Bibliographic Research Plan Strange Worlds: An introduction to the genre of Alternate History Reese Sako LIS 601 Professor Irvin May 5, 2016. Reese Sako 1 Contents I: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................... 2 II: SEARCH STRATAGIES......................................................................................................... 3 Call Numbers .......................................................................................................................... 3 Subject Headings ................................................................................................................... 3 Search Strategy Table ............................................................................................................ 3 III: Search Process ..................................................................................................................... 4 OPAC ..................................................................................................................................... 4 ManoaOneSearch ............................................................................................................... 4 WORLDCAT ....................................................................................................................... 4 Databases and Indexes .......................................................................................................... 5 JSTOR ................................................................................................................................ 5 PROJECT MUSE ................................................................................................................ 5 PROQUEST ........................................................................................................................ 5 ACADEMIC SEARCH COMPLETE ..................................................................................... 6 NOVELIST .......................................................................................................................... 6 HISTORY REFERENCE CENTER ...................................................................................... 6 HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS ................................................................................................ 6 GOOGLE SCHOLAR .......................................................................................................... 7 LEXISNEXIS ....................................................................................................................... 7 WEB RESOURCES ................................................................................................................ 7 UCHRONIA.NET ................................................................................................................. 7 ALTERNATEHISTORY.COM .............................................................................................. 7 IV CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................... 8 V. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................10 VI: APPENDIX I: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................12 General Resources................................................................................................................12 Topic I: Hard/Plausible Alternate History ...............................................................................13 Topic II: Soft/Fantasy Alternate History..................................................................................14 VII: APPENDIX II: SEARCH TERM RELEVENCY CHART .......................................................16 Reese Sako 2 I: INTRODUCTION It is said that the saddest and most though provoking question is “What if?” What if I had done this? What if I had forgotten to do that? More importantly, the genre of Alternate History, sometimes referred to as Counterfactual History, Imaginary History or Alternative History, ask us the question of “What if this historical event had ended otherwise?”. Within the genre, scholars, historians and writers begin to ask, speculate, and in many cases construct an alternate world where the Confederate States of American achieved independence, or Nazi Germany went on to dominate the world. It is important to note that Alternate History does not include novels that speculated about future events, such as World War III or the collapse of the USA in 1999, only for that time to pass and the event does not come true. In some cases, such as 1984 or War Day, a 1984 novel which proposed World War III breaking out in the 1988, have been retroactively declared “Honorary Alternate Histories”. As of late the genre has become more popular and well-known in popular culture and entertainment: Amazon.com has recently adapted the Phillip K. Dick novel, The Man in the High Castle, which portrays a world where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan won World War II. Essentially, what I seek to do with this bibliographic guide, is introduce the genre and explain two different aspects to the genre: essentially the difference between “Hard” or plausible Histories, and “soft” histories that are more heavily influenced by the Fantasy and Science Fiction genres. There is a mix of both scholarly articles discussing the popularity and why the genre is important, along with an introduction to several novels of varying plausibility and realism, thus allowing the reader to get a better idea of what is in the genre. For the sake of simplicity, the subsections will be titled “Hard/Plausible Alternate History” and “Fantasy Alternate History”. While searching for information and resources, the most important part was finding the necessary keywords and phrases. Due to the nature of the genre, most works are split between several different Library of Congress headings. The most popular headings include D: WORLD HISTORY, E: HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS, PN: LITERATURE and PS: AMERICAN LITERATURE. Call number vary by exactly what the book is written on, but those in D: WORLD HISTORY, tend to fall under D1-24.5: GENERAL HISTORY or D731-835: WORLD WAR II. As these call numbers show, more scholarly works fall under the D or E categories, while fiction falls under the generic literature or American Literature headings, depending on the author and topic. In addition to book resources, I also went through several electronic resources, such as History- based databases, such as Jstor, LexisNexis, Academic Search Complete and others. Literature based resources, such as NoveList and Worldcat were also consulted in the search for novels and other print resources. Online resources are harder to come across, due to the nature of the genre, but I have found some that may be of use. Reese Sako 3 II: SEARCH STRATEGIES As stated before, call numbers were taken from the Library of Congress, and tend to vary, depending on the topics. The most common Call numbers are as follows: Call Numbers LOC D: WORLD HISTORY -Range D1- D24.5: GENERAL HISTORY -Range D732-835: WORLD WAR II LOC E: HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS -Range E456-655: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR LOC PN: LITERATURE LOC PS: AMERICAN LITERATURE -Range E 370-379: PROSE FICTION For my subject headings, I had an idea of what to start with, and as I continued my search, I was able to find several more: Subject Headings IMAGINARY HISTORIES ALTERNATE HISTORY (FICTION) ALTERNATE HISTORY (HISTORY) ALTERNATIVE HISTORY (HISTORY) There are also several other subject headings, but they are simply repeats or variants of the four listed above. After finding these, I began to develop my search terms, Boolean phrases and Natural language phrases to start digging into databases. Search Strategy Table Search Terms Boolean Phrase Natural Language Alternate Histor* “Alternate Histor*” Alternate Histor* Alternative histor* “Imaginary Histor*” Speculative histor* Speculative Histor* “Alternative Histor*” Alternative Histor* Imaginary Histor* “Counterfactual histor*” Counterfactual Histor* Counterfactual Histor* “Speculative Histor*” Imaginary Histor* What If “What If” What If? Fiction “Alternate Histor*” + Germany As this chart shows, most of my search phrases are redundant and tend to overlap. While I initially searched using the phrases “Alternate Histor*” and “Imaginary Histor*”, I included the other phrases to see if there were any results that I was missing. To a certain degree, I disliked the phrase “Counterfactual history”, as it is sometimes used to discuss historical revisionism, I.E. holocaust denial and other pseudohistorical topics. Reese Sako 4 III: Search Process OPAC ManoaOneSearch With ManoaOne Search, I went in expecting to find more academic resources, either analyzing the popularity of the genre, critiques of the genre, and such. On the whole, the search was mixed: the phrase “Alternate History” came up with around 325 results when used as a general search term. When used as a subject search term, only 70 results came up. What I did notice after looking through several of the more interesting articles and books, was that they all had the subject keyword “Imaginary Histories”. After learning this, I opened up two more searches using the phrase “Imaginary Histories” as both a general search and subject search, resulting in 90 and 81 results. From these results, I was able to pick out several books, articles and novels, including