What I think I'm struggling to say is that with historical fiction and alternative speculative fiction -- besides the imprimatur of it being professionally edited and published -- there is a tacit acknowledgement of recognized artifice. Lots of fnords between the lines to show that this is speculation based on real details and people.

Do you consider The Alienist alternative history, Theodosia? In my head there's a range of historical RPF that moves from shoddy biography to Jean Plaidy through The Alienist to (damn, I'm blocking on any examples) what I'd consider alternative history.

edit: And I'd be worried if puppyslash readers had no fnords.

I'm not sure that the author considers it alternative history, but I certainly do.

True enough (edit: re historical/alternate fiction). My whimsies about Viggo are just my conceptions of him as modified through seeing the occasional interview. Contemplating him and Orlando getting together is even more a flight of fancy. I guess I see actors as being nearly as much a construct as the characters they play. Mentally, they're faces and voices on a screen. If you wanted to get all Twilight Zone, I have no empirical proof that they're real human beings as opposed to being characters in that long-running show some people call Real Life.

I see puppyslash on a continuum starting around The National Enquirer and the other organs of celebrity cultdom -- where the celebrity is an open target as an icon, where most of the readers don't relate to the celebrities as real people (with real families and real feelings) but as super soap-opera characters who have no true privacy in their lives.

I'm not sure that the author considers it alternative history, but I certainly do.

How do you define the term, then? In my head, it's a book set in the past with a real figure. My alternative history doesn't need real figures ... it just speculates a branching off from our line of events. Which is what separates it from a work set in the past that doesn't depend on or instigate historical (as opposed to unrecorded) timeline changes. Did The Alienist do that? Admittedly I'm not good enough at American history to have noticed.

So here is my (rough) continuum map:

National Enquirer --> Puppy Slash --> RPS --> RPF --> Alternative Speculation (live people) --> Alternative Speculation (safely dead people) --> Historical Fiction --> Biography

I'm not chiseling these into tablets of stone, I'm just trying to work out for myself where I stand on this. I have committed RPS, even though it was long ago in a different country and besides the wench is dead.

ita, to me historical fiction is merely a subset of alternative history, because if you depict even a small event that is not in the verifiable historical record, you are imagining. So there is 'fairly strict' alternative history where the writer weaves in as much historical detail as they can manage and speculates what was going on in the heads of the protagonists and then way further out on the continuum there is the wild ass alternative speculation where Teddy Roosevelt ends up fighting H.G. Wells' Martians or Gandhi tries to use pacifism against the Nazi German occupation of India.

I'm amusing myself by contemplating Viggo's neighbors in New Zealand chatting to each other about that nice young man down the hall who carries a sword around.

I think I'm pretty much with Connie.

And chatting about him and his buddies going out on weekends and giggling and getting drunk and tattoos.

Ian McKellan giggling. I may have just broken myself.