John Varley writes in a style inspired by Heinlein while leaving out Heinlein’s tendency to preach. Check out his Mars books: Red Thunder, Red Lightning, and Rolling Thunder.
S.M. Stirling writes books that cross over between science fiction and historical fiction. Start out with his solo novels like Conquistador or The Peshawar Lancers. Then if you like him, you can try Lords of Creation - The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings - or the Nantucket trilogy - Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, and On the Oceans of Eternity. Then if you get ambitious you can start the Emberverse series, which is currently up to seven books (and is going to nine).
Great read - I flew through it when I was backpacking through Greece, reading while riding on trains and ferries, lying the beach, and lounging around town; it’s tough to put down, telling a great story, developing characters well, building attachment to the families, and dragging you through Roman history. Good times.
just thought of a fun historical fantasy: Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Night’s Tempest - the premise is an alternative time-line where every word Shakespeare wrote is historically accurate, meaning, for example, that 17th century technology is a bit further along than in our timeline. It’s set in the English Civil War, with Prince Rupert as as the protagonist. Puck and Ariel both put in appearances, since they are real personages.
Actually his actual Histories (THE CONQUERING FAMILY, THE MAGNIFICENT CENTURY, THE THREE EDWARDS and THE LAST PLANTAGENETS) are better. 4 books in the series.
There’s also the “Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Althelstan” Paul Doherty
I also suggest the SPQR mystery series by John Maddox Roberts.
Robert Harris’s Fatherland is an alt-history murder mystery set in 1964 Berlin. The Nazis won World War II, President Joseph Kennedy is coming for a summit meeting with Hitler, and an SS criminal investigator is trying to figure out why several senior Nazi bigwigs have met premature deaths. Very, very good stuff.
Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution posits that Sherlock Holmes got treatment for his cocaine addiction from Dr. Sigmund Freud. A wonderful, fun book.
For a straight historical novel, you can’t beat Gary Jennings’s Aztec, which is an epic, compellingly readable account of the last days of the Aztec Empire, told through the eyes of a peasant who rises to the uppermost levels of society just as the Spaniards show up. I reread this every eight years or so, and it just keeps getting better.
If you liked Fatherland you should check out Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois. A very similar feel - a mystery in an alternate history setting with some government conspiracy thriller thrown in. But the setting here is the United States ten years after the Cuban missile crisis led to a limited nuclear war. Well written.
I keep forgetting to mention Guy Gavriel Kay, who definitely deserves it. Avoid his Fionavir Tapestry, which I didn’t like, but I love the rest of his stuff. It’s all set in a world very similar to ours, with a few minor changes, including some fantasy elements, like some mild magic. Each book is based on an alternate version of a medieval European country. There’s an analogue of Spain, Italy, England, etc. But that description doesn’t do it justice. His stuff is very literary, almost poetic. My personal favorites are Sailing to Sarantium and its sequel, Lord of Emperors, based on the Byzantine Empire.
I think you and I already discussed this on another alt-hist thread. I was actually very disappointed in Resurrection Day. I’ve long been interested in JFK and have read a lot about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I thought the author fell well short of the mark - cardboard characters and an implausible plot. Fatherland is, IMHO, far superior (although of course it’s comparing apples and oranges).
I’ve really gotten into Bernard Cornwell’s books–especially the series beginning with the Last Kingdom (10th century England) and the Grail Quest series (sounds fanatsy-ish, but its not) (100 years war). Angincourt is also very good, and its being made into a movie next year. If they stay true to the book, it will be awesome.
I recommend longtime YA fantasy writer Dianna Wynne Jones. Standouts are Howl’s Moving Castle (the movie was loosely based on her novel), and its sequel, Castle in the Air; the Chrestomanci series; and standalones Dogsbody and Deep Secret. I also recommend Barry Hugart’s Bridge of Birds: A Novel of Ancient China that never was. I read a fair amount of fantasy in my teens and a lot of it was mediocre and stale (it was easy to avoid from the really awful stuff) but these works are fresh and often humorous and are still fun to reread.
And extremely light-hearted. Very humorous. Very worth reading. And if you read Doomsday Book (time travel to the plague in an English town, while a simultaneous plague takes place where she came from) first, you’ll be in desperate need of light-hearted. (As I suspect Willis was after she wrote it.)
