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the Civil War? What if America had lost the Revolutionary War? What if a nuclear war had been fought in 1958? What if Lincoln had not been assassinated?
    The new science fiction writer should be warned that the research required to write such a "period" science fiction novel is intense indeed. Before you can project how things would have developed since the historical event was rewritten, you must know how things really were back then, what forces would have filled the vacuum, what philosophy would have replaced the dead ones, what persons would have replaced the assassinated greats.

ALTERNATE WORLDS STORY
    Akin to the sixth type is the seventh type of science fiction story: the
alternate worlds story
. Imagine that, in the beginning, there was only one Earth but that different
possible
Earths branched off from ours at various points in time. Let's say that every time something could have happened two different ways, another possibility world came into being. On our world, there was a World War I which the Allies won; in another world, the Allies lost; in our world, we did not avoid the Second World War; in a third world, they did; in a fourth world, the U.S. got into World War II, and lost to the Germans who took possession of America, giving the course of history yet another turn. So on, and on, and on. The result is a vast, indeed an infinite number of possible Earths existing side-by-side, each invisible to the other but nonetheless real. This is, basically, the theory of other dimensions beyond our own, dimensions in a romantic sense rather than the mathematical. Specific science fiction novels that deal with alternate worlds include: my own
Hell's Gate; Worlds of the Imperium, The Time Benders
, and
The Other Side of Time
by Keith Laumer;
The Gate of Time
by Philip Jose Farmer; and
The Wrecks of Time
by Michael Moorcock.
    While the alternate worlds and the altered past stories are similar in essence, the alternate world background allows a hero from our own Earth and time, the here-and-now, to investigate new places and encounter odd wonders with the familiar perspective of a modern-day American.

JOURNEY THROUGH A STRANGE LAND STORY
    The last story form is best described as the
journey through a strange land story
, a great trek and epic quest narrative that is science fiction chiefly by virtue of its setting which is also its plot. The characters in this kind of tale must journey from Point A to Point B, through a landscape as different from our own as a Dali painting is from the reality it represents.
    Jack Vance's Big
Planet
is the classic of this form, dealing with a huge world many times larger than Earth, and a forty thousand mile journey across an enormous continent harbouring dozens of wildly different societies, terrains, and challenges. In one short paragraph near the beginning of the novel, Vance sets the sense-of-wonder tone upon which all such stories depend, presenting a taste of marvels to come:
Looking to where Earth's horizon would lie, he could lift his
eyes and see lands reaching far on out; pencil lines of various subtle colors,
each line a plain or forest, a sea, a desert, a mountain range… He took a step
forward, looked over his shoulder. 'Let's go.'
    The landscape over which this trek takes place may be an alien planet, our
own Earth in the far future (tens of thousands of years from now and utterly
different than we know it today), an alternate world, an Earth based on an
altered past, or even our own world in the days of pre-history when the continent of Atlantis (some maintain) was the focal point of civilization. The writer must create one fantastic scene after another, make them credible, and keep the characters moving toward their distant goal, whatever it may be.
    The difference between this story and the alien contact story is simple: in the alien contact story, the alien race and mankind's interaction with it is the center of focus; in the journey through a strange land tale, the