For weird AH, you can’t beat Howard Waldrop.
You might like The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
What do y’all think about the Wild Cards series?
In this alternate history, during the Second World War, an extraterrestrial biological device infects a sizable percentage of the planet’s population with an alien virus that transforms a very few of the victims into superheroes known as Aces. The rest of the unfortunates either die in agony or are transformed into monstrous abberations known as Jokers. The series is a shared Universe type of deal with many different writers joining in. George R. R. Martin is the series editor and creator.
I’ve never read the series, but can stuff like that be considered “alternative history?” I mean, to me that sounds just like fantasy.
I wouldn’t classify Guns of the South as alternative history either.
Everything that Harry Turtledove writes. There’s one in particular, I think it’s The Man With The Iron Heart, that is a terrific, IMHO, question about how WWII would have gone if the Nazi’s had fought guerrilla warfare like Vietnam. Apparently there really was a Nazi officer who wanted to incorporate those tactics, but was pooh-poohed by the high command. This is the story of what if he had gotten his way.
Turtledove has a whole series of books on how the North would have changed, politically and socially, if the South had won.
Yes, he’s repetitive. Yes, he’s long-winded. But if you can get through the books and sort of squint back in retrospective, he has some amazing thoughts in there.
“Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” is a fantasy but has a lot of alternate history elements in it. An England where magic and magicians are accepted as real. I love this book. http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Strange-Mr-Norrell-Novel/dp/0765356155/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336573016&sr=1-1
“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” by Michael Chabon also has elements of alternate history., in that it describes a WWII era Jewish refugee settlement in Alaska. http://www.amazon.com/The-Yiddish-Policemens-Union-Novel/dp/0007149832/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336573089&sr=1-1
Actually Reinhard Heydrich, the main character in the book, was assassinated in 1942 in real life.
For a science fiction alternative history, I recommend Stars and Stripes Forever by Harry Harrison. It’s 338 pages, and asks “What if Great Britain attacked both sides in the American Civil War?”
For fantasy alternative history, I recommend Mad Amos, by Alan Dean Foster, which is set (mostly) in the Wild West. What if (among other things) a dragon attacked the people building the transcontinental railroad? (It’s a collection of stand-alone short stories.)
And I agree, the Flashman novels are very good.
I got most of the books in the series from the Science Fiction Book Club as part of one of their “Get 64 books for 10 cents!” membership promotions back in the late 80’s. I eventually did read all of them from that order, and I found it to be the most depressing series of stories I ever read. It featured some of the most repulsively cruel characters I ever ran across. Apparently part of the agreement among the authors in that shared universe is that nothing good is ever allowed to happen to anybody without the character being horrifically punished for it. OTOH, if anything bad happens to a character, that character must also be horrifically punished. The whole series was an exercise in sadism bordering on torture porn.
In those pre-internet days, there wasn’t quick access to reviews and such. I chose the books because SFBC’s very brief descriptions led me to believe that they were going to be a “realistic” examination of what would happen if some people actually got comic book powers IRL. I was expecting something vaguely along the lines of “Watchmen.” Ha ha, the joke was on me, wasn’t it?
As far as alternate history, the timeline in the books was just a thinly disguised version of what happened in the real world. Jokers were used as stand-ins for persecuted minorities was the only real change.
I remember that series. We had the first 4 or 5 books, then stopped because they were getting seriously strange. I would go for the first couple then stop. Shared Universe series can be seriously uneven in quality of read.
What was interesting was the character of the alien who dropped the wild card bomb and caused it all to start. I always had a lot of sympathy for Dr Tachyon, though much of the time I wanted to clue by four him with a brick.
As far as "strange"alternative histories go,that book certainly fits the bill!It sounds interesting,so I guess that’s another book I’ll have to check out.
Definitely. Japan and Nazi Germany have split up the U.S. after beating it in WWII. Then Hitler’s successor dies in the early Sixties, and a power struggle breaks out in Berlin…
As did I. A friend described it as reading like Jane Austen wrote a Harry Potter book. Not quite, but you get the idea. A big but wonderful read. Check out Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu for more short stories in that setting.
YMMV and obviously does, but sorry, I thought Stars and Stripes Forever sucked. Implausible and badly written, IMHO.
Len Deighton’s SS-GB (about the UK under Nazi occupation a year or so after the Germans invade) and Robert Harris’s Fatherland (about a 1964 U.S.-German summit meeting in Berlin, as an SS criminal investigator looks into the suspicious deaths of several senior Nazi officials) are very different from one another, but both are fantastic.
How about Darwinia? It’s premise is very odd (from Wikipedia):
The books deals with some rather unusual circumstances fairly matter-of-factly.
I’ve tried Turtledove a few times, and have found his stuff to be universally horrible. His dialogue is so wooden and artificial that it would make Scooby-Doo villains shudder.
The Flashman series is good, but there are other similar series worthy of mention if you like that sort of thing. The original, and still really good, is the Hornblower series, following Horatio Hornblower through his career in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Then there’s the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian, which is Hornblower rewritten and updated for modern tastes. The Sharpe series is Hornblower on land, and Flashman is Sharpe as an asshole.
Then, of course, Honor Harrington is Hornblower in space, but that’s getting a little far afield for the OP. I’m sure there are innumerable other examples.
I recently read an oldie but goodie, A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! by Harry Harrison.
The plot revolves around a certain Mr. Washington, who is attempting to wipe the stain of his ancestor’s famous treason by building a tunnel to connect the two halves of the most flourishing bits of the British Empire together - the Island of GB and its loyal North American colonies … 
There’s only a single novel and a handful of short stories, but you might like Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy series. Mystery/fantasy, starting with the premise that King Richard the Lionhearted recovered from begin shot while on crusade, came to his senses, and returned to found a solid dynasty in England. Fast forward 700 or 800 years and you have Lord Darcy, a sort-of Sherlock Holmes investigator solving mysteries in a world where technology lags far behind the science of using magic, and a logical but very different geopolitical landscape that often serves as an important element to the plot.
They are difficult to find, but Garrett is a smart writer as well as an egaging one and his work well worth hunting down.
The 1632 series, overseen by Eric Flint, is fun. It tells the story of a small West Virginia mining town, which is inexplicably thrown back in time and finds itself, along with the population, buildings, power plant and coal mine, in the middle of the Germanies during the 30 Years War. They immediately set about changing the local culture as best they can, trying to bend things toward tolerance and democracy.
It’s not the perfect series for alt history fans, but it’s loads of fun.
Really? I thought they were terrible. Implausible to the point of being ridiculous.
Now his alternative Viking/Anglo-Saxon era trilogy The Hammer and the Cross , they were fun.
The author H. Beam Piper, who died in the early 60’s, wrote a series of stories dealing with parallel time lines coexisting.
But there was one short story, my very favorite, titled “He Walked Around the Horses” The Project Gutenberg eBook of He Walked Around the Horses, by H. Beam Piper
Read it, I think you will like it.
In a series of letters the story of a man, Benjamin Bathhurst, is told. It’s based on a real event in our world and tells what happens to the guy when he suddenly finds himself in an alternate timeline, very close to our own. If you know your history, the signature at the end of the last letter is really ironic.
Well,to be honest I couldn’t figure it out.
Why is it ironic?(I thought I knew a lot about history,but evidently I was wrong.)