Alternate Fiction

MacKinlay Kantor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and master storyteller, shows us how the South could have won the Civil War, how two small shifts in history (as we know it) in the summer of 1863 could have turned the tide for the Confederacy. What would have happened: to the Union, to Abraham Lincoln, to the people of the North and South, to the world?

Rudi Mackenzie has won the battle that expelled the enemy from the new High Kingdom of Montival. Now he must free the people who live in the state once known as Idaho from occupation by the legions of the Church Universal and Triumphant and pursue them to their lair over the mountains. There he will finally confront the forces behind the Church - the Powers of the Void.

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 a world where an anti-aging cure is available worldwide, immortality comes with its own unique problems. John Farrell is about to get "The Cure". Old age can never kill him now. The only problem is, everything else still can.

Deftly blending such genres as mystery, science fiction, and classic literature, Jasper Fforde’s gleefully irreverent New York Times best-selling Thursday Next novels defy categorization. In this sixth installment, the threat of all-out Genre war looms over BookWorld. But with the real Thursday Next retired in the real world, the Council of Genres has no other choice than to tap the fictional Thursday to save the day. Her mission as emissary is to prevent the brewing war—but her task is made more difficult by a hidden foe manipulating events.

The battle between democracy and tyranny is joined, and the American Revolution has begun over a century ahead of schedule. A cosmic accident has shifted a modern West Virginia town back through time and space to land it and its 20th century technology in Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. History must take a new course as American freedom and democracy battle against the squabbling despots of 17th century Europe.

During a perfect spring evening on Nantucket, a violent storm erupts and a dome of crawling, colored fire blankets the island. When the howling winds subside and the night skies clear, the stars appear to have shifted. The mainland has become a wilderness of unbroken forest, where tools of bronze and stone litter the beaches, and primitive natives scatter in terror.

Stuck in an alternate universe during World War II, Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy of the U.S.S. Walker has found an unlikely but invaluable ally in Commodore Jenks of the New Britain Imperial Navy. And now they are united in their desire to hunt down the traitor who abducted two women both men would die to protect: Reddy's love, nurse Sandra Tucker, and young Princess Rebecca of the New British Empire. But first they have a new battle to win. However, this battle will not be fought with broadsides and broadswords, but with cunning and intrigue.

Camford, 1920. Gilded and glittering, England's secret magical academy is no place for Clover, a commoner with neither connections nor magical blood. She tells herself she has fought her way there only to find a cure for her brother Matthew, one of the few survivors of a faerie attack on the battlefields of WWI which left the doors to faerie country sealed, the study of its magic banned, and its victims cursed.

Imagine a London where magic is real...real, but feared. This is Eliza Braxton's London, and she has always accepted her place in it gladly. As one of the Riftborn, her magic has relegated her to the servant class, where she dutifully serves as the lady's maid in one of the most powerful households in the country. There, she uses her remarkable powers of persuasion to keep Elder Hallewell's rebellious daughter in the path to an arranged match of power and prosperity. Eliza has never questioned her loyalty...until now.

In December of 1282, English soldiers ambushed and murdered Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales. His death marked the end of Wales as an independent nation and the beginning of over seven hundred years under the English boot. < Footsteps in Time is the story of what might have happened had Llywelyn lived. And what happens to the two teenagers who save him.

The Baltic War which began in the novel 1633 is still raging, and the time-lost Americans of Grantville - the West Virginia town hurled back into the seventeenth century by a mysterious cosmic accident - are caught in the middle of it. Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden and Emperor of the United States of Europe, prepares a counter-attack on the combined forces of France, Spain, England, and Denmark - former enemies which have allied in the League of Ostend to destroy the American threat to their power.

Armed with lancers, breech-loading rifles, steamships, and galleys, General Belisarius, accompanied by his own ally from the future, ventures into the Malwa Empire, a sixth-century kingdom ruled by Link, a horrifying and evil entity from the future.

Cady McCall is ready to be rich and famous. She has sacrificed everything, putting her work ahead of family and friends. Now, with breakout success and huge, insane wealth so close she can taste it, her life is blown apart by Deputy Marshal John "Titanic" Smith, the man who rescues her from two muggers only to carry her off into history. Lost on the seas of time, Smith is desperate to get home to his family in 1876, and now Cady is lost along with him.

In the mid-1870s, a violent spray of comets hits Earth, decimating cities, erasing shorelines, and changing the world's climate forever. And just as Earth's temperature dropped, so was civilization frozen in time. Instead of advancing technologically, humanity had to piece itself back together.... In the 21st century, boats still run on steam, messages arrive by telegraph, and the British Empire, with its capital now in Delhi, controls much of the world.

Everyone with an interest in America's greatest battle comes up against its controversies. What if J. E. B. Stuart had arrived on the battlefield before the second day? What if Ewell had pressed hard on the heels of the Union rout on the first day? What if Pickett's charge had been stronger and better led? What if the Army of the Potomac had been commanded by a more aggressive counter attacker than Meade?

The new United States in central Germany launches a one-plane Doolittle Raid on Paris, France. The target: their arch-enemy, Cardinal Richelieu. Meanwhile, an ambassador from the Mughal Empire of northern India is being held captive in Austria by the Habsburg dynasty. Mike Stearns decides to send a mercenary company to rescue him, led by two 17th-century mercenary officers: an Englishman and a Irishman, who seem to spend as much time fighting each other as they do the enemy.

Disorder and chaos ravage London when thousands are contaminated by the accidental discharge of an experimental bio-weapon. The disease robs its hosts of rational thought, giving them a singular desire - find more living flesh to infect. Cut off from information and senior leadership, one squadron of soldiers under the command of their senior NCO, Sergeant Major Johnson, finds itself forced to operate independently until the remnants of military and government command re-establish themselves safely at sea in the English Channel.

In the early 20th century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: They are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan. Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo wranglers from around the globe.

Princess Orlaith, heir to Rudi Mackenzie, Artos the First, High King of Montival, now wields the Sword of the Lady - and faces a new enemy. Fortunately, she also has a new ally in Reiko, Empress of Japan. To combat their mutual foe, Orlaith and Reiko embark on a quest to find the fabled Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword, one of the three great treasures of the Japanese Imperial House - but they'll face great peril along the way.