History is one long game of "what if?" "What if Germany had been victorious in the Second World War?" Philip K. Dick gave us a fictional answer in The Man in the High Castle, which was made into a successful TV series. In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth explored another historical hypothetical: "What if Charles Lindbergh – American hero, celebrity aviator, anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser – had become president in 1940 instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?"
Dick’s story had all the dystopian trappings of science fiction but Roth’s was disturbingly realistic. It showed how little was required to bring about a radical change in a society we thought we knew well, unleashing bestial instincts lurking just below the surface. Written in the first-person, in the style of a memoir, Roth related the events of the early 1940s as if he were describing historical fact.
