Alternate Fiction

On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, as the world waits for war, a miles-high energy wave cordons a vast area from southern Canada to northern Mexico. In a moment, 99 percent of the U.S. population has been wiped from the face of the earth.

In the year 2021 a multinational fleet - experimenting with untested weapons technology - pitched through time, crash-landing in 1942. The world is thrown into chaos as Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, and Stalin scramble to adapt to new, high-tech killing tools, and twenty-first-century ways of war.

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.

It's been five years since a cosmic incident known as The Ring of Fire transported the modern-day town of Grantville, West Virginia, through time and space to 17th-century Europe. The course of world history has been forever altered. And Mother Russia is no exception. Inspired by the American up-timers' radical notion that all people are created equal, Russian serfs are rebelling. The entire village of Poltz, led by blacksmith Stefan Andreevich, pulls up stakes to make a run for freedom.

Teenager Staci's father has just remarried, and now she finds herself being shunted aside by her new stepmother. Shunted all the way to the run-down and dying Maine town of Silence, in fact, and the custody of her alcoholic mother. It gets worse. Silence seems to be stuck in the proverbial stone age. There's no cell phone service except at the very top of a bluff outside of town, no internet except dial-up, and not one familiar franchise or business.

A principios del siglo XIX, las hazañas del Rey Cuervo, el más grande de todos los magos de la Edad Media, perviven en la memoria y la leyenda, pero la práctica de la magia ha sido completamente olvidada en Inglaterra. Hasta el día en que el esquivo señor Norrell, de Hurtfew Abbey, logra que las piedras de la catedral de York hablen.

Ten years have passed since Admiral Kolhammer's 21st-century battlefleet was dragged into a wormhole and thrown across oceans of time, emerging with disastrous consequences and shattering the history of the Second World War.

2080: At a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers, and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one last-ditch experiment. Their goal: to make a tiny alteration to the past, averting a global catastrophe while at the same time leaving recorded history intact. To make the experiment work, they just need one last recruit: an ageing schoolteacher whose late mother was the foremost expert on the mathematics of paradox. 2028: A young woman goes into surgery for routine brain surgery.

Outraged when the US Navy seizes three Confederates aboard an English sailing ship, Britain retaliates by entering the fray in support of the Rebels - and suddenly, it's a whole new war. Once again, cotton is king as the North's blockade crumbles before the might of the Royal Navy. While Lincoln confronts the monumental challenge of vanquishing mighty Britannia, the Redcoats revive their 1812 penchant for burning down American cities, and Union troops see Canada as ripe for the picking.

Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds on to its desperate alliance with the United States' worst enemy while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove's compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last.

A vacationing Harold Smith finds himself in the middle of a war zone when World War II planes bomb London and Nazi-attired skinheads goose-step through the streets. To complete the weird déjà vu, the guy responsible is a raging Nazi, part of a secret brotherhood with a high-tech agenda for recapturing the dream of a certain evil visionary. But this rogue Nazi devised a new blueprint for world domination that sets him on a path of violence in pursuit of the glorious dream.

US Marine Colonel Robert Buckner, passed over for a coveted command, takes a post working for Vice Admiral Falkner on his way to retirement. As the world is lurching towards World War Ill, he finds his way towards a panoramic view of the unfolding crisis with a pivotal role to play. War breaks out across the globe, but the pin falls in the far north, where soldiers and civilians alike must battle not just the enemy, but the unforgiving elements. With arsenals of high-tech weapons loosed in both directions, the ultimate reward may not be victory, but survival.

Berlin, 1964. The Greater German Reich stretches from the Rhine to the Urals and keeps an uneasy peace with its nuclear rival, the United States. As the Fatherland prepares for a grand celebration honoring Adolf Hitler's 75th birthday and anticipates a conciliatory visit from US president Joseph Kennedy and ambassador Charles Lindbergh, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb.

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.

Apollo 32, commanded by career astronaut Vivian Carter, docks at NASA's Columbia Station in lunar orbit en route to its main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. In an unplanned and desperate move, Vivian spacewalks through hard vacuum back to her Lunar Module and crew, and escapes right before the station falls into Soviet hands.

The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. A devastating palace fire has killed the Eighteenth Dynasty’s royal family—with the exception of Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen, Nefertiti. The girl’s deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. But this changes when she is taken under the wing of the Pharoah’s aunt, then brought to the temple of Hathor, where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen.

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.

It's been said that musicians live for the next new sound. Well, the musicians of Europe were presented with the biggest new sound ever when the Ring of Fire brought the future back to 1631. What will the court musicians think when they hear Bach, Stravinsky, and the Beatles? What will the street and tavern musicians think when faced with Johnny Cash, Metallica, and Nirvana? Things don't go smoothly for Marla Linder and her friends.

In Taylor Anderson's acclaimed Destroyermen series, a parallel universe adds an extraordinary layer to the drama of World War II. Now, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy, the crew of the USS Walker, and their allies battle an ever-growing host of enemies across the globe in a desperate battle for freedom.

In the real world, Reinhard Heydrich, the number-two man in the SS and an architect of the Holocaust, was assassinated in Czechoslovakia in May 1942. In The Man with the Iron Heart, Heydrich survives that fated assassination attempt, only to hatch an insurgency as insidious as anything conceived by Osama bin Laden.