Originally Posted By: Benito
I didn't even realize this was it's own genre, but yeah this concept has always intrigued me.
I think it does very well as a plot device within an existing science fiction story eg Star Trek has done this several times.
It will be interesting to see if an entire movie about an alternate history can hold enough interest.
High Castle is considered a classic of the alternate-timeline or alternate history genre. The usual suspects have all been treated: the South wins the Civil War in Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, for instance, or Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated leading to a 20th-Century Catholic England in Keith Roberts's Pavane. There's a short novel by Poul Anderson, one of his Time Patrol stories, in which Hannibal defeats Rome and thus changes all of Western history. And there's a neat collection of "What if Nazi Germany had won WWII?" stories, Hitler Victorious, which contains another and haunting Roberts story, "Weinachtsabend."
The last section of Stephen King's wonderful time travel novel 11/22/63 details his suggestions of what might have happened if John Kennedy had not been killed in Dallas on that Friday. (Hint: It ain't pleasant.)