Alternate history prepares us for reality

They say that there are no "ifs" in history because what has been done cannot be undone. Still, sometimes we cannot help but wonder, "What if things had been different?"

- KIM SEONG-KON

For example, we ponder, "What if John F. Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt?" Today's America would be completely different. We may also ask, "What if the US had not intervened in the Korean War and thus North Korea had occupied the South?" "What if General Park Chung-hee had failed in his military coup?" or "What if Roh Moo-hyun had lost the presidential election?" Then, we, too, would have lived in an entirely different Korea.

Indeed, we are curious about the alternate world we may have lived in if history had taken another path. Alternate history novels pique our curiosity about such other worlds. As fantasy novels and science fiction do, alternate history novels use imagined realities to provide us with a mirror that reflects our present world metaphorically.

When the British novelist Robert Harris's alternate history novel Fatherland came out in 1992, it instantly became a bestseller that has been translated into 25 languages. Readers were fascinated by what the novel portrayed: it portrayed a world in which Hitler won World War II and his only rival was President Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in the US.