Alternate Fiction

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.

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.

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....

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.

Was wäre, wenn die Achsenmächte den Zweiten Weltkrieg gewonnen hätten? Und sich Hitler mit Japan die USA geteilt hätte? Die Grenze durch die Rocky Mountains verliefe, wo es neutrale Pufferstaaten gäbe? Und dort ein "Orakel vom Berge"? Vor dieser Unwirklichkeit flüchten die Menschen in ein Buch über die "Heuschrecken", in der die Welt so dargestellt wird, wie sie eher unserer Wirklichkeit gleicht - aber nur fast, oder ist es wirklich ganz anders herum?

Velma Frye is many things. A pilot, a former bootlegger, a well-seasoned traveler, a jazz pianist…and a wielder of celestial magic. She’s also a member of the mystical Rhodes family as well as an investigator for arcane oddities for a magic rights organization, dealing with both simple and complicated cases. And when a pocket watch instigates a magical brawl after one of her flight shows, things become very complicated.

Aristos Petrakos has never been one to take anything too seriously, even his immortal position as a protector of humankind. But having recently been dealt the power of a demi-god, granting him control over life and death, his naturally easygoing manner has taken a blow. One that may just prove a knockout punch, when the only woman who ever fully claimed his heart reaches out from beyond the grave. Ari attempts to ignore her messages, but his long-dead lover, Juliana Tiades, has other plans.

After foiling a German plot to devastate America's coastal cities from Boston to Galveston, crack Black Chamber agent Luz O'Malley and budding technical genius Ciara Whelan go to California to recuperate. But their well-deserved rest is cut short by the discovery of a diabolical new weapon that could give the German Imperial Navy command of the North Sea. Luz and Ciara must go deep undercover and travel across a world at war, and live under false identities in Berlin itself to ferret out the project's secrets.

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 Actual Star takes listeners on a journey over thousands of years and six continents—collapsing three separate timelines into one cave in the Belizean jungle. An epic saga of three reincarnated souls, this novel demonstrates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, love and hate. The book jumps forward and backward in time among a pair of twins who ruled a Maya kingdom, a young American on a trip of self-discovery, and two dangerous charismatics in a conflict that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.

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.

In this novel of alternative history from best-selling author Harry Turtledove, the Spanish Armada has conquered England, King Phillip holds the English throne, and Elizabeth I languishes as a prisoner in the Tower of London. Meanwhile, in London, a mysterious stranger approaches young playwright William Shakespeare with an offer that could change the course of history.

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.

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.

This world is trying to kill Lily Proctor. Her life-threatening allergies keep her from enjoying experiences that others in her hometown of Salem take for granted, which is why she is determined to enjoy her first high school party with her best friend and longtime crush, Tristan. But after a humiliating incident in front of half her graduating class, Lily wishes she could just disappear. Suddenly, Lily is in a different Salem - one overrun with horrifying creatures and ruled by powerful women called Crucibles.

After a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI Agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is suddenly unrecognizable, as the United States faces its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned government installation in the Nevada desert. Despite the government's best intentions, as the military pulls out of "Rescue City", the residents are increasingly left to their own devices, and tribal gang warfare fuses with democracy.

November 1288. Bereft of a king or rightful heir, England hurtles towards civil war for the second time in a generation. When David, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Lili, travel to London to attend the wedding of William de Bohun and Princess Joan, they have no intention of involving themselves in local politics. But as infighting leads to murder, David and Lili find themselves at the center of a far-reaching conspiracy.

Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games. Expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travelers walk between parallel universes. The year is 2020. It's 17 years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world.