Alternate History Fiction

It is Coronation Year, 1953, and a new queen is about to be crowned. The people of London are in a mood to celebrate, none more so than the residents of the Blue Lion hotel. Edie Howard, owner and operator of the floundering Blue Lion, has found the miracle she needs: on Coronation Day, Queen Elizabeth in her gold coach will pass by the hotel’s front door, allowing Edie to charge a fortune for rooms and, barring disaster, save her beloved home from financial ruin. Edie’s luck might just be turning, all thanks to a young queen about her own age.

El 22 de noviembre de 1963 tres disparos resonaron en Dallas. Murió el presidente Kennedy, y el mundo cambió. ¿Qué harías tú si pudieras impedirlo?

In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's Last Year, the technology exists to open doorways into the past - but not our past, not exactly. Each "past" is effectively an alternate world, identical to ours but only up to the date on which we access it. And a given "past" can be reached only once. After a passageway is open, it's the only road to that particular past; once closed, it can't be reopened.

It is 1943, the third summer of the new war between the Confederate States of America and the United States, a war that will turn on the deeds of ordinary soldiers, extraordinary heroes, and a colorful cast of spies, politicians, rebels, and everyday citizens. The CSA president, Jake Featherston, seems to have greatly miscalculated the North's resilience. But as new demonic tools of killing are unleashed, secret wars are unfolding.

It turns out that the same skills that let Mark fix machines work on people, too. The mismanagement at the local Association has left quite a backlog of folks who need a little help. Mark's dad thinks Mark is the man for the job. If that wasn't enough to keep Mark on his toes, there's always his love life to worry about.

1399: Constance of York, Lady Despenser, proves herself more than a mere observer in the devious intrigues of her magnificently dysfunctional family, the House of York. Surrounded by power-hungry men, including her aggressively self-centred husband, Thomas, and ruthless siblings, Edward and Richard, Constance places herself at the heart of two treasonous plots against King Henry IV. Will it be possible for this Plantagenet family to safeguard its own political power by restoring either King Richard II to the throne, or the precarious Mortimer claimant?

On the last day of December 1921, three enigmatic men - Cairo Martyr, a blue-eyed African who controls the Middle East's supply of aphrodisiac mummy dust; O'Sullivan Beare, a former Irish patriot and gunrunner who has made a fortune selling spurious, phallic-shaped Christian artifacts; and Mark Szondi, a dedicated Zionist who wagers only fried fish futures - sit down to a fateful game of poker in the back room of a Jerusalem antiquities shop owned by a 3000-year-old knight errant.

Up-timer Morris Roth and his Grand Army of the Sunrise stand at a crossroads. Military success against the Polish-Lithuanian magnates has all but guaranteed a continued push east into Ruthenian lands. There, Roth hopes to further his Anaconda Project so that tens of thousands of Jews are not slaughtered in what’s to become known as the Chmielnicki Pogrom of 1648.

North America, 2027. Southern California is a developer's dream gone mad: an endless sprawl of condos, freeways, and malls. Jim McPherson, the affluent son of a defense contractor, is a young man lost in a world of fast cars, casual sex, and designer drugs. But his descent in to the shadowy underground of industrial terrorism brings him into a shattering confrontation with his family, his goals, and his ideals.

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons - "Bad Monkeys" for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail’s psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy, or playing a different game altogether.

The Thirty Years' War continues to ravage seventeenth-century Europe, but a new force is gathering power and influence: the Confederated Principalities of Europe, an alliance between Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, and the West Virginians from the twentieth century, led by Mike Stearns, who were hurled centuries into the past by a mysterious cosmic accident.

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.

In these 34 intriguing episodes, leading historian Christopher Andrew rewrites history, considering what might have transpired if pivotal events had turned out differently. By altering a single, plausible fact, he explores alternative futures where the Spanish Armada landed on English soil, Pontius Pilate freed Jesus, the Nazis occupied Britain and many more.

1945: Russian troops have entered Berlin, and are engaged in a violent orgy of robbery, rape, and revenge! Wehrmacht officer Hasso Pemsel, a career soldier on the losing end of the greatest war in history, flees from a sniper's bullet, finding himself hurled into a mysterious, fantastic world of wizards, dragons, and unicorns!

Thomas "the Great Stoner" Stone once performed miraculous surgery upon Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the World’s Greatest Alchemist, using his bare hands, no anesthesia, producing no pain, and leaving no scar. It would have been wonderful if it was real. But Dr. Tom Stone, the face of modern medicine, has been engaging in fake treatments—bringing all modern medicine into question.

Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever - a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma.

In this volume of The Flashman Papers, Flashman, the arch-cad and toady, matches his wits, his talents for deceit and malice, and above all his speed in evasion against the most brilliant European statesman and against the most beauiful and unscrupulous adventuress of the era. From London gaming-halls and English hunting-fields to European dungeons and throne-rooms, he is involved in a desperate succession of escapes, disguises, amours and (when he cannot avoid them) hand-to-hand combats. All the while, the destiny of a continent rests on his broad and failing shoulders.

From "a major new talent" (George R. R. Martin) comes an epic speculative novel of revolution, adventure, and the struggle for free will set in a world that might have been, of mechanical men and alchemical dreams. My name is Jax. That is the name granted to me by my human masters. I am a slave. But I shall be free.

Europe, 1632. It is a time of upheaval and great change. But none so great as when an unexplained temporal and spatial phenomenon known as the Ring of Fire transports the blue collar town of Grantville, West Virginia, smack dab in the middle of the Thirty Years War. When the dust settles, it becomes clear that the town of Grantville isn't going anywhere, and the can-do Americans of the twenty-first century begin altering the course of history forever.

Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate US - an alternate timeline - she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts - a science-fiction masterwork in her world.