Newsgroup: it.cultura.fantascienza
Titolo: Storia Alteernativa

Potreste consigliarmi qualche libro che tratti argomenti di Storia
Alternativa.
Vi ringrazio anticipatamente.

Alternativa.
un po' tutto turtledove.
--------------------------------------------------
e' vero, 
c'e' un po' di casualita' in tutto
ma e' anche vero 
che esiste una tua forma di gusto
(Soerba)
-----------------------------------
rimuovere NOSPAM. per mandare email
-----------------------------------
il sito comune di it.comp.database.access:
http://members.xoom.it/it_db_access

Alternativa.
ah, recente e carino su urania L'abisso del tempo/alba eterna, di
Sprague de Camp e Drake.  in edicola non c'e' piu' ma forse in qualche
usato lo trovi.


 Alternativa.
c'è un sito in itagliano interamente dedicato all'argomento, ma non ricordo più il link;
AVVISO ai richiedenti: cercate di dire a noi grupparoli a che livello di conoscenza siete,
altrimenti non sappiamo da che parte cominciare, nel darvi consigli;
cmq i classici sono:
Pavana di Keith Roberts;
La svastica sul sole di Philip Dick;
il ciclo di Lord Darcy di Randall Garrett;
il già citato Abisso del passato;
il ciclo temporale di Anderson e quello di Williamson -che non mi piacciono;
Il giorno del Giubileo (? Bring the Jubilee) di Ward Moore, che pero' per essere
apprezzato richiede una buona conoscenza della guerra civile americana;
altro non mi viene;
R
ps
NON cominciare con Turtledove, semmai con l'Urania consigliato nel secondo msg di Lbo
-- 
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?
[Janis Joplin: Mercedes Benz]
http://Ramapage.freeweb.org
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfcity/crono.sf


La svastica sul sole...
Solo LSD poteva farglielo scrivere ^__^

 c'č un sito in itagliano interamente dedicato all'argomento, ma non ricordo piů il link;
Questo č l'indirizzo di quello in inglese:
http://www.skatecity.com/ah/
Ciao
Marco
"Mi sono sempre chiesto se Dio c'era....
 ora lo so. C'é. E sono io"
 (Homer Simpson)
http://www4.pisoft.it/~marcast/

Il giorno del Giubileo (? Bring the Jubilee) di Ward Moore,
  Io ce l'ho come "Anniversario fatale".
  Ciao :-)
  Massimo
  Nell'indirizzo, sostituire lana con seta
  In the address, replace lana with seta


Ti mando un paio di voci dalla Encyclopedia of Science Fiction di
Clute/Nicholls:
1)Alternate Worlds
An alternate world -- some writers and commentators prefer the designation
"alternative world" on grammatical grounds -- is an account of Earth as it
might have become in consequence of some hypothetical alteration in history.
Many sf stories use PARALLEL WORLDS as a frame in which many alternate
worlds can be simultaneously held, sometimes interacting with one another.
Hypothetical exercises of this kind have long been popular with historians
(> HISTORY IN SF) and their virtue was proclaimed by Isaac d'Israeli in The
Curiosities of Literature (coll 1791-1823). A classic collection of such
essays, ed J.C. Squire, If It had Happened Otherwise (anth 1931; vt If, or
History Rewritten; exp 1972) took its inspiration from G.M. Trevelyan's
essay "If Napoleon had Won the Battle of Waterloo" (1907); its contributors
included G.K. CHESTERTON, Andre MAUROIS, Hilaire BELLOC, A.J.P. Taylor and
Winston Churchill. The most common preoccupations of modern speculative
historians were exhibited in two essays written for Look: If the South had
Won the Civil War (1960; 1961) by MacKinlay KANTOR and "If Hitler had Won
World War II" (1961), by William L. Shirer. The tradition has been continued
in the MAINSTREAM by the film IT HAPPENED HERE (1963), Frederic MULLALLY's
Hitler Has Won (1975) and Len DEIGHTON's SS-GB (1978). Another event seen
today as historically pivotal, the invention of the atom bomb, is the basis
of two novels by Ronald W. CLARK: Queen Victoria's Bomb (1967), in which the
atom bomb is developed much earlier in history, and The Bomb that Failed
(1969; vt The Last Year of the Old World UK), in which its appearance on the
historical scene is delayed. Alternative histories are used satirically by
non-genre writers in R. Egerton Swartout's It Might Have Happened (1934) and
Marghanita LASKI's Tory Heaven (1948), and the notion is given a more
philosophical twist in Guy DENT's Emperor of the If (1926). The continuing
popularity of alternative histories with mainstream writers is further
illustrated by John HERSEY's White Lotus (1965), Vladimir NABOKOV's Ada
(1969), Martin Cruz SMITH's The Indians Won (1970), Guido Morselli's Past
Conditional (1975; trans 1981) and Douglas Jones's The Court Martial of
George Armstrong Custer (1976).
Murray LEINSTER introduced the idea of alternate worlds to GENRE SF in
"Sidewise in Time" (1934), and Stanley G. WEINBAUM used it in a light
comedy, "The Worlds of If" (1935); but the first serious attempt to
construct an alternative history in sf was L. Sprague DE CAMP's LEST
DARKNESS FALL (1939; 1941), in which a man slips back through time and sets
out to remould history by preventing or ameliorating the Dark Ages. This
story is set entirely in the distant past, but in "The Wheels of If" (1940)
de Camp displayed a contemporary USA which might have resulted from
10th-century colonization by Norsemen. Most subsequent sf stories in this
vein have tended to skip lightly over the detailed process of historical
development to examine alternative presents, but sf writers with a keen
interest in history often devote loving care to the development of imaginary
pasts; a recent enterprise very much in the tradition of LEST DARKNESS FALL
is Harry TURTLEDOVE's Agent of Byzantium (coll of linked stories 1986).
The extraordinary melodramatic potential inherent in the idea of alternate
worlds was further revealed by Jack WILLIAMSON's THE LEGION OF TIME (1938;
1952), which features alternative futures at war for their very existence,
with crucial battles spilling into the past and present. The idea of worlds
battling for survival by attempting to maintain their own histories was
further developed by Fritz LEIBER in Destiny Times Three (1945; 1957) and in
the Change War series, which includes THE BIG TIME (1958; 1961). Such
stories gained rapidly in extravagance: The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) by
Barrington J. BAYLEY features a time-spanning Empire trying to maintain its
reality against the alternative versions which its adversaries are imposing
upon it. Attempts by possible futures to influence the present by friendly
persuasion were presented by C.L. MOORE in "Greater than Gods" (1939) and by
Ross ROCKLYNNE in "The Diversifal" (1951).
The notion of competing alternative histories is further recomplicated in
TIME-TRAVEL stories in which the heroes range across a vast series of
parallel worlds, each featuring a different alternative history (alternate
universes are often created wholesale, though usually ephemerally, in tricky
time-travel stories; see also TIME PARADOXES). The policing of
time-tracks -- either singly, as in Isaac ASIMOV's The End of Eternity
(1955), which features the totalitarian control of history by social
engineers, or in great profusion -- has remained a consistently popular
theme in sf. One of the earliest such police forces is featured in Sam
MERWIN's House of Many Worlds (1951) and Three Faces of Time (1955); the
exploits of others are depicted in H. Beam PIPER's Paratime series, begun
with "Police Operation" (1948), in Poul ANDERSON's Time Patrol series, whose
early stories are in Guardians of Time (coll 1960), in John BRUNNER's Times
without Number (fixup 1962 dos), and -- less earnestly -- in Simon Hawke's
Time Wars series (> Nicholas Yermakov), begun with The Ivanhoe Gambit
(1984). Keith LAUMER's Worlds of the Imperium (1962 dos) and sequels, Avram
DAVIDSON's Masters of the Maze (1965), Jack L. CHALKER's Downtiming the
Night Side (1985), Frederik POHL's The Coming of the Quantum Cats (1986),
Mike MCQUAY's Memories (1987) and Michael P. KUBE-MCDOWELL's Alternities
(1988) are convoluted adventure stories of an essentially similar kind. John
CROWLEY's "Great Work of Time" (1989) is a more thoughtful work about a
conspiracy which attempts to use time travel to take charge of history.
Early genre-sf stories of conflict between alternate worlds tend to assume
that our world is better than most of the alternatives. This assumption owes
much to our conviction that the "right" side won both the American Civil War
and WWII. Ward MOORE's classic BRING THE JUBILEE (1953) paints a relatively
grim portrait of a USA in which the South won the Civil War; and images of
worlds in which the Nazis triumphed (> HITLER WINS) tend to be
nightmarish -- notable examples include "Two Dooms" (1958) by C.M.
KORNBLUTH, THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952) by SARBAN, THE MAN IN THE HIGH
CASTLE (1962) by Philip K. DICK, The Proteus Operation (1985) by James P.
HOGAN, and Moon of Ice (1988) by Brad LINAWEAVER. An interesting exception
is Budspy (1987) by David DVORKIN, where a successful Third Reich is
presented more evenhandedly. Other turning-points in which our world is held
to have gone the "right" way include the Reformation and the Industrial
Revolution -- whose suppression produces technologically primitive worlds in
Keith ROBERTS's excellent PAVANE (fixup 1968), Kingsley AMIS's The
Alteration (1976), Martin GREEN's The Earth Again Redeemed (1978), Phyllis
EISENSTEIN's Shadow of Earth (1979) and John Whitbourn's A Dangerous Energy
(1992) -- and the Black Death, which aborts the rise of the West in Robert
SILVERBERG's The Gate of Worlds (1967) and L. Neil SMITH's The Crystal
Empire (1986). The idea that our world might have turned out far better than
it has is more often displayed by ironic satires, including: Harry
HARRISON's Tunnel Through the Deeps (1972; vt A Transatlantic Tunnel,
Hurrah! UK), in which the American colonies never rebelled and the British
Empire remains supreme; D.R. BENSEN's And Having Writ . . . (1978), in which
the aliens whose crashing starship is assumed to have caused the Tunguska
explosion survive to interfere in the course of progress; S.P. SOMTOW's The
Aquiliad (fixup 1983), in which the Roman Empire conquered the Americas; and
William GIBSON's and Bruce STERLING's THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990), in which
Babbage's calculating machine precipitates an information-technology
revolution in Victorian England. More earnest examples are fewer in number,
but they include "The Lucky Strike" (1984) by Kim Stanley ROBINSON, in which
a US pilot refuses to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, and Elleander Morning
(1984) by Jerry YULSMAN, which imagines a world where Hitler was
assassinated before starting WWII.
More philosophically inclined uses of the alternate-worlds theme, involving
the worldviews of individual characters rather than diverted histories, were
pioneered in genre sf by Philip K. Dick in such novels as Eye in the Sky
(1957), Now Wait for Last Year (1967) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
(1974). Intriguing homage is paid to Dick's distinctive use of the theme by
Michael BISHOP's The Secret Ascension (1987; vt Philip K. Dick is Dead,
Alas). Other novels which use alternate worlds to explore personal problems
and questions of identity include Bob SHAW's The Two-Timers (1968), Gordon
EKLUND's All Times Possible (1974), Sheila FINCH's Infinity's Web (1985),
Josephine SAXTON's Queen of the States (1986), Ken Grimwood's Replay (1986)
and Thomas BERGER's Changing the Past (1989).
Radical alternative histories, which explore the consequences of fundamental
shifts in biological evolution, include Harry Harrison's series about the
survival of the dinosaurs, begun with West of Eden (1984); Harry
Turtledove's A Different Flesh (fixup 1988), in which Homo erectus survives
in the Americas until 1492; and Brian M. STABLEFORD's The Empire of Fear
(1988), in which 17th-century Europe and Africa are ruled by "vampires".
More radical still are novels which portray universes where the laws of
physics are different. Some of these are described in George GAMOW's series
of educative parables Mr Tompkins in Wonderland (coll 1939), and the "many
worlds" interpretation of quantum theory has encouraged their use in more
recent sf, a notable example being The Singers of Time (1990) by Frederik
Pohl and Jack Williamson.
Worlds of Maybe: Seven Stories of Science Fiction (anth 1970) ed Robert
Silverberg contains further work on the theme by Poul Anderson, Philip Jose
FARMER, Larry NIVEN and Silverberg, as well as the Murray Leinster story
cited above. In addition to further stories, including the de Camp story
mentioned above, Alternative Histories: Eleven Stories of the World as it
Might have Been (anth 1986) ed Martin H. GREENBERG and Charles G. WAUGH
includes the definitive version of Barton C. Hacker's and Gordon B.
Chamberlain's invaluable bibliography of the theme, "Pasts that Might Have
Been, II"; the first version appeared in EXTRAPOLATION in 1981. Gregory
BENFORD edited four anthologies on the theme: Hitler Victorious (anth 1985);
plus What Might Have Been #1: Alternate Empires (anth 1989), #2: Alternate
Heroes (anth 1989) and #3: Alternate Wars (anth 1991). Alternatives (anth
1989), ed Robert ADAMS and Pamela Crippen Adams, presented original stories
told from LIBERTARIAN perspectives. Alternate Presidents (anth 1992) ed
Michael RESNICK examines a particular aspect "from Benjamin Franklin to
Michael Dukakis"; the same editor's Alternate Kennedys (anth 1992) narrows
the focus yet further. [BS]
See also: PARANOIA; STEAMPUNK.
2) History in SF
The real history of the world and the many alternative histories which might
have replaced it (>ALTERNATE WORLDS) are extensively featured in sf stories
of TIME TRAVEL and PARALLEL WORLDS, but sf writers have also drawn much
inspiration from history in designing hypothetical futures. Sometimes, like
Charles L. HARNESS in Flight into Yesterday (1949 Startling Stories; exp
1953; vt The Paradox Men) and James BLISH in CITIES IN FLIGHT (1950-62 var
mags; omni 1970), they have made use of actual theories-from Arnold Toynbee
(1889-1975) in the former case, Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in the latter --
which have claimed to detect authentic cyclic patterns in history; more
commonly, though, they have simply borrowed the past as a convenient
template. Thus Miles J. BREUER and Jack WILLIAMSON replayed the story of the
American Revolution as the story of the revolt of the MOON's colony against
its Earthly masters in The Birth of a New Republic (1930 AMZ; 1981); Robert
A. HEINLEIN later did this more convincingly in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
(1966). Isaac ASIMOV gave to this process of borrowing a new gloss of
sophistication in the first phase of his Foundation series (1942-50 ASF; in
3 vols 1951-3; as THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY omni 1963) by inventing his own
futuristic science of PSYCHOHISTORY, by which Edward Gibbon's retrospective
analysis of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is transmuted into Hari
Seldon's prophetic analysis of the decline and fall of the GALACTIC EMPIRE.
Seldon's Plan, however, can change these deterministic prophecies by social
engineering. Interestingly, a later novel by Asimov, The End of Eternity
(1955), argues as strongly against social engineering as the Foundation
series argued for it.
Toynbee eventually recanted the cyclic theory outlined in A Study of History
(12 vols 1934-61), and the earlier quasideterministic theories of
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-22)
never quite attained academic respectability, but the attractions of such
theories to sf writers are obvious. Blish's fascination with Spengler became
deep, respectful and altogether serious, and A.E. VAN VOGT drew inspiration
from Spengler in The Voyage of the Space Beagle (fixup 1950). Toynbeean
ideas continued to echo various writers' works, including Frederik POHL's
and C.M. KORNBLUTH's "Critical Mass" (1961), in which they are quoted
directly, Frank HERBERT's DUNE (fixup 1965), which seems to draw on
Toynbee's picture of the Janissary-supported Turkish courts of the later
Middle Ages, and Larry NIVEN's A World out of Time (1967), which uses the
Toynbee-derived notion of "water-monopoly empires" -- i.e., empires founded
on irrigation control. Philosophers of history who dealt in NEAR-FUTURE
climaxes rather than recurrent cycles -- G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl
Marx (1818-1883) are the most obvious examples -- have naturally been of
less interest to sf writers.
The PULP MAGAZINES inherited from the dime novels (>DIME-NOVEL SF) a
striking "mythologized" version of the USA's recent past in the Western
genre, which glorified the "frontier spirit". This myth (see also SOCIAL
DARWINISM) was transferred to sf, where it became the animating force of
countless stories about the exploration of the Solar System and the
COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS. The reflection of this mythical version of US
history has maintained a tenacious hold over the images of the future
contained in GENRE SF, and has been elaborated in various ways, sometimes
painfully naive and sometimes quite extraordinary. (The phenomenon is not,
of course, restricted to fiction; the idea of space as a "high frontier"
requiring conquest by bold pioneers informs much actual political rhetoric,
and may be regarded as NASA's guiding myth.) It is not only US history per
se which is reflected in stories of space pioneering; US writers have been
perfectly willing to adapt "relevant" bits of more distant history,
producing such images as those in Poul ANDERSON's The High Crusade (1960),
H. Beam PIPER's Space Viking (1963) and Ben BOVA's Privateers (1985).
Anderson has been a particularly prolific and artful borrower of
entrepreneurial models from the past, taking in explorers, privateers,
merchant princes and all manner of military empire-builders.
Unlike US genre sf, UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE was heavily influenced by more
pessimistic metaphysical notions of eternal recurrence. As citizens of an
empire in decline rather than descendants of mythical pioneers, UK writers
inherited a rather different attitude to the past, reflected in such elegiac
and defeatist fantasies of cyclic history as Edward SHANKS's The People of
the Ruins (1920), Cicely HAMILTON's Theodore Savage (1922) and John GLOAG's
"Pendulum" (c1930) and Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932). J.B. PRIESTLEY's Time
plays dealt more delicately and not quite so darkly with similar
philosophical ideas. Olaf STAPLEDON adopted a more robust view of future
history in his classic LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), toying with cyclicity but
eventually discarding it in favour of a more open-ended philosophy of
progress, but even he could not shake off a pessimistic conviction that
whatever civilizations rise up must ultimately decline and fall. The pulp-sf
writers were sometimes suspicious of the idea of progress, but in general
they had much more faith in the notion that contemporary civilization was
destined to thrive and expand for some considerable time; such future
histories as Laurence MANNING's in The Man who Awoke (1933 Wonder Stories;
fixup 1975) and the far more elaborate patterns drawn in the future-history
series of Heinlein and Anderson are conspicuously open-ended. Relatively few
pulp visionaries imagined that any significant and irreversible rot was
likely to set in before the Galactic Empire had attained a glorious zenith.
(> GALACTIC EMPIRES for the argument that the open framework supplied by
Asimov's Foundation series proved so comprehensive as to render unnecessary
the sort of future history worked out with such pains by Heinlein and in
rather less detail by later writers.)
In somewhat similar fashion, UK writers of scientific romance have often
tended to see the past as something inelastically resistant to change.
William GOLDING's inventor in "Envoy Extraordinary" (1956; play version The
Brass Butterfly 1958) fails ignominiously to interest the Roman Empire in
gunpowder, the steam engine and the printing press, just as the scientist in
Ronald W. CLARK's Queen Victoria's Bomb (1967) finds that his invention
arouses little excitement in Victorian England. (It was, of course, the UK
that produced Herbert Butterfield [1900-1979], the historian who wrote the
clever satire The Whig Interpretation of History [1931] in an attempt to
expose the absurdity of belief in progress, and also the folly of that kind
of history written, perhaps unwittingly, to flatter a society's image of
itself; many works of sf, even though set in the future, are open to the
criticism of "whiggery".) In sharp contrast, the hero of L. Sprague DE
CAMP's classic pulp timeslip story LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939 Unknown Worlds;
1941; rev 1949) averts the Dark Ages by means of a series of small and
subtle technological fixes, and many genre writers felt it necessary to set
up corps of "time police" to protect history from casual spoliation by
careless or evil-minded time-travellers. Examples include Anderson's The
Guardians of Time (fixup 1960) and The Corridors of Time (1965), Barrington
J. BAYLEY's The Fall of Chronopolis (1974) and Diana Wynne JONES's A Tale of
Time City (1987); however, Fritz LEIBER's Change War series includes one
story, "Try and Change the Past" (1958), whose basic point is the
impossibility of changing history at all.
It was not until the spectre of the Bomb caught up with US sf writers that
tragic images of historical recurrence -- like that in Walter M. MILLER's
classic A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1955-7 FSF; fixup 1960), which portrays a
future Dark Age in which learning has once more retreated to the
monasteries -- began to appear in some quantity. More pessimistic
philosophies of history, like the one deployed in Kornbluth's "The Only
Thing We Learn" (1949) and the one detected by John F. CARR in the stories
he collected for H. Beam PIPER's posthumous Empire (coll 1981), also began
to infect genre sf in this period. More recently, the aftermath of
world-scale HOLOCAUST has been much more widely exploited as a setting for
historical "replays" in such novels as Paul O. WILLIAMS's Pelbar Cycle,
begun with The Breaking of Northwall (1981), and Kim Stanley ROBINSON's THE
WILD SHORE (1984). However, the progressive optimism of US sf has generally
been maintained, being unrepentantly and exuberantly displayed in such
fantasies of history as D.R. BENSEN's ironic And Having Writ . . . (1978)
and Poul Anderson's THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS (1989). Anderson and other
US writers in the same vein have always taken it for granted that liberal
democracy is the evolutionary ideal of all political systems.
Although UK sf has absorbed much of the imaginative drive of US sf since the
importation of the genre label, its more thoughtful exponents have always
maintained a relatively modest and sceptical attitude to the dynamics of
history, as displayed in such novels as Brian W. ALDISS's An Age (1967; vt
Cryptozoic! US and later UK edns), Andrew STEPHENSON's The Wall of Years
(1979) and Ian WATSON's Chekhov's Journey (1983). [TS/BS]
Simon

Vi ringrazio anticipatamente.
I Mondi del Possibile, raccolta di ucronie varie, Ed.Nord 1993
(secondo me e' ottima).
Andy

 wrote:
:>Potreste consigliarmi qualche libro che tratti argomenti di Storia
:>Alternativa.
:>Vi ringrazio anticipatamente.
	Puoi trovare molte indicazioni sul numero 42 di Delos, interamente
dedicato all'Ucronia 
www.delos.fantascienza.com/delos42
	Cordialmente
		Lanfranco
togliere spam dall'indirizzo
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Lanfranco Fabriani
(
sys.ad
)
C.I.S.A.D.U.
fabr...@rmcisaduspam.let.uniroma1.it
+39-06-4991.3936
----------------------------------------------------------------------


cribbio, sì, dovremmo tenere sempre presenti gli speciali di Delos;
vo' a vedere se è uscito il numero di luglio;
R
-- 
A shout in the street, Stephen answered [Ulysses, II:26]
http://Ramapage.freeweb.org
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfcity/crono.sf