The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
They’re short stories but there’s a heckuva lot of them and they’re all pretty good in their own ways.
That’s how it starts out, but then about 100 pages in it turns into something far stupider and more annoying. I recommend strongly against starting it.
For a really unusual alternate history, there’s Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters, which details a voyage through the solar system in a world where Aristotle’s physics are accurate.
Another interesting one I haven’t seen mentioned yet is Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, which operates on the premise that the Black Death in Europe was several times as bad, wiping out 95 percent of the population. It has a restrained fantasy premise in that the book’s main characters are serially reincarnated across a span of several hundred years.
Hey,now there’s a good suggestion!I haven’t read the book myself,but I own another book from the Mammoth Book series(about Ancient Rome),and I can tell everyone else here that they’re really quite good books;I imagine this one is at least as good,if not better.Gyrate,does that book include sections from any of the books we’ve discusssed here?
Psst. See post 32.
One of the first American Civil War alternative histories, Ward Moore’s 1953 novel Bring the Jubilee, has an interesting approach. It begins in 1940, I believe, as a time-traveling historian - from a timeline where the Confederacy won the war - visits Gettysburg in July 1863 to study the battle that played so key a role in the Southern victory. To his horror, he inadvertently changes the outcome of the battle, resulting in the timeline that the reader recognizes as our own, with the Union winning the battle and, in time, the war.
I’m pretty sure they are all self-contained short stories rather than novel sections, although some of them are well-known. I’ve found a list of the stories included:
James Morrow – THE RAFT OF THE TITANIC
Ken MacLeod – SIDEWINDERS
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman – THE WANDERING CHRISTIAN
Suzette Hayden Elgin – HUSH MY MOUTH
Harry Harrison & Tom Shippey – A LETTER FROM THE POPE
Esther Friesner – SUCH A DEAL
A A Attanasio – INK FROM THE NEW MOON
Pat Cadigan – DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION
Fritz Leiber – CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN
Paul McAuley – A VERY BRITISH HISTORY
Rudy Rucker – THE IMITATION GAME
Keith Roberts – WEINACHTSABEND
Kim Stanley Robinson – THE LUCKY STRIKE
Marc Laidlaw – HIS POWDER’D WIG, THIS CROWN OF THORNES
Judith Tarr – RONCESVALLES
Ian R MacLeod – THE ENGLISH MUTINY
Chris Roberson – O ONE
Harry Turtledove – ISLANDS IN THE SEA
George Zebrowski – LENIN IN ODESSA
Pierre Gévart – THE EINSTEIN GUN
Robert Silverberg – TALES FROM THE VENIA WOODS
Gregory Benford – MANASSAS AGAIN
Pamela Sargent – THE SLEEPING SERPENT
Frederik Pohl – WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS
Stephen Baxter – DARWIN ANATHEMA
It’s particularly interesting reading them all in one book; you get your mind around the particular alternate world of one story and then have to completely reset it for the next one.
I remember The Proteus Operation by James P Hogan being a fun read though it’s a little boys own adventure. It’s alternate WW2 story. It does feature time travel as the mechanism of creating an alternate history though.
I also liked Island in the Sea of Time by SM Stirling. That is about a 20th Century Nantucket finding itself relocated into the Iron age. It’s a fairly silly premise on the face of it but I do like what if scenarios about what you could do with modern knowledge if you found yourself in the distant past. It’s actually connected to Stirling’s Dies the Fire series though it’s a series of 3 books that proceeded it.
And obtainable from Baen’s webpage for free.
Interesting to see these two posts. I really enjoyed *Island in the Sea of Time *(and the sequels although I know some people hate them!) which is why I read 1632. I was looking for more fascinating culture clashes between modern and ancient world view plus struggle to maintain/develop a high-tech civilisation. Trouble was *1632 *sucked :eek: As **Saltire **says:
The whole plotline seemed ridiulous to me with with the good American democrats showing their superiority to the evil or foolish locals. The characterisations were hardly even two dimensional and the interactions between the 20th century and 17th century people inane.
I’ve downloaded the next in the series from Baen (as **Nava **says, they are free) but I haven’t brought myself to read it. My question is does it get better?
William Forstchen collaborated * on a couple of alternate history series that are quite good. The Gettysburg trilogy (Gettysburg, Grant Comes East and Never Call Retreat) sets up the South winning at Gettysburg and then the aftermath. Pearl Harbor and Days of Infamy show what happens if the Japanese decided to invade Pearl Harbor not just attack it. Both series fit each criteria that the OP asks for and are very well written.
Forstchen also wrote a series that I loved called The Lost Regiment. Its about a Civil War unit (based on Chamberlain’s 20th Maine) that gets transported to an alien world. It does not fit the OP’s criteria.
* Ok he co-wrote it with Newt Gingrich. I know that will cause an immediate knee jerk reaction from many around here. But they are really well written and not at all political.
The ones I read from Flint were quite good IMHO. He did open the world up for others to write in and those stories are uneven at best. I would have to go back and reread from the beginning because it got very complicated and I lost track of the plot when I tried to read the later books.
@@MarcusF If you liked Islands in the sea of time it would be worth checking out Stirling’s Dies the fire series. It’s actually the story of the world that Nantucket left behind in the Islands series. In the world that’s left behind things like electricity, gun power and combustion engines no longer work due to some subtle change in the laws of physics. It’s never really explained exactly why really but the point of the books is how modern people might go about learning to survive in a pre-technical age. It’s almost the opposite of Islands in that the people have to adapt to not having technology and learning mediaeval ways of doing things as opposed to having technology but being in a primitive world.
There is apparently a TV show coming next season with a similar premise.
Thanks, I’ve read - and enjoyed - them 
I didn’t mention them as they stretch AH a long way from what I’d guess the OP is looking for. They are an alternative history in that the course of events since the Change in March 1998 is VERY different but it is effectively a different universe with the laws of physics different. Good stuff but not classic AH.
The first three Emberverse books are a pretty straight look at the impact of the Change and the loss of all advanced technology but the next five - set twenty plus years after the Change - start digging into what and why the Change happened - not just putting it down to Alien Space Bats. I was much less keen of these to start with but they have grown on me. I just wish Steve Stirling would bring them to a conclusion! There were going to be four, then five, then six, and now seven in the series…
Maybe when finishes them he can do another book in the Pesharwar Lancers universe - my personal favourite of Steve’s books.
Yep they do stretch the AH part of the OP quite a bit.
I actually kind of stalled on that series in the end. I did get into the second series of books but I think I stopped at about book number 2 as it did seem like there was no plan to end it. I had no idea it had gone on to so many more books !! I guess I have some catching up to do if I ever go back to that series.
Malevil doesn’t exactly fit your requirements, but it’s worth checking out. I read it decades ago, and I’ve decided to hunt down a copy and read it again. It’s a story of post-apocalyptic survival in rural France. IIRC the story was plausible, and the character development was very good.
Here’s a succinct Wiki plot summary
Amazon reviews
Take the cannoli - Malevil sounds a lot like a book called Earth Abides, which a wonderful post-apocalyptic novel. If you haven’t read it I’m strongly recommending.
(sorry for the off-topic)
Actually,that seems like quite a good book;I’ve never read a book from the post-apocalyptic novel genre,so that probably would be a good book to introduce me to the genre.Thanks for the suggestion.
That looks good. I’ll check it out, along with the :Mammoth Guide" suggested by gyrate. Thanks for the tip.
Yeah, I was going to order a copy from Amazon for myself, but did a double-take when I noticed the price. FYI it can be had at a more reasonable price from Amazon .
Seconded, also a good way to learn history AND enjoy doing so.
Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War, by Ian Tregillis, form the first 2/3 of an alternate history story that starts out as a sort of “hidden history” but explodes out from there.
It involves a german scientist who more or less creates some limited “superheroes” which the Nazis cultivate and attempt to utilize against Britain and Russia. The Brits try to counter using black magic.
It sounds a bit silly, but it emphatically is not. It’s dark as hell and a sometimes devastating read/listen. Much of the story involves questions of “how far will you go to save your country?” and the toll that takes on everyone involved.
The first book is available, the second comes out in July (but is available on audiobook), and the third is (I hope I hope I hope) on its way.