Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies.The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought.