Alternate Fiction

The bond between a mother and her child is the strongest in the natural world. So, why would a young woman, dreaming of America, throw her newborn baby into the waves of the wild Atlantic ocean? Life in the Scottish Hebrides can be harsh - 'The Edge of the World' some call it. For Kirsty MacLeod, the love of Murdo promises a new life away from the scrape of the land and the repression of the church. But the Great War looms, and Kirsty is overpowered and raped by an unknown assailant.

It’s not the 1930s you were taught. Trench fighting of "The Great War" has raged on for decades. During the carnage of a German/Russian counter-offensive, Pvt. Pepper witnessed the slaughter of his comrades. When death presses in on him, he is saved by a mysterious Knight with a magical shield.

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them."

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

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.

After attacking Devil's Reef in 1928, the US government rounded up the people of Innsmouth and took them to the desert, far from their ocean, their Deep One ancestors, and their sleeping god, Cthulhu. Only Aphra and Caleb Marsh survived the camps, and they emerged without a past or a future. The government that stole Aphra's life now needs her help. FBI agent Ron Spector believes that communist spies have stolen dangerous magical secrets.

The Providence Rider is the fourth installment in the extraordinary series of historical thrillers featuring Matthew Corbett, professional problem solver. The narrative begins in the winter of 1703, with Matthew still haunted by his lethal encounter with notorious mass murderer Tyranthus Slaughter. When an unexplained series of explosions rocks his Manhattan neighborhood, Matthew finds himself forced to confront a new and unexpected problem. Someone is trying - and trying very hard - to get his attention.

Commander Matt Reddy and his crew are afraid it may finally be the end of the USS Walker. Ever since their ship was transported to another world, and they became embroiled in a deadly conflict between the Lemurians and the vicious Grik, the Walker has been taking a pounding. With Walker out of commission for repairs, Reddy takes command of a different ship and joins a desperate battle to block the Grik swarm.

Rudi Mackenize, now Artos the First, High King of Montival, and his allies have won several key battles against the Church Universal and Triumphant. But still the war rages on, taking countless lives, ravaging the land once known as the United States of America. Artos and his Queen, Mathilda, must unite the realms into a single kingdom to ensure a lasting peace. If the leaders of the Changed world are to accept Artos as their ruler, he will need to undertake a quest to the Lake at the Heart of the Mountains....

Ariane has found refuge in Illinois, and now plans her rightful return to vampire society. She must stay in control while hiding in nature, while foes old and new converge on her territory.

America is Gone. It’s 2003 and American forces are assembled in Kuwait for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris an assassin wakes from a coma, in the Cascades a lone hiker watches a plane fly into a mountain and just north of the Equator a modern-day pirate, a rogue-Tasmanian, is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant an inexplicable wave of energy has changed the world. From Canberra to Cairo things will never be the same.

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.

"All the women of my family had gone to war... Now my turn had come... So, it is the custom that a free woman leave her mother's house to bind herself and those of her blood to a neighboring clan, either by the sword or by the cradle." So begins the story of young Tamras, as she embarks on her journey to become a warrior's apprentice. This epic story is not about battles and armor, but rather about relationships, coming of age and wisdom, and deep insights into the human experience.

Jaxon had just one job—to return three baby dragons to the realm of magic. But when he got there, only two dragons were left in the bag. His best friend's sister, Kavita, is a dragon thief! Kavita only wanted what was best for the baby dragon. But now every time she feeds it, the dragon grows and grows! How can she possibly keep it secret? Even worse, stealing it has upset the balance between the worlds. The gates to the other realm have shut tight! Jaxon needs all the help he can get to find Kavita, outsmart a trickster named Blue, and return the baby dragon to its true home.

After the explosion, Will didn't expect to wake up again, especially in the past. Alive is good. Except he finds himself at the Alamo in 1836 in the body of another man doomed to die. If history repeats itself, Santa Anna is coming soon, and the Alamo will fall, along with himself and 189 others. In a race against time itself, Will uses his knowledge of the future to change the past. He will use every means necessary, even if it means abandoning the fort. He is determined to forget the Alamo!

1399: England’s crown is under threat. King Richard II holds on to his power by an ever-weakening thread, with exiled Henry of Lancaster back to reclaim his place on the throne. For Elizabeth Mortimer, there is only one rightful King - her eight-year-old nephew, Edmund. Only he can guarantee her fortunes and protect her family’s rule over the precious northern lands bordering Scotland.

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

Strasbourg, 1518. In the midst of a blisteringly hot summer, a lone woman begins to dance in the city square. She dances for days without pause or rest, and when hundreds of other women join her, the men running the city declare a state of emergency and hire musicians to play the Devil out of the mob.

"What is the lost treasure which you seek"? Nick Hollister's luck usually ran only one way-bad. At 32, his life was a disappointment, nothing but a series of dead-end jobs, poor decisions, and broken relationships. One especially bad day, Nick manages to lose his job, his girlfriend, and even gets beaten up. While on a road trip to get away from it all, he discovers a book hidden within the frame of a cheap painting he bought from Hank Harper, the dwarf-sized and eccentric owner of an unusual antique shop.

A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, Breakthroughs is the third installment of best-selling author Harry Turtledove’s The Great War series of remarkable alternate histories. As the frightening war to end all wars continues to spread with vengeance around the globe, the swiftly modernizing armies of the Confederacy and the United States battle for control of the North American continent.