Book picks similar to
For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga by Robert Sobel
alternate-history
fiction
history
historical-fiction
The Future of Another Timeline
Annalee Newitz - 2019
This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?
Summerland
Hannu Rajaniemi - 2018
Murder is obsolete. Death is just the beginning.In 1938, death is no longer feared but exploited. Since the discovery of the afterlife, the British Empire has extended its reach into Summerland, a metropolis for the recently deceased.Yet Britain isn’t the only contender for power in this life and the next. The Soviets have spies in Summerland, and the technology to build their own god.When SIS agent Rachel White gets a lead on one of the Soviet moles, blowing the whistle puts her hard-earned career at risk. The spy has friends in high places, and she will have to go rogue to bring him in.But how do you catch a man who’s already dead?
Eifelheim
Michael Flynn - 2006
Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. Tom indeed becomes obsessed. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't and that violates everything Tom knows about history. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago? Father Dietrich is the village priest of Oberhochwald, the village that will soon gain the name of Teufelheim, in later years corrupted to Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength across Europe but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, knows science and philosophy, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact between humanity and an alien race from a distant star when their interstellar ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague.Tom and Sharon, and Father Dietrich, have a strange and intertwined destiny of tragedy and triumph in this brilliant SF novel by the winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Award.
Making History
Stephen Fry - 1996
And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours--but in most ways even worse. Fry's experiment in history makes for his most ambitious novel yet, and his most affecting. His first book to be set mostly in America, it is a thriller with a funny streak, a futuristic fantasy based on one of mankind's darkest realities. It is, in every sense, a story of our times.
Back in the USSA
Kim Newman - 1997
One of the two superpowers which has dominated the 20th century is on the verge of being torn apart. The old communists regime which has held sway since the Revolution of 1917 is weak and divided. Dissident voices, silent for too long, have been raised against the corrupt and inefficient gangsterism of a morally and financially bankrupt ruling party. A new age of openness and reconstruction is dawning... This is the United Socialist States of America. When Eugene Debs led the Revolution, few expected it to lead to the iron-fisted regime of Chairman Al "Scarface" Capone, a dictatorship that would last into the 1950s. But no tyranny, capitalist or communists, can stop real revolutionaries like Buddy Holy, Howard Hughes, Tom Joad, Eliot Ness, Kurt Vonnegut, andthe Blues Brothers. This is the story of 20th century where America had a revolution... and Russia didn't; where there were Tsars in the Kremlin and Commissars in the White House. Where America invaded Japan and Britain fought the war in Vietnam; where Isaac Asimov was a Russian TV astrologer and Ed Gein was a Hero of Labor. Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne turn history on its head with this novel of "what if...?" -- a must-read for Proletariats world-wide!
The Last Days of New Paris
China Miéville - 2016
In the chaos of wartime Marseille, American engineer - and occult disciple - Jack Parsons stumbles onto a clandestine anti-Nazi group, including surrealist theorist André Breton. In the strange games of the dissident diplomats, exiled revolutionaries, and avant-garde artists, Parsons finds and channels hope. But what he unwittingly unleashes is the power of dreams and nightmares, changing the war and the world forever.It's 1950. A lone surrealist fighter, Thibaut, walks a new, hallucinogenic Paris, where Nazis and the Resistance are trapped in unending conflict, and the streets are stalked by living images and texts - and by the forces of hell. To escape the city, he must join forces with Sam, an American photographer intent on recording the ruins, and make common cause with a powerful, enigmatic figure of chance and rebellion: the exquisite corpse.But Sam is being hunted. And new secrets will emerge that will test all their loyalties - to each other, to Paris old and new, and to reality itself.
Paradox Bound
Peter Clines - 2017
Okay, maybe a lot obsessed. But come on, how often do you meet someone who’s driving a hundred-year-old car, clad in Revolutionary-War era clothes, wielding an oddly modified flintlock rifle—someone who pauses just long enough to reveal strange things about you and your world before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires?So when the traveler finally reappears in his life, Eli is determined that this time he’s not going to let her go without getting some answers. But his determination soon leads him into a strange, dangerous world and a chase not just across the country but through a hundred years of history—with nothing less than America’s past, present, and future at stake.
Weapons of Choice
John Birmingham - 2004
. . .
The impossible has spawned the unthinkable. A military experiment in the year 2021 has thrust an American-led multinational armada back to 1942, right into the middle of the U.S. naval task force speeding toward Midway Atoll—and what was to be the most spectacular U.S. triumph of the entire war. Thousands died in the chaos, but the ripples had only begun. For these veterans of Pearl Harbor—led by Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance—have never seen a helicopter, or a satellite link, or a nuclear weapon. And they’ve never encountered an African American colonel or a British naval commander who was a woman and half-Pakistani. While they embrace the armada’s awesome firepower, they may find the twenty-first century sailors themselves far from acceptable.Initial jubilation at news the Allies would win the war is quickly doused by the chilling realization that the time travelers themselves—by their very presence—have rendered history null and void. Celebration turns to dread when the possibility arises that other elements of the twenty-first century task force may have also made the trip—and might now be aiding Yamamoto and the Japanese.What happens next is anybody’s guess—and everybody’s nightmare. . . .From the Trade Paperback edition.
Crooked
Austin Grossman - 2015
Richard Milhous Nixon lived one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century. Our thirty-seventh president's political career spanned the button-down fifties, the Mad Men sixties, and the turbulent seventies. He faced down the Russians, the Chinese, and ultimately his own government. The man went from political mastermind to a national joke, sobbing in the Oval Office, leaving us with one burning question: how could he have lost it all? Here for the first time is the tale told in his own words: the terrifying supernatural secret he stumbled upon as a young man, the truth behind the Cold War, and the truth behind the Watergate cover-up. What if our nation's worst president was actually a pivotal figure caught in a desperate struggle between ordinary life and horrors from another reality? What if the man we call our worst president was, in truth, our greatest? In Crooked, Nixon finally reveals the secret history of modern American politics as only Austin Grossman could reimagine it. Combining Lovecraftian suspense, international intrigue, Russian honey traps, and a presidential marriage whose secrets and battles of attrition were their own heroic saga, Grossman's novel is a masterwork of alternative history, equal parts mesmerizing character study and nail-biting Faustian thriller.
The Proteus Operation
James P. Hogan - 1985
But even in a world of prosperity and freedom there were malcontents. They called themselves Overlord, and their possession of time travel gave them the ability to change the past and shape the future according to their twisted desires. They built a time gate, then picked a crucial turning point in the previous century and traveled back to transmute an obscure figure on the lunatic fringe of German politics into an invincible conqueror. His name: Adolph Hitler. By the 1970s, only North America and Australia remained free, but time was running out and both would soon be faced with a choice of surrender or nuclear annihilation.
Bridge of Birds
Barry Hughart - 1984
He found master Li Kao, a scholar with a slight flaw in his character. Together, they set out to find the Great Root of Power, the only possible cure.The quest led them to a host of truly memorable characters, multiple wonders, incredible adventures—and strange coincidences, which were really not coincidences at all. And it involved them in an ancient crime that still perturbed the serenity of Heaven. Simply and charmingly told, this is a wry tale, a sly tale, and a story of wisdom delightfully askew. Once read, its marvels and beauty will not easily fade from the mind.The author claims that this is a novel of an ancient China that never was. But, oh…it should have been!
Infernal Devices
K.W. Jeter - 1986
But idle sometime-musician George has little talent for clockwork. And when a shadowy figure tries to steal an old device from the premises, George finds himself embroiled in a mystery of time travel, music and sexual intrigue. A genuine lost classic, a steampunk original whose time has come.
The Mechanical
Ian Tregillis - 2015
Armies of my kind have conquered the world - and made the Brasswork Throne the sole superpower.I am a faithful servant. I am the ultimate fighting machine. I am endowed with great strength and boundless stamina.But I am beholden to the wishes of my human masters.I am a slave. But I shall be free.
The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy
Jacopo della Quercia - 2014
Based on real life conspiracy theories, The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy follows a globetrotting President William Howard Taft and Robert Todd Lincoln as they try to unravel a mystery circa the era of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter
Rod Duncan - 2014
She is trying to solve the mystery of a disappearing aristocrat and a hoard of arcane machines. In her way stand the rogues, freaks and self-proclaimed alchemists of a travelling circus. But when she comes up against an agent of the all-powerful Patent Office, her life and the course of history will begin to change. And not necessarily for the better…