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.

Oh, Sir Ian does giggle. God, I adore Sir Ian. Such a sweetheart. Bless him. I'm his bitch.

I've been awash with Sir Ian love ever since he was on Blankety Blank. It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

That's not helping.

Really, I think that the Sir Ian love is a good and healthy thing. He's adorable. Bless him. Look! Here he is playing with a Magneto doll. How cute is that? Bless. And then there's the Grey Book , which is also cuteness on a stick.

Before we got there, a Gandalf lookalike was on parade. I wish I’d met him. By comparison, I was a wizard in mufti, my new brown tweed suit by John Varvatos, my hair dressed with cold cream that I had mistaken for gel in my home bathroom.

He's just unbelievably endearing, isn't he? Bless. I think I'd probably find Sir Ian RPF disturbing, because I believe that he's real. Whereas the other folks, I don't have so much of a sense of as real people, so it's easier to just take the fiction as fiction. Or something.

t / complete hypocrite with the ethics of an alley cat but gallons of affection for Sir Ian McKellern

complete hypocrite with the ethics of an alley cat but gallons of affection for Sir Ian McKellern

Yet another entry into the endless book of "Why I Love Fay"

t Captain Tangent!

Yo, All-knowing queens of Ficcish Crack - is there Fight Club fic out there? Because I was watching it again this evening, and it struck me that there really should be some nice meta-ish fic out there. Slash would be obvious, but even not slash would be fine.

t / Captain Tangent!