Profiles of Terrifying Alternate Worlds, all this Month at AHWU!

Welcome again, my dear readers, and as I am sure you are aware, it is now October. In popular culture, October is often a month used for reflections of terror and horror, and in light of that, I would like to do something similar for AHWU.

Alternate History is often used to show some of the ways a simple change in the time stream could have made far different, and quite often better worlds than our own, feeding into that inate sense of wondering what might have been all fans of the genre harbor. At the same time though, there is the option to take things in another, darker direction, and in the process create a world that makes the reader thankful to exist in our own. The genre has given us countless classic examples of this, from SM Sterling's Drakaverse, TL-191's Featherston controlled CSA, and even one of the novels that helped spawn the genre, Phillip K Dick's Man in the High Castle, all veiw history view a dark lense.

So for this month, I and some of the other writers for the site will take a look at some of the most terrifying, dystopic, and disturbing worlds concieved by the genre, and feel free to give us suggestions of your own as well. If it gets too frightning my dear readers, remember - it's only alternate history...

Soldier, scholar, writer and web-voyeur, Sean CW Korsgaard has been active in the alternate history community since 2006, and was recently elected to succeed Mitro as President of the Alternate History Online Facebook group. In addition to his contributions at the Alternate History Weekly Update, he writes for several websites, including his own, which can be found here.