In this course, we will consider counterfactuality in fiction from the 19th century to the 21st. Following critic Catherine Gallagher, we will ask, what if things had happened otherwise? and wonder—along with a range of authors—abut the literary, generic, historical, and ethical stakes of the answers. Readings will focus on the counterfactual from the scale of the sentence to the scale of the (alternate) world. Readings will be drawn from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip Roth, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kingsley Amis, and Abdourahman A. Waberi, among others.