Karen Hellekson
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Karen L. Hellekson (born 1966) is an American author and scholar who researches science fiction and fan studies. In the field of science fiction, she is known for her research on the alternate history genre.
Hellekson considers the earliest Western examples of the genre to be Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Chateau's Napoléon et la Conquête du Monde (1836) and Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1824), although Geoffrey Winthrop-Young highlights possible alternative histories by authors as early as Livy and Herodotus. The Alternate History discusses examples drawn from science fiction, including works by Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson/Bruce Sterling, Ward Moore and H. Beam Piper, and also reviews anthologies compiled by historians, which, Hellekson posits, attempt to curtail the freedom inherent in alternate history by excluding works considered too unlikely or "frivolous". Hellekson considers narrative strategies in the genre, reflecting on the opinions of Paul Ricoeur, Stephen Jay Gould and Hayden White. She underlines the fact that history represents not the actual past, but a narrative about the past in which "the historian is complicit in [the] storytelling, not an objective, impartial recorder of events". She notes that alternate histories "change the present by transforming the past".
