Alternative History Quotes

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'

There's not an emperor or artist out there I won't read a medical history of, even if - or especially if - the author uses that medical history to spin out wild counterfactuals about how wars or masterpieces might have turned out differently. They're like delicious philosophical mints to roll around inside your mouth, just to see how they taste.

Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.

When I wrote 'The Da Vinci Code,' I told myself that this story of Jesus makes more sense to me than the story I read in the Bible.

I learned a lot about American history though jazz, and that's why I loved American history when I was in high school. I could hear different stories - the story that they would tell in school, and then the story that I would hear in the music.

I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

Bryce Zabel and I went down the road of revising the Kennedy historical record together on the NBC seriesDark Skies. This time instead of giving new meaning to the established JFK chronology, hes created a brand new one altogether.Surrounded by Enemiesis an exhilarating ride, full of twists and turns that never were, but surely could have been.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

... but to remain historically accurate, I would have had to leave out an important question that I felt needed to be addressed, which is, 'What if Jesus had known kung fu?

I would have preferred to have been born in any other time than our own.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.

Many people say I believe aliens built the pyramids. I don't. In fact I'm not a supporter of the 'ancient alien' hypothesis at all. I think a lost human civilization is a much better explanation of the mysteries and paradoxes of ancient cultures.

I was always interested in the kind of history they didn't teach you in school.

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

The 'Heirs of Alexandria' series mixes the Renaissance with magic and demons, based on a changed theological history.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

Coast to Coast AM may just be the most unusual show I have ever witnessed or been a part of. You really almost have to be born into that arena, I think, in order to handle it. I was very lucky in that's the way I was guiding my own career. It was this thirst to really get to the bottom of some of these stories that kept pushing me.

If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie.

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.