No war in American history has inspired more “what if” fiction than the Civil War. The conflict turned on a lost set of orders, a hill nobody thought to defend, a diplomatic crisis over two envoys seized from a British…
Len Deighton spent six decades as one of Britain’s defining thriller writers, standing alongside John le Carré as one of the two authors who took the spy novel out of glamorous Bond territory and into a grubbier, more believable Cold…
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 asked one of the best questions in alternate history: what if the Napoleonic Wars had been fought with dragons? Her answer, the nine-novel Temeraire series, made her name, and she has since won the Nebula, Locus, British Fantasy…
The Temeraire series asks one of the best questions in alternate history: what would the Napoleonic Wars look like if every great power fought with an air force of dragons? Naomi Novik answers it across nine novels, published between 2006…
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 has spent more than four decades asking one deceptively simple question: what if history had gone differently? Publishers Weekly called him “The Master of Alternate History”, and no other novelist has explored the idea at such length or…
Alternate history asks the most irresistible question in fiction: what if? What if the Allies had lost the Second World War? What if the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg? What if one election, one battle or one lost set of…
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…