Uchronia
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"Napoleon was always glad to sleep in the beds of other kings, and establish himself in palaces, from which his appearance had driven them."--The Apocryphal Napoleon (1836) by Louis Geoffroy |
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The term uchronia refers to a hypothetical or fictional time-period of our world, in contrast to altogether fictional lands or worlds. A concept similar to alternate history but different in the manner that uchronic times are not easily defined (mainly placed in some distant or unspecified point before current times), sometimes reminiscent of a constructed world. Some, however, do use uchronia to refer to an alternate history.
The word is a neologism from the word utopia (Greek u-topos, meaning "no-place"), replacing topos with chronos (time). It was coined by Charles Renouvier as the title of his 1876 novel Uchronie (L'Utopie dans l'histoire), esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la civilisation européenne tel qu'il n'a pas été, tel qu'il aurait pu être (Uchronia (Utopia in History), an Apocryphal Sketch of the Development of European Civilization Not as It Was But as It Might Have Been).
The term has been applied to Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.
Uchronian settings
- Middle-earth/Arda
- Hyborian Age
- Gloriana by Michael Moorcock
- Terre D'Ange, the setting of Kushiel's Legacy
- The World of The Wheel
- Gotham City
See also