"Alternative History Fiction" Is the Tackiest Genre

“Novelists trafficking in the present would do well to abandon their lingering prejudices against historical fiction as something ready-made and second-rate,” claims Thomas Mallon in today’s New Yorker, making the case for the highs and lows of “alternative-history fiction,” which is my least favorite genre of all time. I hate it so much! (And that’s coming from someone who’ll read books with like, wizards and garbage.) It most often contains all the boringness of actual history with the lazy sort of ingenuity of a writer with a desperate trick. Do writers, Mallon suggests (and he is more appreciative) turn sometimes to the genre because of fiction’s current lack of cultural oomph?