World War II is the single most written-about conflict in human history, and it is also the richest hunting ground for alternate history fiction. The stakes were absolute, the outcome was never guaranteed the way hindsight makes it feel, and…
The Southern Victory series is the most ambitious alternate history series ever written in the English language. Across eleven novels and nearly a decade of publishing, Harry Turtledove asks what would have happened if the Confederacy had won its independence…
Naomi Novik is the author who asked one of the most delightful questions in alternate history fiction: what if the Napoleonic Wars were fought with dragons? The answer, across nine novels of the Temeraire series, made her one of the…
The Temeraire series answers one of the best questions in alternate history: what would the Napoleonic Wars look like if every major power had an air force made of dragons? Naomi Novik’s answer, across nine novels, is so thoroughly imagined…
No story in the English language has inspired more retellings than the legend of King Arthur. From the earliest Welsh poems to the most recent bestseller, writers have returned again and again to post-Roman Britain, to a warlord king holding…
Harry Turtledove is the undisputed master of alternate history fiction, a historian-turned-novelist who has spent four decades asking one deceptively simple question: what if history had gone differently? Dubbed “The Master of Alternate History” by Publishers Weekly, he has built…
Alternate history asks the most irresistible question in fiction: what if? What if the Allies had lost World War II? What if the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg? What if a single assassination, a single battle, a single decision had…
There is a reasonable argument that George MacDonald Fraser wrote the greatest comic historical fiction series in the English language. The Flashman Papers, twelve novels and one short story collection published between 1969 and 2005, follow the fictional Victorian soldier…
There is no other character in historical fiction quite like Harry Flashman. A coward, a liar, a bully, and a shameless self-promoter, he is also one of the most entertaining narrators in the entire genre. Over the course of twelve…
Alice Winn announced herself as one of the most exciting new voices in historical fiction with her debut novel In Memoriam, published in 2023. The book, a devastating love story set in the trenches of World War I, won the…