Bad Future: Real-Time Alternate History

This essay argues that alternative histories serve as alternate political narratives in a variety of contexts and forms, including web memes that invoke Nazism and Hitler, computer games that stage alternate realities as their starting points, and news parody that offers satirical alternate narratives for real world figures. The author critically analyses key works of cinematic and televisual alternative histories including It Happened Here and The Man in the High Castle, tracing connections between them through a reading of Karen Hellikson's taxonomy of the alternate history genre (2000), linking them to newer forms of alternate history media. The essay concludes by postulating a term for the growing phenomenon of a distributed, alternate reality: real time alternative history.