A normal What If? story asks "What if something went differently?". For example, "What if the South won The American Civil War?" A Double-Blind What-If asks, from the perspective of people in a What If? scenario, "what if things went the way they did historically/canonically?" (Like people in a Southern-victory timeline wondering "What if the North won?") This can produce a scenario that, while seeming plausible to the people of the What If? and superficially similar to the real outcome, is also very different than the real course of events despite the key event turning out as it did historically, as both the cause of the key event and the effects of it can vary wildly from the historical causes and effects.
Much like Alternate History as a whole, Double-Blind What-Ifs can be employed to try to assess just how likely our own history was, without hindsight making the history we know seem nearly inevitable.
Because creating such a story usually requires an already existing world, such stories are rarely by themselves, thus it's usually a Story Within a Story, Fan Fiction or a Game Mod.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Touched upon, although not developed, in Superman: Red Son — an Elseworld where Superman's ship lands in Ukraine and the Cold War is driven by the personal conflict between a Soviet Superman and an American Lex Luthor. Luthor comments that if the spaceship had landed in the US, he and Superman could have become friends. Superman also mentions that, centuries after their first meeting, a famous poet would write an Alternate History where he and Lois Lane-Luthor became lovers. While he doesn't understand the appeal, it does go on to become the best-selling work of fiction of all time.
- Briefly used in Watchmen, after Doc Manhattan achieves rapid victory in Vietnam, The Comedian muses that, if they'd lost the war, "it might have driven us a little crazy, y'know? As a country."
Fan Works
- This is briefly touched upon in the Animorphs Alternate Universe Fic Ghost in the Shell, where Tom says to Rachel's grave that he used to think everyone would be better off if she'd succeeded at killing him. She did kill him in canon, and his family definitely wasn't better off for it.
- Medicated, an Amphibia AU: After learning about the prophecy in chapter 35, Anne and Sasha wonder what they and Marcy would be like if they'd grown up on Earth — would they have been childhood friends? Would they have always had their powers? Would they still care about Amphibia if they didn't always live there? Canon already has the answers: Yes, no, and yes.
- The Mountain and the Wolf: The story starts with the Wolf killing the Mountain in a Curb-Stomp Battle instead of Oberyn's Mutual Kill. But we later learn Oberyn is still dead (and the Dorne subplot presumably happens as in the series), when Tyrion angrily says that had the Wolf never come along, Tyrion would be a lot better off instead of becoming a fugitive.
Literature
- In The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, wherein the Axis won World War II, an In-Universe novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that asks "what if the Allies won World War II?" The book has World War II followed by a Space Cold War between the USA and UK, the latter of which has become a racist dictatorship. The latter wins and goes on to Take Over the World, as Abendsen, who lives in a Nazi-dominated world, would logically assume that the most "racially pure" country would emerge superior. Grasshopper's deeper meaning is: What if every "major" reader of it could realize they have entered an imaginary world? It's hinted that the main cast are in fact people from “our” world making up theirs, with the book being their way home.
- Harry Turtledove is fond of using this in his works, usually as a one-off joke.
- In the Worldwar series and the follow-up Colonization series, it is assumed that had the Race not invaded Earth during World War II, the humans would have eventually developed nuclear weapons on their own ... and destroyed each other.
- In The Two Georges, America Is Still a Colony, eventually uniting with Canada to form the North American Union, and the British Empire is the world's greatest power in the 1990s. An indirect consequence of this is that the German states never unified and still frequently squabble among themselves. An alternate history novel entitled The United Colonies Triumphant involves a united Germany starting a major European war in the 20th Century and the former American colonies, which gained their independence in the 18th Century, coming to the aid of Britain. Colonel Thomas Bushell, the protagonist of The Two Georges, thought that the idea of Germany uniting under a single malign ruler was absurd and that the novel was very poorly written. Others found it entertaining, even if /the idea was far-fetched and improbable. The major difference between the world of The United Colonies Triumphant and the real world is that slavery still existed in 20th Century America in the former.
- In The Guns of the South, in which the Confederates won The American Civil War thanks to aid from time travelers, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee meet some years after the war (and after Lincoln's term as President has ended). When Lee asks what he's going to do now, Lincoln suggests that maybe he'll write a book about how everything would have been better had the Union won.
- Similarly, in the Timeline-191 series (another "South wins Civil War" series, this time without outside interference), one of the viewpoint characters mentions that "What if the North won?" novels are popular among the people of the United States, who are still bitter fifty years later.
- This is the premise of the 1930 short story "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" by Winston Churchill, who later became a character in many alternate history stories himself. As the title suggests, the story takes the form of an historian from a world in which Lee won at Gettysburg imagining what would have happened if he had not done so. In the historian's world, the British Empire acted as a mediator between the Confederacy and the US after the battle. The Confederacy's independence was recognized by the Treaty of Harper's Ferry on September 9, 1863, which also declared all slaves to be free. In 1884, the Confederacy conquered Mexico. The US, the Confederacy and the British Empire eventually formed the English-Speaking Association (ESA) in 1905. After the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the ESA was successful in preventing the European crisis of August 1914 from turning into a war. The still-reigning Kaiser Wilhelm II hopes to unify Europe in a similar fashion to the ESA at "the forthcoming Pan-European Conference at Berlin in 1932." Both Gladstone and Disraeli still became Prime Minister in the historian's world but their parties were reversed with Gladstone being a Conservative and Disraeli a Liberal. The historian notes that Wilhelm II's position could have been very different if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg, speculating that "his career might have been wrecked in 1914 by the outbreak of a war which might have cost him his throne, and have laid his country in the dust." He also speculates that if Lee had not won, "Gladstone would not have become the greatest of Conservative Empire and Commonwealth builder, nor would Disraeli have been the idol of the toiling masses."
- Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois takes place in a United States turned into a Third World-type dictatorship after the Cuban Missile Crisis started World War III. A journalist talks of reading an alternate history novel in which the war didn't happen and JFK (reviled for supposedly starting the war) became a much beloved President. Needless to say, he is not assassinated in this novel.
- The Sea Lion Press book Chamberlain Resigns, and Other Things That Did Not Happen is a collection of 6 of these around the Second World War (for example, a story about "what if Japan joined the war?" set in a timeline where they did not).
- In Eric Swedin's When Angels Wept, set decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis escalated into a devastating nuclear exchange, the author muses on whether the Crisis could've been averted and maybe shocked the world away from nuclear war. Even then, he remains skeptical of the idea that the Cold War could've ever ended peacefully, and that anyone who thinks so has more faith in humanity than he does.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: Enterprise: In "In a Mirror, Darkly", the evil Mirror Universe version of Captain Jonathan Archer recalls to T'Pol the First Contact between Earth and Vulcan, where Zefram Cochrane killed the Vulcans and stole their technology, and idly wonders if things might have turned out differently. Instead of the events of Star Trek: First Contact, he suggests that humans might have become the slaves of the Vulcans instead of the other way round. He's not happy after reading in a database from the other universe that this didn't happen, and his counterpart is a famous explorer and diplomat, not a conqueror.
Video Games
- In Kaiserreich: Legacy of the Weltkrieg, wherein Germany won the Weltkrieg, events about In-Universe novels present two reversals of its initial what-if of "What if Germany won World War I".
- In the first, Winston Churchill (in previous versions, the writer was Erich Maria Remarque) writes a book entitled Their Finest Hour, which asks "What if the Entente won the Weltkrieg?". Among the first differences is that, since it is common knowledge in Kaiserreich that Woodrow Wilson was a staunch isolationist who would never get the United States involved in a European war, it has Theodore Roosevelt, a well-known interventionist, win the 1912 elections and bring the United States into the Great War on the side of the Entente. After its defeat, Germany eventually is taken over by an extreme nationalist party called the Valkists headed by a (fictional) Great War veteran named Adam Dressler, who are much more socially progressive and inclined towards neo-paganism than their historical counterparts and in which Adolf Hitler (who died in Kaiserreich's timeline) is a mere economic minister of dubious competence. Furthermore, since Huey Long wasn't assassinated in Kaiserreich and Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of polio in 1921, Long is still a prominent politician in the United States, while Roosevelt's rise to power hasn't been quite as rapid as in our timeline and he is making his first presidential bid in 1936. Also, without Wilson's insistence on national self-determination, Italy was able to claim the spoils it wanted from the Great War and doesn't feel it has suffered a "mutilated victory" as it did in our history, thus preventing the rise of Italian fascism. The book has also been defictionalized as the mod Führerreich: Legacy of the Great War, named after the title of Remarque's book in the first iteration of the event.
- In the second, Red Flood by Lithuanian author Ignas Šeinius, the What If? is reversed instead as "What if Germany lost the Weltkrieg?". In its course of events, Russia overperforms history in the Brusilov Offensive and France launches a massive attack at the same time. However, the French offensive fails and the losses mount on the western front, while Russia manages to avert revolution and stays in the war. With no end in sight on the western front and no hope of American entry to revitalize the lines due to Woodrow Wilson's well-known isolationism, France and Germany fall to revolutions at home, with France being taken over by ultranationalists and Germany by socialists, neither of which seek to continue the old regime's war. With the largest players (and most of the battlefield, as much of Imperial Russia's western buffer area broke free in the wave of revolutions, eliminating the eastern front as well) in the war removed by way of revolution, the war ends with no real victor. Come 1936 and the French nationalists are itching for a rematch and the German socialists and their Hungarian allies want to spread the revolution around the world. Russia, having sacrificed so much in the Great War for no real gains, has subscribed to a national myth similar to the Italian "Mutilated Victory" myth and has seen Admiral Alexandr Kolchak assume dictatorial power of a new ultranationalist government that seeks to reclaim Russian glory, western lands, and the spoils it feels it was denied in the Great War. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom wants to maintain the balance of power and hold on to its colonial empire and sees both the ultranationalists and the socialists as a threat to their interests. Like Their Finest Hour, it is being defictionalized as the Game Mod Red Flood, which adds the additional points of divergence of Japan underperfoming at Tsushima Straits and Dmitri Bogrov missing his shot and shooting Tsar Nicholas II instead of prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, whose reforms contribute Russia's increased endurance in WWI and giving more room for different outcomes in the Far East, which isn't detailed in the event.
- Führerreich: Legacy of the Great War has its own in-universe Alternate History fictions.
- A Fourth Rome (Ernest Raymond) describes a world where German Emperor Frederick III lives past 1888, leading to Britain joining the Central Powers and helping them win World War 1. France then falls into radical nationalism and militarism, and establishes a puppet government of identical ideology in Italy. A man named Marco Brescil rises in this new Italy and declares himself "Caesar", and Italy to be "Fourth Rome". The novel ends with a second world war about to happen between the German-led Central Powers and the French-led Entente d'Acier, while Fourth Rome prepares to take advantage of the new war. The reactions to the book is identical to the reactions to the Führerreich book in the original Kaiserreich, with Raymond defending his story by saying that it could've happened in another universe. ("What a childish fantasy.")
- In Tides of Revolution (Eric Blair), America did not join WW1, leading to a drawn-out and bloody war that ends with a shaky peace arrangement as both sides teeter on the brink of collapse. After the war, the Entente intervenes in the Russian Civil War to ensure a white victory, while France falls into a civil war that sees Socialists coming out on top. Germany and Russia both fall to Nationalism, while Britain and Austria-Hungary reform into liberal democracies. A civil war occurs in the United States between Nationalists and Socialists, and the novel ends with a Second Great War between the French "P.R.I.", the "Russo-German Axis", and the "Freipakt". This book received the same reactions as Red Flood in Kaiserreich. ("Is he trying to make that Universe as bad as possible?"). Doubles as a Mythology Gag: the setting described in this work is basically... the Kaiserreich world!
- In an Axis victory Hearts of Iron IV mod The New Order Last Days Of Europe, Lazar Kaganovich, General Secretary of the rump Marxist-Leninist USSR in Tyumen, at some point commissions to write a book which describes the alternate history events where Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union instead of Bukharin (who succeeded Lenin in this timeline). The book follows almost exactly the same direction as real life (Soviet Union wins against Germany, forms the "Budapest Pact" against the alliance of Western powers called "North Atlantic Treaty Coalition", the British Empire decolonizes, the Soviet Union itself lasts until the 80s when Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy loses against the free market). Despite this, the novel is universally panned outside of Kaganovich's USSR.
- Prey (2017) has a synopsis of a fiction book as one of the text logs you can read, And The West Stood Tall.
[Excerpt from the back cover synopsis of an alternate history novel, by Lance B. Jenkins]In 1964, President Kennedy turned his back on American interventionism. But what if America had stood up for its allies in Vietnam? Would Communism still reign in the East? Would the Iron Curtain have fallen? Renowned political commentator Lance B. Jenkins, weaves a gripping alternate account of the days following the Gulf of Tonkin incident and what might have been if America had gone to war in 1964."Jenkins' historical imagination is meticulous, majestic, poignant. 10/10" - The Liberty Herald
Webcomic
- Discussed in xkcd #2149: Alternate Histories
, in which people discuss this idea in the context of World War II, including bringing up The Man in the High Castle. Then one of the two wonders about the possibility of third-level what-ifs and beyond, resulting in an alternate history 500 levels in that bears pretty much no resemblance to the actual World War II, other than Harry Truman being involved.
Web Original
- Double-Blind What-Ifs are a moderately common genre on Alternate History boards, such as AlternateHistory.com and the older soc.history.what-if. It is often phrased as "DBWI [historical event]?" (e.g. "DBWI Rome defeated Carthage?") without a specific pre-existing What If? work, inviting responders to create or imagine their own What If? setting from which to write the double-blind what-if.
- Parodied by The Onion in "Alternate Universe Sci-Fi Channel Show Asks What Would Happen If Germany Lost War".
