r/althistory

6.4K archived posts · Sep 2011 – Sep 2026

Alternate History

r/althistory

Archived posts from r/althistory, Sep 2011 to Sep 2026.

Created Sep 10, 2011

15KMembers (last snapshot)

6.4KArchived posts

Welcome to r/althistory, the alternate history subreddit! Here you can discuss alternate history matters, whether they be books, essays, TV shows, movies, or podcasts.

Common Acronyms and Phrases:

AH stands for Alternate History.
WI stands for What If.
OTL stands for Our Time Line, history as it happened.
ATL stands for Alternate Time Line
POD stands for Point Of Divergence or the point at which a fictional timeline diverges from OTL.
ASB stands for Alien Space Bats, referring to alternate history so implausible it would have required the intervention of "alien space bats."
ISOT stands for Island in the Sea of Time, the S.M. Sterling novel which popularized the idea of transporting people and places to a different time period. ISOTs are, by their nature, always ASB.
DBWI stands for Double-Blind What-If, where OTL history is examined from an AH perspective. ex: "What if the Soviets put the first man in space?" asks a character from a timeline where the USA put the first man in space.
The butterfly effect, where small changes accrue over time to significantly alter events.
Counterfactual histories, the scholarly version of alternate history.
Wank, refers to when a nation is made unrealistically powerful.
Scew, the opposite of a wank.

Related Subreddits:

r/HistoryWhatIf: An alternate history subreddit dedicated exclusively to answering traditional what-if questions.
r/AskHistorians: Direct any questions about actual history to this excellent sub.

Other communities

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