I've always been a fan of counter factual history: from Robert Harris's brilliant debut novel Fatherland which takes as its starting point the fact that Hitler did not win WW2 to Keith Robert's stately Pavane, which although set in the twentieth century, assumes that the Reformation did not happen. All of these work brilliantly as fiction, with the historical setting providing a fascinating context to an exciting story.
However in the run up to Christmas I was completely bowled over by this brilliant article by Martin Kettle which tries to work out how modern European history would have worked out if Germany had won the First World War - a very real possibility in the chaos of the battles of the first few months:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/25/if-germans-won-first-world-war
It might be possible to take a snapshot of a particular period and populate it with characters thatt we know from "real" history and imagine them in a different context, as C J Samsom did with Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley and others in Dominion, but the premise that he outlines does not offer such a memorable story as the last hundred years that we have lived through.
Perhaps somewhere in a parallel universe the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand enjoyed his trip to Sarajevo, went safely back to Vienna and finally became Emperor of Austria.
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