What if?…and alternate history…

For some strange reason, alternate history is considered a subgenre of sci-fi or fantasy, most likely the former. Maybe the reason is whoever decides these things just didn’t know where to put it? It isn’t as puzzling as that catch-all genre literary fiction, but it’s close.

An alternate history story is the quintessential example of an author using a what-if to write a story. What if George Washington had been assassinated? What if Lincoln hadn’t? What if Hitler had been taken out early on i...