Alternate Fiction

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.

In London and Germany, strange beings are reanimating themselves. They are the Erstwhile, the angels that failed to protect the Tree of Knowledge, and their reawakening will have major consequences. In Africa, the colonial town of Essenwald has fallen into disarray because the timber workforce has disappeared into the Vorrh. Now a team of specialists are dispatched to find them. Led by Ishmael, the former cyclops, they enter the forest, but the Vorrh will not give them back so easily. To make matters worse, an ancient guardian of the forest has plans for Ishmael and his crew.

The Great War has ended at last. Archaeologist Amelia Peabody and her husband, Emerson, the distinguished Egyptologist, no longer fear for the life of their daring son, Ramses, now free from his dangerous wartime obligations to British Intelligence. Delightful new additions to the growing Emerson family and new wonders waiting to be discovered beneath the shifting Egyptian sands mark a time of new beginnings in Luxor.

Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars.

Set in a postapocalyptic world, this tale of courage, sacrifice, and heroism takes place against the backdrop of an age of steam and rational humanism, where the social elite have rejected religion and spiritualism as nothing more than quaint superstition. Brutal Vampire Clans rule half the world, keeping human herds for food, and Princess Adele, heir to the throne of Equatoria, is faced with grim choices. War is imminent and her marriage to the odious Senator Clark of America will cement an alliance uniting the Equatorian Empire and the American Republic.

As Irene tries to manage a fraught Fae-dragon truce and her overbearing parents, she’s given a hot new mission. The world where she grew up is in danger and only one book can save it. This is held by Mr Nemo, secretive Fae villain and antique dealer, so Irene and Kai travel to his Caribbean retreat to strike a deal. But in return for the book, they must steal a painting from 21st century Vienna. They’ll join a team of dragons, Fae gamblers and thieves, so their greatest challenge may be one another.

Alex Rogers is a young, intelligent workaholic who jumped from high school to college to a technical career with little time for a personal life. With his dog Kinsey, he pursues his only vice, wandering in the wilderness areas of Washington State, dreaming of adventure. Without warning, he and Kinsey find themselves in an unfamiliar land, unable to speak the language and fighting for their lives.

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than 30 feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance. Among them are 14-year-old Molly McHugh.

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.

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....

Daughter of a Norse king, 15-year-old Åsa dreams of becoming a shield-maiden. When she spurns a powerful warlord, he rains hellfire on her family, slaughtering her father and brother and taking her captive. To protect her people, Åsa must wed her father's killer. To take vengeance, she must become his queen.

The irreverent author of the cult classic Syrup hits his target in this satire on the wages of big capital. In Max Barry's hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations, and employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly traded security firms, and the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.

Bram Stoker kept secret a tale even more terrifying than Dracula. It begins among the Carpathian peaks, when an intrepid explorer discovers a mysterious golden box. She brings it back with her to the foggy streets of Victorian London, unaware of its dangerous power…or that an evil beyond imagining has already taken root in the city. Stoker, a successful theater manager but frustrated writer, is drawn into a deadly web spun by the wealthy founders of a mission house for the poor. Far from a safe haven, the mission harbors a dark and terrifying secret.

A former Magistrate in the grim world of post-holocaust America, Kane cuts his ties to the ruling order and its launched on a reluctant quest to uncover the truth about a bitter enmity that haunts humanity. He knows the answer is out there - beyond the garrisoned cities, the Outlands' hell zones, the ancient seats of planetary power. Barely ahead of a Grudge task force, Kane and his fellow exiles venture from Cerberus redoubt to the hell zones and other global hot spots via the Mat-trans units.

Aliens From Planet X—Their Origin and Future Appearance is the culmination of filmmaker and investigative journalist Bart Sibrel's decades long research about the illusive topic of "Aliens", as well as the recently discovered possibility of a dangerous rogue planet "Planet X" passing by the earth in the near future, with potentially catastrophic global consequences.

In the first months of 1936, Adolf Hitler risked everything by ordering his untrained military to reoccupy the Rhineland. It was a bluff. The Germans would have been forced to retreat if the French or British had offered the slightest opposition. But the bluff succeeded. History changed decisively. Hitler quieted the opposition at home, and marched the world relentlessly on, to the edge of destruction and beyond.

Set in a world in which the Roman Empire never fell, Clash of Eagles finds Praetor Gaius Marcellinus leading his 33rd Legion into Nova Hesperia. But there his conception of the world is challenged by encounters with the Powhatani, Iroqua, and Cahokiani tribes.

Wyoming Territory, 1873. Tim Colter and his trusted guide, mountain man Jed Reno, are on the trail of a vicious gang of train robbers when they happen upon a bloody and shocking scene. Lying on the ground, barely breathing, a Secret Service agent has been left for dead in the wake of a brutal ambush. His final words: "President Grant . . . assassination . . . Dugan . . . trust nobody."

An untested group of Shield-Brethren initiates stand before the sprawling Mongol army in a bloody circus of sadistic violence, while a hardened company of their finest roam the desolate wasteland of the Mongol empire, wrapping their dead in blood-soaked soil and struggling to find the strength to fight even as they mourn. The warrior-monks, both in the East and the West, sharpen their swords for a final battle. The Khan of Khans must be slain if Christendom is to survive.

Christmas 1292. Time travel has meant many things to Meg, David, and Anna over the years. But regardless of the circumstances, it's always been about saving lives: their own, their family members', and their friends'. This time, it's a combination of all three.