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Alternate Universe, or Alternative Reality, is a sub-genre of Science Fiction. It is about that OTHER universe, very like ours, but with a key difference(s). Sometimes it's a small difference, sometimes a huge one, but in some significant way, the progress of time did not happen just as it did in the "real" universe. A "variant" universe, if you will. the Trousers of Time. Think Bradbury's butterfly. NOTE: There is a distinction between this genre and "Parallel Universe" fiction. A parallel universe can be ANYTHING, really - in other words, they don't have to be a variant of our own universe at all. That is not what we're going for here; see the previous paragraph.