Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:56:14 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Philip Roth discovers Alternate History.
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

> elilley at mindspring.com 9/23/04 4:46:17 PM >>>
>I'm listening to All things considered on NPR (WAMU 89.5)
>and the
>commentator is interviewing Philip Roth about his new novel,
>" The Plot
>Against America" in which Charles Lindberg becomes
>president. He's
>accurately described the one change premise of spec fic...but
>the words
>Alternate History have left no one's lips. Nor, do I expect them
>too.
>Sigh.
>
>They have a link: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?
>wfId=3932632
>

And in another alternative history, we'd see: "Philip Roth: sci-fi
writer"

Anyway,  The NY Times has reviewed the book.  Surprisingly, the
reviewer is not ignorant of the alt history genre:

"Of course, this brand of historical fiction (or "counterfactual"
history) is hardly new. In "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclair Lewis
created a portrait of the United States as a fascist dictatorship under
the rule of a New England demagogue. In "The Man in the High Castle,"
Philip K. Dick conjured up a Japanese- and-Nazi-occupied America in
which slavery was legal again and Jews hid behind assumed names. In
"SS-GB," Len Deighton imagined a Nazi-occupied Britain in which
Churchill had been executed. And in "Fatherland," Robert Harris
postulated a world in which the Nazis had won World War II and covered
up the Holocaust. "
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/21/books/21kaku.html>

mjw

>Ernest
>
>ern at e357.net / (703) 371 0226 hm/cell
>