Fallacies and thresholds: notes on the early evolution of alternate history

'The paper attempts to reconstruct the founding decade of the Science Fiction subgenre Alternate History. The basic premise is that Alternate History is a highly improbable genre whose success relied on the negotiation of new thresholds of acceptability and credibility. Adopting an evolutionary approach, the goal is to show how - after a series of unsuccessful earlier attempts - Alternate History …