10 What-If Machines

Fictional what-ifs come in all shapes and sizes. Many are ephemeral brain farts that are as disposable as they are whimsical. What if Neo had chosen the blue pill? What if plants could talk? What if animals wanted us to eat them? What if we needed stamps to send email? What if Steve Jobs was an alien who merely returned to his home planet? What if Donald Trump turned the Whitehouse into a casino? Other what-ifs, born of exactly the same slice'n' dice attitude to reality, turn out to be made of weightier stuff and provoke fascinating debates. What if animals brought a class action suit against the human race? What if the ancient Romans had invented the atom bomb? What if the USSR had won the cold war? What if the Axis powers had won World War II and divided up the United States among themselves? This last what-if is the provocative basis for Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award—winning novel, The Man in the High Castle.
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Written in 1962 and set in the same year, the book explores an alternate reality in which the allies lost World War II after the Nazis dropped the first atomic bomb on Washington, DC. The political counterfactuals of the novel concern the machinations of Nazi Germany, which now controls the Eastern states of America, and of Japan, which controls the Pacific states, with the Rocky Mountain states serving as a neutral buffer.