There is a moment at the end of the film Quest for Love (Ralph Thomas, 1971) when the protagonist Colin Trafford enters the hospital bedroom of a woman he has already seen die and has chased between and within alternate worlds. Her friend whispers something to her and he hands the patient a bunch of flowers, saying the name ‘Ottilie’. She repeats this back as the credits appear. Quest for Love film is one of several adaptations of John Wyndham's short story ‘Random Quest’ (1962) and in this chapter I will discuss both texts as examples of alternate history, in the process noting how adaptation itself is also a form of alternate history. ‘Random Quest’ is one of a series of what Wyndham's biographer David Ketterer has called ‘time-schism love stories’, that explore a tension between arbitrary happenstance and inevitable predestination. These stories have largely been neglected in favour of the disaster novels that Brian Aldiss labelled ‘cosy catastrophes’. It will be necessary to briefly discuss those novels and Wyndham's status, in order to consider how cosy his other work might be.

Whilst alternate histories are often means of exploring political distinctions between the empirical and fictionalized worlds, Wyndham’s stories occupy a more domestic or cosy milieu. In this chapter, I have adopted the term ‘uchronia’, coined by Charles Renouvier in 1857 to refer to ‘a utopia of past time […] works in which some crucial turning point is given a different, and from the author's point of view better, outcome’ (Alkon 115). The philosopher Paul Ricoeur used the word in relation to the imagined better world of the future (and as an alternative term to utopia – ‘no-time’ rather than ‘no-place’ (219)). According to Ricoeur, the philosophy of the Enlightenment had led to an expectation of unprecedented novelty, of accelerating societal improvements and the notion that humanity could determine history. The crises of twentiethcentury modernity locate us between a dead past and a future that seems ever further away: ‘the horizon of expectation recedes at a quicker pace than we advance. [… E]xpectation can longer fix itself on a determined future, outlined by discernible stages’. (219) But Wyndham seems more interested in Trafford's personal uchronia rather than the wider social shifts Ricoeur considers, even though he is aware of twentieth-century global politics.