Published alternate histories

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Literally thousands of alternate history stories and novels have been published. The following are some of the most critically notable and commercially successful examples of these.

Contents 1 By Kingsley Amis 2 By Steven Barnes 3 By John Birmingham 4 By Orson Scott Card 5 By Robert Conroy 6 By Len Deighton 7 By Philip K. Dick 8 By Dougal Dixon 9 By David Drake 10 By Eric Flint 11 By William R. Forstchen 12 By Stephen Fry 13 By Randall Garrett 14 By William Gibson 15 By Robert Harris 16 By Kenneth Hite 17 By Michael Moorcock 18 By Ward Moore 19 By Douglas Niles 20 By Keith Roberts 21 By Kim Stanley Robinson 22 By Philip Roth 23 By Robert Silverberg 24 By L. Neil Smith 25 By Robert N. Sobel 26 By Bruce Sterling 27 By S.M. Stirling 28 By Harry Turtledove

[edit] By Kingsley Amis

• The Alteration (1976). In this world, Martin Luther, rather than beginning the Protestant Reformation, became pope. The novel concerns the attempt to prevent a young boy with a perfect singing voice from being recruited to the Vatican's eunuch choir. There are a number of in-jokes, where famous works of fantasy and science fiction appear, under slightly different titles.

[edit] By Steven Barnes

• The Bilalistan series of novels (Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart) shows an alternate world in which Carthage destroyed Rome, with Europe remaining tribal and an Islamic-dominated Africa colonizing the New World.

[edit] By John Birmingham

• Weapons of Choice: Axis of Time series, which is part alternate history, part military science fiction. Its point of divergence is 1942 when an American-led UN Multinational Force arrives uptime from 2021 via a wormhole that was accidentally generated as a byproduct of a scientific experiment. Of course one could say there is also a downtime point of divergence--the point at which the UN force disappears from its "normal" time. (In other words, within the framing logic of parallel universe science fiction, the fictional experiment creates two new worlds or histories, while presumably leaving unchanged the future of a third world--the one in which the wormhole was never generated.)

[edit] By Orson Scott Card

• Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, in which scientists from the future travel back to the 15th century to prevent the European colonization of the Americas. It also makes a good case that our own time line is the result of a similar alteration from scientists in a now-vanished future who sent a fake vision to persuade Columbus to sail west in the first place, to undo their own history in which Europe was conquered by the Tlaxcalans. It's notable in avoiding the usual time-travel paradoxes in a very clever way.
• Alvin Maker, in which Card imagines North America where people wield magic, or knacks, and the revolution was only partly successful. The second novel in the series, "Red Prophet," is currently being adapted into graphic novel form. The last novel in the series has yet to be published.
  • Seventh Son
  • Red Prophet
  • Prentice Alvin
  • Alvin Journeyman
  • Heartfire
  • The Crystal City
  • Master Alvin

[edit] By Robert Conroy

• 1862 (novel) depicts what might have happened if England had entered the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy due to the RMS Trent incident.
• 1901 (novel) depicts a hypothetical war between Germany and the United States at the start of William McKinley's second term as President.
• 1945 (Conroy novel) depicts what could have happened if the United States had to invade Japan in World War II

[edit] By Len Deighton

• SS-GB by is a detective novel set in 1941 Britain in which the Germans have successfully occupied the country.

[edit] By Philip K. Dick

• The Man in the High Castle set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II.

[edit] By Dougal Dixon

• The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, a book by a geologist and paleontologist chronicling the world had the dinosaurs not died out 65 million years ago but instead had kept the mammals in small rodent-like forms.

[edit] By David Drake

• The Belisarius series of novels by David Drake and Eric Flint take place when opposing factions from the future influence early times through intermediaries for their own purposes: the 'good' side operating through the Byzantine general Belisarius and the 'evil' side operating through the Indian state of Malwa.

[edit] By Eric Flint

• The Belisarius series of novels by David Drake and Eric Flint take place when opposing factions from the future influence early times through intermediaries for their own purposes: the 'good' side operating through the Byzantine general Belisarius and the 'evil' side operating through the Indian state of Malwa.
• 1632 - (found online at the Baen Books free library in various ebook formats.) Its sequels, starting with 1633 are available for sale. A series based on the premise that an entire modern West Virginia town is transported in time and space to Germany during the Thirty Years' War. [1]
• 1812: Rivers of War is an alternate history of the American frontier. It posits that Sam Houston was not injured at the beginning of the War of 1812, and substantially revises the history of the Trail of Tears.
• The Shadow of the Lion and This Rough Magic, collaborations between Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer, are set in a renaissance Europe where the Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by a Christian mob and the now sainted Hypatia of Alexandria and John Chrysostom shaped religious thought, significantly altering how the Church developed. The novels center around the Republic of Venice.

[edit] By William R. Forstchen

• 1945 by Newt Gingrich and Forstchen assumes that the Germans perfected long-range jet aircraft by the end of World War II and conducted successful raids in North America against the US nuclear program.

[edit] By Stephen Fry

• Making History (1996) by the British actor, comedian and novelist is set in a parallel world in which Adolf Hitler was never conceived, let alone born.

[edit] By Randall Garrett

• The Lord Darcy fantasy series, a number of short stories and one novel (Too Many Magicians) based on the premise that King Richard I of England returned safely from France and that Roger Bacon had systematized the laws of magic. The stories are a series of traditional detective fiction-style murder mysteries with forensic magic being used in the investigation.

[edit] By William Gibson

• The Difference Engine by Gibson and Bruce Sterling is a steampunk novel which deals with a Victorian society in which Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century early.

[edit] By Robert Harris

• Fatherland is also set in the 1960s in a Germany which won World War II.

[edit] By Kenneth Hite

• GURPS Alternate Earths (ISBN 1-55634-318-3) and GURPS Alternate Earths II (ISBN 1-55634-399-X) a pair of "What might have been" supplements for the Third Edition of the GURPS role-playing game, by Kenneth Hite, Craig Neumeier and Michael S. Schiffer, include a world with a surviving Confederacy, a Nazi/Japanese Empire world, an Aztecs-rule-America scenario, a Viking empire and a unique "Gernsback" world in which the dreams of mad scientists and Doc Savage have become reality. The conflict between the Infinity Patrol and Centrum across the multiplicity of parallel Earths detailed in these supplements (and originating in GURPS Time Travel) was made central to the Fourth Edition of GURPS as the default setting in the Basic Set and in the supplement GURPS Infinite Worlds.

[edit] By Michael Moorcock

• A Nomad of the Time Streams trilogy (aka The Nomad of Time), a series of novels featuring a grown-up version of E. Nesbit's Oswald Bastable (from The Treasure Seekers and other books) who experiences a variety of alternate realities that have diverged from his own time-line.
  • The War Lord of the Air
  • The Land Leviathan
  • The Steel Tsar

[edit] By Ward Moore

• Bring the Jubilee, in which the South was not defeated in the American Civil War because it won the Battle of Gettysburg.

[edit] By Douglas Niles

• Fox on the Rhine by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson, imagines that the attempt by German generals to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 succeeded but their attempt to take power failed. Heinrich Himmler takes over as leader and shocks everyone by arranging a cease-fire with the Soviet Union to free German forces. He then appoints Erwin Rommel to command over the German forces in Europe. As the story goes on, Rommel realizes the depths the Nazi command have gone through with the Holocaust and that the Soviet Union will become a major threat. At the end of the book, he surrenders to George Patton after losing the Battle of the Bulge. The sequel Fox at the Front, has Rommel and his loyal soldiers now fighting for the Allies as they attempt to defeat Germany and rebuild it as a "buffer" against the growing Soviet empire.

[edit] By Keith Roberts

• Pavane, assumes that Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated, and in the ensuing disorder, the Spanish Armada was successful in suppressing Protestantism; the novel (actually a series of shorter pieces) is set in a 20th century where technology has advanced less than in our world, and where the Inquisition still has power.

[edit] By Kim Stanley Robinson

• The Years of Rice and Salt imagines a world in which the Black Death of the 14th century kills 99% of the people in Europe. Over the next seven centuries, China and the Islamic world come to dominate the planet as they colonize a North America whose native peoples have all united in the Hodenosaunee League under the Iroquois, clash in India (a place of many scientific innovations), and the Muslims resettle a depopulated Europe.

[edit] By Philip Roth

• The Plot Against America, in which Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States in 1940 and collaborates with Nazi Germany.

[edit] By Robert Silverberg

• Roma Eterna is set in a world where the Red Sea did not part before Moses. As a result, the Roman Empire grew and prospered without the influence of Christianity. The novel is a series of short stories set in the same alternate history, up to 2753 AUC.

[edit] By L. Neil Smith

• The Probability Broach One single word in the Declaration of Independence differs and the US becomes the North American Confederation, a libertarian society. In the present some scientist will invent the Probability Broach and make contact with other universes.
  • The Venus Belt
  • Their Majesties' Bucketeers
  • The Nagasaki Vector
  • Tom Paine Maru
  • The Gallatin Divergence

[edit] By Robert N. Sobel

• For Want of a Nail (1973) by the American business historian - details a world in which the American Revolution failed. The British colonies become the Confederation of North America (CNA), while the defeated rebels go into exile in Spanish Tejas, eventually founding the United States of Mexico (USM) - a bitter rival to the CNA. The gigantic multinational corporation Kramer Associates, originally from Mexico but later based in Taiwan, is the third world power, and the first power to detonate an atomic bomb. This book is of particular interest because it is written in the format of a standard popular history, complete with footnotes and discussions of differing historical interpretations, and for the fact that for many years, at least one major municipal library (the Denver Public Library) had this book filed in its history collection rather than as fiction.

[edit] By Bruce Sterling

• The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Sterling is a steampunk novel which deals with a Victorian society in which Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century early.

[edit] By S.M. Stirling

• Conquistador a novel in which an inter-dimensional gateway is discovered in California, which gives access to an alternate Earth in which the empire of Alexander the Great flourishes, and where Europeans never discovered America.
• The Domination is a compendium of three novels originally published separately as Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, and The Stone Dogs. There are several points of divergence during the American Revolution, including the entry of the Netherlands on the American side, the occupation of the Dutch Cape Colony by the British during the war, and the survival of British Major Patrick Ferguson of the Battle of Kings Mountain. The United States still become independent, but expand more thoroughly by conquering Canada in the War of 1812, along with all of Mexico and Central America in the 1840s. As part of the territorial settlements after the American Revolution the Dutch transfer the Cape Colony to Britain, which renames it the Crown Colony of Drakia after Sir Francis Drake. Loyalists and British mercenaries are given land grants to move to South Africa, where they absorbed the Boers to set up a slavery-based empire called the Domination of the Draka. The stories tell of the struggle between the Domination and the free world.

[edit] By Harry Turtledove

• How Few Remain is set twenty years after a Southern victory in the American Civil War established the Confederate States of America. This novel is followed by the Great War trilogy, set in the 1910s, the American Empire trilogy, taking the time line up through the 1920s and 30s, and the Settling Accounts tetralogy, detailing an alternate World War II.
• The Worldwar series which depicts a World War II rudely interrupted by an extraterrestrial invasion, and its aftermath.
• The Two Georges by Harry Turtledove and actor Richard Dreyfuss is set in modern times under the assumption that King George III of Great Britain and George Washington reached a settlement where the 13 Colonies remained within the British Empire with increased autonomy and virtually all of their grievances redressed.
• Ruled Britannia (2002) The Spanish Armada conquers England and forces Shakespeare to write a play about Philip II. At the same time he is secretly writing a play for the English underground resistance about Boudica's rebellion, with Boudica meant to be analogous to the imprisoned Elizabeth I.