Guest blogger Kim Newman is the author ofAnno Dracula, an alternate-history novel in which the famed bloodsucker defeats vampire hunter Van Helsing. The 1992 best-seller gets an upgrade Tuesday with a new edition that packs in additional material, including annotations, articles, a new afterword from Newman — and alternate endings to the original novel.

In this essay for Wired.com, Newman expounds upon the alternate history genre’s roots and modern incarnations.

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Proper alternate history novels — and there are purists who insist on them — change one small thing about the past, and examine (rather, imagine) the consequences in the timeline.

The roots of the genre are in the essays collected in J.C. Squire’s If It Had Happened Otherwise, including G.K. Chesterton’s “If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary Queen of Scots,” G.M. Trevelyan’s “If Napoleon Had Won the Battle of Waterloo” and Winston Churchill’s “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” (yes, he was being clever even for this company).

It should be noted that those were essays, not stories: The contributors were only obliged to outline their had-it-been-otherwise histories, rather than deliver fictions set inside their invented worlds. The second part of the equation is the difficult bit, as many dreary books written by Americans who seem overly fond of Confederate uniforms or Nazi tanks can attest.

It’s always about the story.

The hook for alternate histories is the “if” moment, when history diverges from our own … if the Nazis had won the Second World War (still the most commonplace premise in the field) … if the plague had wiped out almost all the population of Europe (Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt) … if the Spanish Armada had triumphed (Keith Roberts’ Pavane, which actually starts with the assassination of Elizabeth I) … if the British Empire still reigned on both sides of the Atlantic (Harry Harrison’s A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!) … if the United States had a socialist revolution in 1918 (my and Eugene Byrne’s Back in the USSA) … if the Beatles had broken up in 1965 (Ian R. MacLeod’s “Snodgrass“).

Because this is a field that attracts proper historians (Niall Ferguson), literary novelists (Kingsley Amis, Michael Chabon) and thriller writers (Len Deighton, Robert Harris) as well as speculative fiction and fantasy writers, it has tended to be grounded and almost respectable. Within speculative fiction, the form was originally most associated with time-travel stories in which the past was either altered or corrected (Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, John Brunner’s Times Without Number, Paul McAuley’s “Crossroads”).

Like many forms of fantastic or speculative fiction, the intent is often satirical — by considering how things might have been, we get our noses rubbed in the way things actually are. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, for instance, uses a South-wins-the-Civil-War premise to highlight racist elements that persist in the real U.S.A. by mirroring them in the imagined C.S.A. of the film. (Uniform-lovers hate this movie.)

Key influences on the development of the form are Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, in which characters have visions of horrible alternate timelines. The world where Scrooge does not reform and dies alone and the world where George Bailey was never born are shown to be concrete realities, but are erased when protagonists change their ways or their minds.

Between these was J.M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus, which similarly used magic to show characters how their lives might have turned out if they got their wishes — but has a chilling second-act curtain, just before normality is restored when everyone has learned their lesson, as a character whose entire existence is about to be revoked since she will never be born in mainstream reality becomes aware of the workings of the multiverse and shrieks, “But I don’t want to be a might-have-been!”

It’s a crucial moment in the history of alternate history, focusing on the people who live within pocket universes rather than the tides of battle or empire or politics.

In my Anno Dracula series, the “if” moment takes place not in history but in a novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula — if the vampire Count Dracula had defeated Van Helsing, and succeeded in his one-man invasion of Britain. I didn’t invent the idea of tampering with a set fictional storyline to come up with an alternate world, though I may have been among the first to spin a novel out of it. Among the oddest premises for alternate history novels is Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest, which imagines the English Civil War in a world which grows out of Shakespeare’s plays. John M. Ford (The Dragon Waiting) and Brian M. Stableford (The Empire of Fear) wrote novels in which, among other things, vampires are real beings and their long lives affect the course of history.

I knew all these books, but first encountered the idea of changing a well-known story and considering the consequences in DC Comics’ Imaginary Stories series (a wonderful tautology) of the 1960s, which pondered questions like “if Superman married Lois Lane?” or “if Batman died?” Marvel Comics responded with a more sophisticated series, What If, that mulled over “if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four,” “if Wolverine became Lord of the Vampires” or (a favorite) “if the gamma bomb — which turned Bruce Banner into the Hulk — were dropped on Japan, and created a million Hulks.”

Now, thanks to the lingering influence of It’s a Wonderful Life, every TV show seems obliged to deliver an “if they hadn’t met” episode (Lois & Clark did an “imaginary story,” where Clark Kent keeps quiet about having superpowers), take a look at how the regular supporting cast would get on without the lead character in their lives (“The Wish,” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is a template) or travel to an “evil alternate universe” where the typecast heroes get to be snarling villains (the place where Spock has a beard in Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror,” spoofed on South Park).

Considering that it’s not so long ago since Back to the Future Part II was deemed confusing as it spelled out a time-twisting with blackboard diagrams and speeches, the mainstreaming of complicated premises suggests that what was once arcane has seeped into pop culture. When I first outlined Anno Dracula, I wondered whether the premise wasn’t too abstruse for most readers — by the time it came out, everyone got it.

I had dipped a toe in the water with short stories: “Famous Monsters,” which plays Poul Anderson’s game and looks at a 20th century which begins with H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and wonders how that conflict would have shaped subsequent events, and “Ubermensch!” — a homage to “imaginary stories” in which the rocket from Krypton crashes in Europe and Kal-El comes to manhood in Nazi Germany.

The new thing I did was put the “if” inside someone else’s book; accepting the first 20 chapters of Stoker as gospel, rewriting the events of his Chapter 21 so that Dracula comes off best in a key confrontation, and then junking the rest of the original story to overlay it with my own. Yes, it does involve bloody cheek on my part.

This is not the same as the Anderson trick, writing a novel that stands as a sequel to someone else’s work and assumes the events of that original have had large-scale global consequences — or the imaginary stories gambit of writing an entry in a long-running series that is then immediately revoked as “something that might or might not happen in the future.” (Indeed, as it happens, Lois and Clark are currently married in the mainstream DC continuity.)

It is the stratagem of Marvel’s What If series, which would often reprint or redraw the frames leading up to the “if.” Spider-Man did try to join the FF in an early issue, only to back off in a huff when he found there was no salary involved; the What If issue restages that scene, only with a different outcome. (Not altogether happy, Sue Storm feels useless in the Fantastic Five and marries the Sub-Mariner on the rebound.)

The unusual thing about Dracula is that it’s a domestic story in which the villain’s major ambitions are thwarted before there can be any large-scale consequences.

Having done it once, there’s a temptation to try again. But maybe it’s a one-to-a-writer device. And the number of stories well-known enough to be worth altering is limited. The unusual thing about Dracula is that it’s a domestic story in which the villain’s major ambitions are thwarted before there can be any large-scale consequences. It is resolved at a point when only Van Helsing and his few allies have to accept the existence of vampires, though presumably if Dracula succeeded in creating a new breed of man “whose path runs through death, not life,” then he would have had to take the undead public, as in the more recent alternate world of True Blood.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of a few other pulp-style stories that run to the same format. How would Dr. Fu Manchu (or Blofeld or Dr. Evil or Voldemort or similar mastermind) actually run the world if they took over? What might have happened if Moriarty came back from the waterfall but Sherlock Holmes didn’t? What if Wonderland, Narnia or Oz were colonized by the imperial powers of our own world? What if Frankenstein didn’t abort his female monster, and humanity had to share the planet with a hardier species bred from the union of his creatures? What if Ilse stayed with Rick in Casablanca, and — as a consequence — Victor gave the Nazis the names of all the Resistance leaders in Europe?

Workable ideas, perhaps? Though — as always — what’s the story?

The Anno Dracula series is not yet finished, so I have more ripples to examine. The blunt underlying metaphor of the books is that the vampires won. Looking at the news, it often seems to me that this is barely an alternate reality — which is why I need to go back to it every so often.