A rabbit hole that hides a secret world. A weird hurricane that drops you in a strange place. A portal that gives you access to a different world. An intriguing environment you've never seen before and curious looking beings that seem to come from your imagination. All these examples can be used to introduce to us the wonders of the Alternate World.
We can say that Alternate World phenomenon took its first steps in the Fantasy genre when Gulliver ended up in a strange island after his ship wrecked in 1726. Alice grabbed the baton of this subgenre and fell down the rabbit hole in 1865. It continued to shine when Dorothy and her pet Toto were swept away from their Kansas home by a cyclone in 1900. The subgenre kept trending, and added a new twist when Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie discovered the wardrobe that dragged them to Narnia in 1950. And it introduced itself to the new generation when Harry Potter received a letter of acceptance into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in 1997.
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But what is an Alternate World, really?
An Alternate World can be defined as a reality hidden within our world or a world beyond ours. This hidden reality can vary from a small, undiscovered, land to a completely different world.
This undiscovered land is a hidden world. It co-exists with our own world and our characters accidentally discover it. These hidden worlds are usually found after a difficult journey. Sometimes, anyone can access them, while others are separated by a portal and only specific beings can access it. In other cases, a special item or artifact is used to enter that world. Alternative World in fiction is a common theme, found in many pieces of literature-especially in genres that involves Fantasy and Science Fiction. Though, in the Science Fiction genre, it's mostly known as Parallel World. In Fanfiction it's known as Alternate Universe. In the Science Fiction genre, logic is used to explain the existence of that specific world-while in the Fantasy genre, only a portal separates us from a magical realm.
An Alternate World can be a place hidden within our world, but with different cultures and habits as in the Harry Potter series. Besides having magic, time seems to be frozen in the 1700's. The people of Harry's world use feathers instead of pens, use potions instead of modern medicine, use burning torches instead of lamps or bulbs-and have a curious menu that would make us muggles/humans think twice before tasting it.
