Excluding long multi-volume series, I’d like to get some recommendations some counterfactual history novels.
I’m especially (though not exclusively) in more recent stuff interested; trying to imagine what things would be like now if Rome had not fallen seems too much of a stretch to me.
Syntax garbled in OP is. Not in novels, hope I.
You mean alternate histories?
The obvious is Harry Turtledove’s How Few Remain/Great War/American Empire series, which tracks the history of North America starting a few years after the US Civil War (which the Confederates won) up until, so far, the 40s.
Lots of them out there. A few of my faves:
The Probability Broach &** The Nagasaki Vector** - L. Neil Smith
The Two Georges - Harry Turtledove & Richard Dreyfuss
The Peshawar Lancers - S. M. Sterling
Sorry, I missed this part.
Resurrection Day by Brendan Dubois (sp?) - set about ten years after the Cuban missile crisis ended up with a minor nuclear war.
Fatherland by Robert Harris - a mystery set in the early 1960’s in a Germany where the Nazis won the war.
Yes, I read a book in the Turtledove series; was okay, but one was enough to get the idea.
Arrowdreams, but you have to be Canadian.
Fatherland was good. It was a murder mystery set in Germany after the Nazis won WWII (or fought to a stalemate, I don’t remember which).
I’d also recommend Red Army by Ralph Peters. WWIII from the Soviet point of view. An entertaining if somewhat depressing read.
Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka wrote two novels which aren’t really alternate histories per se but still quite interesting. The first was Warday which was about a short nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. Whitley and James are characters in the novel and they tour the country surveying the aftereffects. After that they wrote Nature’s End which was along the same lines but with Nature doing us in rather than nukes. I didn’t think it was quite as good but they were both entertaining.
The Man In The High Castle, by Phillip K Dick, is an excellent place to start. One of the most influential alternate history novels, it’s set in a world in which the Axis forces have won WW2, the Germans control Europe and Africa and the Japanese control the west coast of America. But all is not as it seems, since people keep getting “the time is out of joint” flashes, and one of the characters sets out in search of the eponymous Man In The High Castle, who has seemingly written an alternate history novel in which history has turned out “correctly”. Does your head in, but unbeatable for the sheer weight of ideas.
Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Lion’s Blood by Steve Barnes.
Turtledove’s Agent of Byzantium -
Catholicism & Orthodoxy never split, the Roman-Byzantine Empire survives into the 1300s, the Arab peoples are loyal Christians- having been converted in the 600s by St. Mahomet (who coined “There is One Allah and Jesus is His Son”),
and the R-B Empire is only rivaled by the Manichean Persian Empire. An agent of RBE discovers brandy, gunpowder & the love of a female MPE agent.
Reading this as we speak, based on a recommendation from the last time we did an alternative history thread. I’m enjoying the hell out of it, and have recommended it to at least a half dozen other people already.
Bought it based on the last thread…just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Good to see I’m not the only one who takes reccomendations from the group. 
Turtledove’s Guns of the South is a stand-alone AH book.
Another example (although not true AH) is S.M. Stirling’s Conquistador, where the action goes back and forth between “our” world (albeit in 2009) and an AH world.
Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes posits a world where Africans enslaved the Europeans. There is a follow-up novel (Zulu Heart), but the first book also stands alone.
Zev Steinhardt
For a somewhat humorous take on a counterfactual ancient Rome, there’s S.P. Somtow’s The Aquiliad.
Not a novel, true, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Virtual History: Alternatives and Contrafactuals, edited by Niall Ferguson.
That’s what got the Jones in me.
Thanks all; Years of Rice and Salt, The Man in the High Castle and Red Army will be arriving in 3-5 days. Any more suggestions welcome.
The Moscow Option, by David Downing about a slightly different WWII. Among other things,
The Japanese, after winning the Battle of Midway, bombs Hollywood and one of their victims is the only print of Casablanca !
Let us know how you get on. You could also try The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling - set in an alternate Victorian England in which Babbage’s Engine was built, and where society depends on mechanical computers. Extremely well researched, very well written, and a good deal less gimmicky than it sounds. Very influential in the “steam-punk” sub-genre of SF.
Do not under any circumstances, however, read Harry Harrison’s Stars And Stripes trilogy, again set in an alternate 19th century, this one where the Union and Confederate states patch up their differences to wage war on Perfidious Albion. The premise is OK, but the writing and characterisation are appalling.