Awhile ago I had some comments about how, in the best works of alternative history, the alternative world is not “real,” that in an underlying sense, our world is the real one. Just to update on this, I sent my thoughts to the great John Clute, who had the following response:

I think it’s a neat formulation of at least something of what goes on in the best Alternative History novels, though I tend to think of it more as an involuntary (or elated, or knowing) insertion of a touch of Yin into the Yang. I think the best sf books do tend to wrestle with what I’d call (hey, why not) Minotaur-bearing labyrinth of the “real”, and that the best of them tend to make use of that engagement. But a different focus of energy also operates: the enormously powerful urge of the good writer to realize the imagined thing. BRING THE JUBILEE loses some of its poignance and grasp if we think that the world in which it begins is somehow less real, in the imagined matrix of the tale, than the world in which it ends; though it is at the same time clear that the reader is in a “privileged” position as regards his understanding of the nature of the reality of the world “created”.

In fact, I think the best angle of understanding of the issues you’re addressing may be in reader theory: that the reader is in a particularly privileged, and exposed, and delicate position vis a vis the reality register of any alternative world story; and will be remarkably sensitive to any Yin within the Yang. Something like this is true of any reading experience of fiction (though I find your statement that “in a sense, all novels are alternate histories” true but maybe a bit masking of the readerly issues foregrounded here); but clearly, the stakes are much higher and more visible in the alternate/alternative world story.

As I commented in blog entry, I think that this sort of analysis can be helpful in understanding the “potential outcomes” formulation of causal inference.