Yes, Agent of Bzantium has some great stories in it. Turtledove also wrote a short story called Islands in the Sea about an incident in which a Bulgar chieftain chooses a religion is altered by the fact that Constantinople fell earlier than occurred in our universe
The grandfather of all alt-hist Byzantine stories is surely L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall. Despite being written in 1939 it has a surprisingly (to me, at least) modern tone to it. Highly recommended!
S.M. Stirling also wrote two alt-history novels that were a shoutout to Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. The premise is that millions of years ago unknown aliens terraformed Venus and Mars to be habitable and transplanted Earth life there including primitive and neolithic humans. So we have a Venus inhabited by dinosaurs, cave men and an early Bronze Age civilization; and a Mars inhabited by humans living in a biotech civilization that’s older than the cave paintings of Altamira.
The framing story certainly counts as alt-history.
Yes- the very very best is Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp.
Almost as good, but a bit grittier and from the Woman’s point of view is Household Gods- but you could say that is more Isekai (is a subgenre of fantasy in which a character is suddenly transported from their world into a new or unfamiliar one).
SS-GB by Len Deighton.
1942 by Robert Conroy.
Can we count the Lord Darcy Mysteries-by Randall Garrett ? I mean it is an alt-hist, and the very best fantasy mystery series of all time.
Is that the story in which a woman goes back in time after making a whimsical offering to two antique figures of gods?
Yep. It is a great read in any case.
There’s a whole genre based on “alt-history if magic was real”.
I just read Stirling’s Black Chamber, which is a more straightforward alt-hist - Taft dies in office a few months before the 1916 election, leading to TR becoming the next President. And he has ideas, which impact the conduct of WWI
Not IMHO- it is more of a spy fantasy , with lots of sex, etc. Stirling also mixed up WW2 and the Great War, for some reason Imperial Germany has nazis- or at least nazi stereotypes. Read some of the critical reviews.
The only reason why the USA joined that war is that Wilson, that racist asshole, was a committed anglophile. Wilson dragged the USA kicking and screaming into a war we had no business being in.
A spy fantasy can be part of an alternate history.
The alternations caused by a point of divergence can result in cultural changes such as the influence of proto-fascist 19th century writers on Germany happening earlier than it did in our history.
You are, of course, free to believe that any alternate history breaks plausibility.
By no means have I ever said that, but generally any good alt-hist will have one break and what follows. Taft dying and Teddy taking over will not cause Imperial Germany to become fascist at the same time.
Since I’ve read the book recently, I remember Stirling’s implied justification - the results of TR’s second presidency led to a different pattern of deaths in the alternate WWI, with Falkenhayn dying early, certain battles breaking somewhat differently, and Ludendorff and Nicolai having even more influence than they did in real life. Since Ludendorff was an early Nazi adherent, it’s not completely unreasonable to have him influencing the German empire in a bad way. Likewise the German technical advances are portrayed by Stirling as a response to TR’s very public pushing of military science and technology.
Yes, it is , becuase there are no nazis to be an adherent of. Imperial Germany still thought they could win the Great War, Nazi-ism came out as a result of losing that war, and the versaille treaty. Look, it might be an exciting spy thriller with lots of sex andweapons that never existed, etc, but it is not very good alt-hist.
There are no Nazis in the book - Stirling never uses that word. There are fascists with some similarity to the real-world Nazis - people like Ludendorff, etc. Fascists ideas that were in the air all over the world may have become enormously popular in post-WWI Germany because of the outcome of that war, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t people (all over the world) espousing ideas about racial purity, conquest into lands occupied by inferiors, and all that other garbage.
I’ve heard good things about Pavane by Keith Roberts - about a world where the Reformation was suppressed.
Robert Silverberg wrote a series of shorter pieces about a Rome that never fell (the Roma Eterna series).
On the Roman front there’s also Alan Smale’s Clash of Eagles about the unfallen Roman Empire in conflict with Native Americans
Here’s another- “Back in the USSA”, by Kim Newman. In 1917, the US undergoes a communist revolution led by Eugene Debs, while Russia becomes a constitutional monarchy. A collection of short stories instead of a single narrative, it follows the USSA from creation to collapse, and mixes figures from popular fiction with historical characters as is Kim Newman’s trademark. I believe it’s out of print, which is unfortunate since I enjoyed it quite a bit.
There was that novel Fatherland where the detective has to deal with victorous Nazis.
Did they follow the line of Tsars and say who was on the throne later? Since the monarch was constitutional it could happen.
In Stirling’s book The Peshawar Lancers the line went
Victoria I
Edward Vii
George V
Then the line diverged and it was
Victoria II
Albert I
Elizabeth II
John !!(when the book started)
Charles III, when the book finished
If you thought that series had lots of sex, you should avoid his Shadowspawn trilogy.
Charles Stross has a series where there is travel to two different alternate universes - one in which the Roman Empire fell early, before spreading Christianity throughout Europe, so America is eventually colonized by Germanic people who practice a religion that is a syncretization of Norse pagan and Christian, and one in which the Jacobites allied with the French succeed, but the Hanoverians set up shop in North America, leading to an eventual Cold War between a French Empire that rules Eurasia (including Great Britain) and a British Empire controlling the Americas and Australia