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Oops all fascism12/13/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Dick’s novel was adapted for TV in 2015, followed five years later by a mini-series based on Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, in which xenophobic aviation hero Charles Lindbergh is elected President in 1940, and the US becomes even more anti-Semitic than it is already.īritain still likes to think of itself as the plucky little island that stood firm against fascism while cheese-eating surrender monkeys like the French crumbled and collaborated. A key text here is Philip K Dick’s brain-scrambling The Man in the High Castle (1962), which pivots on the premise that Giuseppe Zangara’s 1933 assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D Roosevelt succeeded, leading to America pursuing a non-intervention policy, the Axis powers triumphing, and America carved up between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Since World War II, one of the most recurrent “what ifs” has been “What if the Nazis had won?” or variations thereof. What if (see Pavane by Keith Roberts) Queen Elizabeth I had been assassinated? What if (see The Alteration by Kingsley Amis) the Reformation had never taken place? What if (see Anno Dracula by Kim Newman) Dracula had killed Van Helsing and married Queen Victoria and the UK had gone full-on vampire? Yes, I realise Dracula is a fictional character but, you know – what if? ![]() The “what if” speculation of Alternative History is one of fiction’s most beloved subgenres. At first it’s all fun and games and sneak previews of David Bowie, but then their attempts to help the Allied cause go horribly wrong, and before you know it – oops! – their well-meaning actions have altered the timeline and the UK is being run by Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. In Lola, Andrew Legge’s Anglo-Irish microbudget fantasy set during World War II, two English sisters invent a sci-fi gizmo enabling them to tune in to TV and radio broadcasts from the future. ![]()
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