Culture Watch
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©2002 Tam Gray for SeniorWomenWebBooks
There are a number of sites that follow alternative histories, as in What If the South Had Won the Civil War? Uchronia is such a site. The Alternate History List is an annotated bibliography of approximately 2, 200 novels, stories, essays and other material involving the 'what ifs' of history. Examples of this kind of fiction can be found in Len Deighton's SS-GB and Robert Harris' Fatherland.
There's the 'generic' historical novel, which uses a fictional character present at some historical event or era to embellish that particular point in time.
Counterfactual (another term for alternative histories) Research News (mainly designed for students and researchers) puts it this way:
How might your life have unfolded differently? What if your parents never met? Perhaps you should have studied harder in school, or asked out so-and-so when you had the chance. Such thoughts of what might have been seem to be a common part of everyday thought processes, sometimes irresistibly drawing our attention.
Indeed, one of SeniorWomenWeb's earliest writers and a Board member, Suzette Haden Elgin, has written a story called Hush My Mouth using the following 'What If?'
What if: The North refused to enlist black soldiers during the Civil War, and blacks ejected whites from the South after devastating epidemics.
(Suzette's story was published as part a collection of Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as It Might Have Been.)
One of the more organized discussion forums is the AlternateHistory site which includes a topic of "alternate history scenarios that involve magic, alien intervention, anything in the sea of time, and other such weirdness." Random House's publishing division, DelRey, has a lively alternate history forum, also. A group that is considered the oldest and largest of these discussion groups is that of soc.history.what-if, a USENET newsgroup site.
My favorite approach to the 'what if' question involves the many authors who generously contribute to this site stated by Digital Divas:
"What if... All the people who create content for the web just deleted their work?"
Theatre
Stephen Sondheim's site is crowded with features such as the Sondheim.com Community Games. One game's goal is to create the longest chain of pure Sondheim quotes possible. Another page dissects the song, I'm Still Here, using a timeline approach. A community forum is entitled Finishing the Chat and commentary consists of columns examining all aspects of the Sondheim theater work.
Sam Norkin, referred to here as that other theater caricaturist provides his own commentary and drawings illustrating a number of Sondheim productions with wit and style.
SeniorWomenWeb, an Uncommon site for Uncommon Women ™ (http://www.seniorwomen.com) 1999-2024
