Alternate Fiction

Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania - and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad. After years of Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Europa, fleeing the war, Germania launches its siege of Khazaria. Only Esther, the daughter of the nation's chief policy adviser, sees the ominous implications of Germania's disregard for Jewish lives.

Next to the colonial town of Essenwald sits the Vorrh, a vast - perhaps endless - forest. It is a place of demons and angels, of warriors and priests. Sentient and magical, the Vorrh bends time and wipes memory. Legend has it that the Garden of Eden still exists at its heart. Now a renegade English soldier aims to be the first human to traverse its expanse. Armed with only a strange bow, he begins his journey, but some fear the consequences of his mission, and a native marksman has been chosen to stop him.

Twice before, mysterious cosmic catastrophes have sent portions of the Earth across space and back in time - first, with the Grantville Disaster in West Virginia, and then again with a maximum security prison in southern Illinois. Now, the planet is struck with yet another such cataclysm, whose direct impact falls upon the Queen of the Sea, a cruise ship in the Caribbean. When the convulsions subside, the crew and passengers of the ship discover that they have arrived in a new and frightening world. They are in the Mediterranean now, not the Caribbean.

It's 1941. In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.

Dorothy Parker: renowned wit, member of the Algonquin Round Table, and more fragile than she seems. Jane Grant: first female reporter for the New York Times, and determined to launch a new magazine she calls The New Yorker. Winifred Lenihan: beautiful and talented Broadway actress, a casting-couch target. And Peggy Leech: magazine assistant by day, brilliant novelist by night.

The coldest shadows. Arcano-archaeologist Elijah knows that digging into the past can be its own reward - or peril. When he’s hired to find an ancient map purported to lead to a mysterious location at the bottom of the world, his professional curiosity is more than roused. But his quest to simply get his hands on the map is more dangerous than he expected - even for a shadowrunner. He and his own team of runners - including everything from a goblin rigger to a troll street samurai - follow a murky trail that takes them from the ruins of Chicago to the jungles of Amazonia.

Set amid the backdrop of the massacre of Greeks and Armenians after World War I, a deeply affecting family story of love and survival infused with the rich historical detail and emotional power of Sisters of the Resistance and The Women in the Castle.

This time the stage is one of the greatest sea battles ever fought: the Battle of Salamis, 306 BC. The small, free, and independent polis of Rhodes is trying to stay neutral between the local great powers, each ruled by one of Alexander the Great’s marshals: one-eyed Antigonos, who controls Asia Minor, and Ptolemaios, ruler of Egypt. As tensions between the great powers escalate, Menedemos and Sostratos are trying to resolve their own problems, oblivious to the fact that one of the greatest navel fleets in ancient history is about to set sail.

United States of Japan is set in a gripping alternate history where the Japanese Empire rules over America with huge robots. Is resistance possible in the form of subversive video games? Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons, a group of rebels fighting for freedom.

What if mankind's "missing link", the apelike Homo erectus, had survived to dominate a North American continent where woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers still prowled while the more advanced Homo sapiens built their civilizations elsewhere? Now imagine that the Europeans arriving in the New World had chanced on these primitive creatures and seized the opportunity to establish a hierarchy in which the sapiens were masters and the "sims" were their slaves.

In the year 1635, the Rhineland is in turmoil. The impact of the Ring of Fire, the cosmic accident which transported the small modern West Virginia town of Grantville to Europe in the early 17th century, has only aggravated a situation that was already chaotic. Perhaps nowhere in central Europe did the Thirty Years' War produce so much upheaval as it did in the borderlands between France and Germany. Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne shares the religious fanaticism of his older brother, Duke Maximilian of Bavaria.

In 1912, history was changed by the Miracle, when the old world of Europe was replaced by Darwinia, a strange land of nightmarish jungle and antediluvian monsters. To some, the Miracle was an act of divine retribution; to others, it is an opportunity to carve out a new empire. Leaving an America now ruled by religious fundamentalists, young Guilford Law travels to Darwinia on a mission of discovery that will take him further than he can possibly imagine.

Im März 2021 fliegt eine Boeing 787 auf dem Weg von Paris nach New York durch einen elektromagnetischen Wirbelsturm. Die Turbulenzen sind heftig, doch die Landung glückt. Allerdings: Im Juni landet dieselbe Boeing mit denselben Passagieren ein zweites Mal in New York. Im Flieger sitzen der Architekt André und seine Geliebte Lucie, der Auftragskiller Blake, der nigerianische Afro-Pop-Sänger Slimboy, der französische Schriftsteller Victor Miesel, eine amerikanische Schauspielerin. Sie alle führen auf unterschiedliche Weise ein Doppelleben.

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of Southwest Asia, gender selection, war, and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and now females must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are some who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night....

When spring comes, the people leave their winter cave, foraging for honey and shoots, bulbs and grubs, the hot richness of a deer's brain. They awaken the fire to heat their naked bodies, lay down their thorn bushes and share pictures in their minds. But strange things are happening - inexplicable scents, sounds and violence - and, suddenly, unimaginable creatures are half-glimpsed in the forest: an upright new people of bone-faces and deerskins. What the early people don't know is that their season is already over....

Running late to the bakery one foggy morning, Audrey strikes a vehicle. Emerging from her car into the fog, she discovers she hit a motor scooter. But there’s no rider in sight. Just blood. The absence of the driver is a mystery, especially to Sergeant Jack Mansfield, the detective and church member responsible for firing Audrey's pastor husband from his pulpit. The scooter belongs to Jack’s wife, Julie, a teacher at the local high school, who has vanished… like morning fog.

The Unfolded World is a bitter and unfriendly place for Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft. In this world the Cold War never happened because the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1941. In this world the Nazi Großdeutschland is the premier superpower and is not merely tolerated but indulged because, in this world, the Holocaust happened behind the ruins of the Iron Curtain and consumed only Bolsheviks, Communists, and others the West was glad to see gone. In this world there are monsters, and not all of them are human.

Everfair is a wonderful neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo's "owner", King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary utopia for native populations of the Congo, as well as escaped slaves returning from America.

Alaska, 1989. In a world where Alaska is still a Russian possession, charter captain Grigorivich Plesnett has a stained past - as a major in the Czar's Troika Guard, he was cashiered for disobeying a direct order. Now, 10 years later, Grig charters out to a cossack and discovers his past has not only caught up with him but is about to violently change his future, and the future of all nine of the nations of North America as well. Spanning Alaska from the Southeastern Inside Passage to the frozen Yukon, this is an epic tale of one man's journey of redemption and courage.

Desperate to save as many people as he can from a horrible fate in the cruel game of the gods, Lee and his small group of friends abandon the relative safety of Satterfield for the great city of Kirshtein. Tensions within the city have reached a breaking point after the arrival of an enemy Herald, and Lee is soon caught up in the struggle for power.