Historical Fiction Science History

The War of Spanish Succession is over, many sailors are out of work, and the thriving American colonies are quickly becoming the place of opportunity. For Sam Bellamy it is the opportunity to become the captain of his own ship.

Welcome to a Victorian England unlike any other you have experienced before. Here, wicked thoughts (both harmless and hate-filled) appear in the air as telltale wisps of Smoke. Young Thomas Argyle, a son of aristocracy, has been sent to an elite boarding school. Here, he will be purged of Wickedness, for the wealthy do not Smoke.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging 60s’ never happened. War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface. The impenetrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters....

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at their family estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative.

Brooklyn native Emily Barton has received many accolades for her fiction, including a grant from the NEA. Here she tells the story of Prudence Winship, a woman living in late 18th-century New York who has a vision of a great bridge spanning the East River. After inheriting a gin distillery from her father, Prue uses her resources to undertake one of America’s greatest public works projects. But many hardships threaten to curtail her efforts, and realizing her dream will not be an easy task.

When Soviet magicians conjured an arcane wall to blockade occupied Berlin, the world was outraged but let it stand for the sake of peace. Now, after 10 years of fighting with spies instead of spells, the CIA has discovered the unthinkable.... The wall is failing. While refugees and soldiers mass along the border, operatives from East and West converge on the most dangerous city in the world to either stop the crisis or take advantage of it.

After years of inconclusive war, the Franco-Spanish Empire is on the verge of collapse. The military is coming apart, the people are starving, the economy is on the brink . . . and yet, as long as the crown keeps tight control of its magicians, all hope of revolution and victory remains faint. The secret police are in control, rebel magicians are hunted down and eliminated before they can pose a threat and, worst of all, the government has found a new way to enhance magical power. The situation seems dire. But with a little help, there may be a chance.

Three-time Hugo Award-winning author Allen Steele now imagines an alternate history rooted in an actual historical possibility: what if the race to space had occurred in the early days of WWII? It's 1941, and Wernher von Braun is ordered by his Fuehrer to abandon the V2 rocket and turn German resources in a daring new direction: construction of a manned orbital spacecraft capable of attacking the U.S. Work on the rocket - called Silbervogel - begins at Peenemunde. Though it is top secret, British intelligence discovers the plan, and brings word to Franklin Roosevelt.

The Dutch are trying to free themselves from the Spanish yolk, and the dynamic and charismatic revolutionary, William of Orange, is risking life and limb for the nation he so desperately loves. But when the Spanish monarch offers glory, titles, and twenty thousand crowns for the man who can silence William, the battle for the Netherlands becomes an assassin's game.

In Edward Whittemore’s masterful and surreal alternate history, a man’s search for answers about his vanished parents propels him on an odyssey from the present into the past, from a bar in the Bronx to Tokyo and Shanghai during the Second World War. Quin, born in China and raised in the Bronx, is orphaned in the closing days of the Second World War when his parents go missing and are presumed dead in Shanghai.

When her father descends into madness, Verity Pruitt and her little sister Lilah find themselves uprooted from New York, on an orphan train to rural Arkansas. In Wheeler, Lilah is quickly adopted by the town’s beloved schoolteacher - but Verity is not. Willing to do anything to stay close, she pawns herself off as a farmhand, but even charming farm boy Abel Atchley can’t completely distract her from the sense that something is not quite right in this little town.

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the '"swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

During one of the earliest blockade actions of the Civil War, Sergeant Alexander Philips of the United States Marine Corps witnesses an unspeakable horror. With no explanation, he finds himself in charge of a group of hotheads and misfits in a strange, unorthodox unit. His new commander is the enigmatic Lieutenant Addison Green, who knows nothing about the military, but a great deal about something else entirely. He comes bearing a collection of weapons geared toward fighting something other than Confederates.

As Davey O'Shea works as a sparker for Nikola Tesla, implementing his wireless electricity technology to the streets of London in 1888, he is also on the lookout as a detective for Scotland Yard during the peak of Jack the Ripper's gruesome spree. Visited by a strange man one night out on the job, Davey is presented with the legendary sword, Excalibur, and upon touching it, learns he is a descendant of King Arthur himself. Now armed with the knowledge of his famed ancestor, Davey joins forces with other descendants of the Round Table to search for King Arthur's true nemesis.

A soldier from a broken future. A war that shaped history. A mission that could destroy time itself. In 2120, the world is trapped under the iron grip of the Douglas Regime, a totalitarian government that rose from the ashes of a war-ravaged past. Jack Murphy, a battle-hardened resistance fighter, is given an impossible mission—travel back to 1863 and alter history before the seeds of the regime are ever planted. His target: General Robert Sinclair, a brilliant Confederate tactician whose wartime victories will set in motion a chain of events leading to a dystopian nightmare. But ...

Nell Martin is moving again, this time to the Winslow Grand Hotel, built in 1878. As Nell is settling in, strange things begin to happen. Doors lock of their own accord, writing appears on bathroom walls - and most horrifying of all - visions of a dead boy permeate her waking life. Thinking it was her mind playing tricks on her, she soon finds the past and the present colliding as she learns horrific details of a murder that happened at the hotel in 1907 involving a girl named Lea.

A sweeping and suspenseful novel of love and war, set in Japan during the final days of World War II, with a shocking historical premise: three atomic bombs were actually delivered to the Pacific—not two—and when one of them falls into the hands of the Japanese, the fate of a couple that has been separated from one another becomes entangled with the fate of this strange new device.

Expert swordsmen Basilio and Alejo have one last mission before they go their separate ways: they must recover their teacher Don Manuel's ancient fighting manual and take it to remote Cataluña in order to have it translated by the famous alchemist Paracelsus. Unbeknownst to them, however, Don Manuel has been murdered, and a host of powerful forces has come looking for the coveted book - everyone from old lovers and lifelong archenemies to the King's assassin, and the Spanish Inquisition.

Miriam was an ambitious business journalist in Boston. Until she was fired - then discovered, to her shock, that her lost family comes from an alternate reality. And although some of them are trying to kill her, she won't stop digging up secrets. Now that she knows she's inherited the family ability to walk between worlds, there's a new culture to explore. Her alternate home seems located around the Middle Ages, making her world-hopping relatives top dogs when it comes to 'importing' guns and other gadgets from modern-day America.

Since the Big Bubble popped in 1929, life in the United States hasn't been the same. Hotshot wizards will tell you nothing's really changed, but then again, hotshot wizards aren't looking for honest work in Enid, Oklahoma. No paying jobs at the mill, because zombies will work for nothing. The diner on Main Street is seeing hard times as well, because a lot fewer folks can afford to fly carpets in from miles away.