Abstract
If history is written by the ‘victors’, are alternative account(s) of history written by ‘the defeated’? If historiography is conceived as the practice of “giving meaning to the meaningless” (Theodor Lessing), are we to assume that ‘alternative historiography’ or alternative accounts of history question the prevailing interpretation of history? Are uchronias (also known as alternative historical narratives, allohistories, parahistories, counterfactual histories and historiographic metafiction), especially ‘uchronic fiction’, in fact, only compensatory products of desire-driven thinking? As a matter of fact, it is not only the rather few contemporary Hungarian novels with alternative historical aspirations that are in an unfortunate position but contemporary Hungarian uchronic short stories as well. Of the nearly three hundred short stories submitted in 2014–2018 as candidates for the Péter Zsoldos Award, a national annual prize awarded for the best (published) Hungarian SF novel and short story in 2014–2018, there are only six uchronic pieces. It is with the help of these pieces of short fiction that I outline (1) the relationship between the philosophy of history and uchronia; (2) the (meta)taxonomies of uchronia; (3) the characteristics of those Hungarian short stories of this kind that are related to Hungary.
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