Karen Hellekson
[12] 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.
[9] 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,[8] 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".
[9][12] Phillip E. Wegner describes the book as a "useful study" of the genre,[12] while Kathleen Singles considers that it "lacks the comprehensiveness necessary to account for alternate history as a complex, interdisciplinary phenomenon".
[25] Matt Hills, in a review for the journal Popular Communication, describes the collection as a "fine set of interventionist essays", which "smartly expands and develops ways of thinking about fandom and the cultural production, circulation, and reception of fan fiction".
[26] Alicia Verlager, in a detailed review for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, praises the "wide-ranging and intelligent" essays but describes the book as "a challenging read" for the non-specialist, with the contents predominantly being "dense with academic theory".
[25] The editors aim to take a literary criticism approach involving close reading, rather than discussing fan fiction as a social or cultural phenomenon, as most earlier works had done; however, Bronwen Thomas considers that the essays "sacrifice depth for breadth and only rarely engage with specific narrative techniques".
[28] Their selections are described as "vital" by the reviewer Anne Kustritz, who considers the editors to have been largely successful in building a fan-studies canon, which she explains as "defining a relatively new field's identity, negotiating its limits, and setting the agenda for future research ... centralizing an often-scattered sub-discipline and assembling a shared base through which scholars working in diverse disciplines and methods can have a common language and conversation."
She describes the editors' introductory contextualizing material as valuable and well balanced, and praises the volume's themed organization for bringing the older texts into conversation with the more modern ones.
[29] Willard also praises the "comprehensive" introductory material; she considers the volume's broadening of focus at the end to include works other than fan fiction to be "somewhat jarring".
