Alt History Nazis invade the United States.

[Blake]

The Moon is Down
John Steinbeck.

[Little_Nemo]

The Divide by William Overgard is a good novel about a United States that was conquered by Germany and Japan.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

The Ultimate Solution is an 1973 alternate history by Eric Norden.

Some of the links on that page go to other books on the theme we haven’t mentioned.

[villa]

@JoelUpchurch

If you are discussing alt.history, then there are a couple of changes needed to make a Nazi invasion of Britain more likely to succeed. The first is that the British didn’t invent RADAR and the 2nd is that Winston Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister.

This whole commonplace idea that a fat, drunken, racist slob was personally responsible for preventing Britain falling to the Nazis is insane.

[Lumpy]

@villa

This whole commonplace idea that a fat, drunken, racist slob was personally responsible for preventing Britain falling to the Nazis is insane.

Someone other than Churchill might have accepted a cease fire/truce; Churchill never would have. Churchill, a mule-headed stubborn die-hard British imperialist, had the good fortune to be Prime Minister when that was exactly what was needed.

[villa]

@Lumpy

Someone other than Churchill might have accepted a cease fire/truce; Churchill never would have. Churchill, a mule-headed stubborn die-hard British imperialist, had the good fortune to be Prime Minister when that was exactly what was needed.

Sorry for continuing the side track, but while it is true much of the aristocracy would have happily sold out to Hitler, and Churchill wouldn’t, nor would many other political figures. A country led by Bevan, Bevin or Atlee wouldn’t have bent the knee to Hitler either. And the left had been fighting fascism back when Churchill didn’t even know the word existed.

[BrainGlutton]

@astorian

Realistically, the Nazis had almost no hope of conquering England, and none at all of conquering the United States.

Unless they were Jetpack Nazis!

See also Ghostapo.

[kath94]

Fatherland by Robert Harris.

linky to Wikipedia article

[kidchameleon]

@kath94

Fatherland by Robert Harris.

linky to Wikipedia article

That was a good book.

I started The Plot Against America but it was dragging a bit, so I’m not sure if the US does get Nazified or just has a close brush with it.

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Blake

The Moon is Down
John Steinbeck.

That wasn’t set in the U.S. The invaders (never specifically identified as Nazis) seize a small town in an unspecified Northern European country.

[twickster]

@Capitaine_Zombie

2000’s elections.

Capitaine Zombie, you’re still fairly new here, so you may not be aware – we prefer that people not slip political commentary into Cafe Society threads. Please don’t do this again.

Thanks,

twickster, Cafe Society moderator

[BrainGlutton]

There’s Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, but none of the countries Feric Jagger and the Helder fight clearly represent the U.S.

[DrFidelius]

Anyone else remember It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis?

It Can't Happen Here

Home-grown Fascist takeover of the US, from the mid-1930s.

[Capitaine_Zombie]

@twickster

Capitaine Zombie, you’re still fairly new here, so you may not be aware – we prefer that people not slip political commentary into Cafe Society threads. Please don’t do this again.

Thanks,

twickster, Cafe Society moderator

Ok, was just going for the laughs here, not really trying to make a political point.

Noted.

[Little_Nemo]

@DrFidelius

Anyone else remember It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis?
It Can't Happen Here - Wikipedia

Home-grown Fascist takeover of the US, from the mid-1930s.

On that you’ve also got K by Daniel Easterman (aka Denis MacEoin).

[Bridget_Burke]

Stephen Fry’s Making History is about a time-traveler’s plan to prevent Hitler’s birth. The result is not the alternate history one might expect.

(Yes, that’s British Actor Stephen Fry.)

[Ranchoth]

Turtledove’s In The Presence of Mine Enemies—I forget though if the US is “conquered” or just “defeated, with a puppet/sympathizer government installed.” (I haven’t read the book myself, yet)

John Barnes’ Finity features an Axis-dominated Earth. Not too great of a novel, in many ways, though.

(I loved Kornbluth’s Two Dooms, though. If you ever get the chance, pick it up—along with the other stories in his collection.)

[BrainGlutton]

@Ranchoth

Turtledove’s In The Presence of Mine Enemies—I forget though if the US is “conquered” or just “defeated, with a puppet/sympathizer government installed.” (I haven’t read the book myself, yet)

From an interesting review:

Oswald Spengler, to take my favorite macrohistorian, was often wrong, but about the Nazis he was mostly right. He understood that the movement was in many ways simply incompetent. He saw them as nothing more than an incident in the era of Western modernity, an era which he expected to last through the 21st century. The end of the story for the modern world might, he thought, be a new Roman Empire. If it materialized, the sun would set on the West in a kind of political and spiritual peace. The alternative, as he saw it, was mere collapse and barbarian chaos. In either case, he had a lively sense in the 1930s that the end of history was still many generations away, and that the Nazis were dangerously deluded about their own importance.

That, really, is the problem with most stories based on unbroken Nazi success. The premise takes the Nazis at their word about the importance of the movement, and credits them with the ability to make a peaceful desert of a world that should still have several generations of tumult remaining to it. This is anachronistic both forward and backward. It is unreasonable to expect to see Spengler’s imperium mundi in any timeline much before the 22nd century. It is equally unreasonable to see the mesmerizing power that political ideology held in the 1920s and '30s transposed to the early 21st century. Even Philip Dick, in The Man in the High Castle, probably stretched a point when he put a world of fanatical Nazis in the 1960s. Certainly we know that, long before the Communist regime collapsed, there were few real Marxists in the Soviet Union.

Popular uprisings rarely overthrow ideologies; rather, even the secret police eventually lose interest.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@kath94

Fatherland by Robert Harris…

Yes, a really great book; probably the best WW2 alt-hist novel ever, I’d say. But the U.S. isn’t invaded - in fact, the Cold War of Harris’s alternative 1964 is between Nazi Germany and the U.S., with the Soviet Union barely hanging on through guerilla warfare, and all of Western Europe under pro-Nazi puppet regimes.

I’ll also endorse Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which might almost be set in the same universe as Fatherland.

Hitler Victorious, edited by Gregory Benford, is an uneven but generally interesting collection of short stories about the Nazis winning WW2.

[control-z]

Apparently Fatherland was made into a movie as well, but Amazon only has VHS: http://www.amazon.com/Fatherland-VHS-Rutger-Hauer/dp/B00000EZTR/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1288105392&sr=1-2