Alternate Fiction

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office.

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.

Ever since the USS Walker came from another world war to defy the terrifying Grik and diabolical Dominion, Matt Reddy and his crew have given their all to protect the oppressed Lemurians. But with the Walker in desperate need of repairs just as the Grik's first general is poised to strike, Reddy is desperate. With more enemies than ever before arrayed against them, the crew of the Walker needs new allies. That means combing the lethal wilds of Madagascar to find the Lemurians' fabled ancestors.

When an inexplicable wave of energy slammed into North America, millions died. In the rest of the world, wars erupted, borders vanished, and the powerful lost their grip on power. Against this backdrop, with a conflicted US president struggling to make momentous decisions in Seattle and a madman fomenting rebellion in Texas, three women are fighting their own battles - for survival, justice, and revenge.

In the dazzling conclusion to the Greystone Secrets series from New York Times best-selling author Margaret Peterson Haddix, the Greystones and their doubles, the Gustanos, must team up to save the alternate world - before both worlds are lost. All secrets are revealed in this addictive, suspenseful story that shows the importance of teamwork, telling your story, and taking action when it matters most.

After being stretched to their limits, the four heroic young Forest Guard recruits - Johnis, Silvie, Billos, and Darsal - face new dangers on their mission to secure the seven lost Books of History. Celebrated as a hero, Johnis's world is shattered when he learns that his mother may not be dead as presumed but could be living as a slave to the Horde. Throwing caution to the wind, he rushes to her rescue. But this is precisely what the Horde has planned. Now he will face a choice between Silvie, whom he is quickly falling for, and his sworn duty to protect the Forest Dwellers.

A few days after the Hunsford Proposal, Darcy unexpectedly comes upon Elizabeth Bennet on the road to London. Her carriage has met with an accident! Of course, Darcy comes to the rescue despite the recent, scathing rejection of his hand and heart. Circumstances force them to seek refuge in a nearby farmhouse, posing as man and wife! Why was Elizabeth travelling to London in a strange carriage, days before her visit to the metropolis was scheduled?

Back at the joint Zvezda-US Copernicus Moonbase, the precarious Cold War cease-fire between the NASA and Soviet crews comes under threat from another consolidated assault. Vivian must navigate a treacherous political and military landscape, and travel from the lunar surface to high lunar orbit and back again, to solve the riddle of these strange lunar incursions and move ahead to a future that even she can barely imagine.

The most popular alternate history series of all continues. When a cosmic disturbance hurls your town from twentieth-century West Virginia back to seventeenth-century Europe-and into the middle of the Thirty Years War-you have to adapt to survive. And the natives of that time period, faced with American technology and politics, need to be equally adaptable. Here's a generous helping of more stories of Grantville, the American town lost in time, and its impact on the people and societies of a tumultuous age.

In the real world, England and France allowed Adolf Hitler to gobble up the Sudetenland in 1938. Once Hitler finished dismembering Czechoslovakia, he was ready to go to war over Poland a year later. But Hitler had always been eager to seize Czechoslovakia, no matter the consequences. So what if England and France had stood up to the Nazis from the start, and not 11 months later? That is the question behind the War That Came Early series.

Present day: When a young anthropologist specializing in ancient technology uncovers a terrible secret concealed in the workings of a three-hundred-year-old mechanical doll, she is thrown into a hidden world that lurks just under the surface of our own. With her career and her life at stake, June Stefanov will ally with a remarkable traveler who exposes her to a reality she never imagined, as they embark on an around-the-world adventure and discover breathtaking secrets of the past….

Up-timer Morris Roth and his Grand Army of the Sunrise stand at a crossroads. Military success against the Polish-Lithuanian magnates has all but guaranteed a continued push east into Ruthenian lands. There, Roth hopes to further his Anaconda Project so that tens of thousands of Jews are not slaughtered in what’s to become known as the Chmielnicki Pogrom of 1648.

One night in Lagos, two former friends reunite. Obinna is a dutiful and unsophisticated stay-at-home husband and father married to a powerful businesswoman. Eze is single, a cautious rebel from his university days whose arrival soon upsets the balance in Obinna’s life. In a world where men are constantly under surveillance and subject to the whims of powerful women, more than Obinna’s ordered and accustomed routine might be on the line.

The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets.

For some, hopes, dreams, and ambitions come easily. Not so much for Lilith. Created by one of the most feared supervillains, Shadowmind, she has no past of her own and only a passing familiarity with the world as it is. With a death sentence hanging over her head due to who created her and how, she escaped into the world to see and explore, and perhaps find a meaning to her life. There, she encounters heroes and villains alike, including those who brought her maker to justice.

Daniel Quinn, well known for Ishmael - a life-changing book for readers the world over - once again turns the tables and creates an otherworld that is very like our own, yet fascinating beyond words. Imagine that Nazi Germany was the first to develop an atomic bomb and the Allies surrendered. America was never bombed, occupied, or even invaded, but was nonetheless forced to recognize Nazi world dominance....

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

Beatrice Leal’s personal life is complicated between her divorce and her precocious six-year-old. But the job she loves is the one thing she counts on to be straightforward—that is, until her boss’s own divorce prompts a move from NYC back to Ireland. Now Bea’s in Ireland twice a month for work. It’s wreaking havoc on the custody agreement she and her moody ex are sorting out while he lives downstairs in the brownstone they co-own. And to top it off, her company’s new CTO turns out to be the boy who once broke her heart: Jack Sander.

From the end of the 18th century, Americans traveled west to find new homes and new lands. They brought with them the magics of plain people. It is from these roots of the American dream that award-winning writer Orson Scott Card has crafted what the Charlotte Observer called "a uniquely American fantasy." Using the lore and the folk magic of the men and women who settled a continent, and the beliefs of the tribes who were here before them, Card has created an alternate frontier America.

In an extraordinary saga of nations locked in war, master storyteller Harry Turtledove tells the story of World War II, which begins over Czechoslovakia rather than Poland, eleven months earlier than it really came. Now comes the final installment in Turtledove's landmark World War II series. Hitler's Plan A was to win in a hurry, striking hard and deep into France. There was no Plan B. Now the war grinds on, and countries have been forced into strange alliances.