From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Philip Roth discovers Alternate History.
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:38:55 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 4:56 PM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Philip Roth discovers Alternate History.

> > 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>

And there's my buddy Michael Dobson's books based on the Hitler bomb plot
succeeding:  FOX ON THE RHINE and FOX AT THE FRONT, or something like that.
He's now working on one set in the Pacific Theater....

--Ted White