Book picks similar to
For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga by Robert Sobel
alternate-history
fiction
history
historical-fiction
Lord Darcy
Randall Garrett - 1966
where magic is a science and science is an art... where the great detective Lord Darcy and the sorcerer Sean O'Lochlainn combine occult skills and brilliant deductions to bring criminals to the King's Justice and thwart those who plot against the Realm. Welcome to a world where murder may be committed by magic most foul, but crime still does not pay - as long as Lord Darcy is on the case.
Unholy Night
Seth Grahame-Smith - 2012
They're an iconic part of history's most celebrated birth. But what do we really know about the Three Kings of the Nativity, besides the fact that they followed a star to Bethlehem bearing strange gifts? The Bible has little to say about this enigmatic trio. But leave it to Seth Grahame-Smith, the brilliant and twisted mind behind Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to take a little mystery, bend a little history, and weave an epic tale. In Grahame-Smith's telling, the so-called "Three Wise Men" are infamous thieves, led by the dark, murderous Balthazar. After a daring escape from Herod's prison, they stumble upon the famous manger and its newborn king. The last thing Balthazar needs is to be slowed down by young Joseph, Mary and their infant. But when Herod's men begin to slaughter the first born in Judea, he has no choice but to help them escape to Egypt. It's the beginning of an adventure that will see them fight the last magical creatures of the Old Testament; cross paths with biblical figures like Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist; and finally deliver them to Egypt. It may just be the greatest story never told.
Pashazade
Jon Courtenay Grimwood - 2001
. . and murder isn’t the worst that can happen.It’s a twenty-first century hauntingly familiar—and yet startlingly different from our own. Here the United States brokered a deal that ended World War I, and the Ottoman Empire never collapsed. And lording it over all sits the complex, seductive, and bloodthirsty North African metropolis of El Iskandryia. Almost nothing is what it seems to be in El Isk, and Ashraf Bey is no exception. Neither the rich Ottoman aristocrat everyone thinks he is, nor the minor street criminal once shipped off to prison when he fell foul of his Chinese Triad employers–the fact is that Raf has as little idea who he is as anyone else. With few clues and no money, all Raf has is a surname hinting at noble heritage and an arranged marriage to a woman who hates him. But nothing Ashraf al Mansur learns about himself is as unexpected—or as terrifying—as the brutal murder he’s accused of committing. Now, as a hunted man with the welfare of a precocious young girl in his irresponsible hands, Raf must race after a killer through an unforgiving city as foreign to him as the truth he'll uncover about himself.
His Majesty's Dragon
Naomi Novik - 2006
When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes the precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Captain Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future – and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.
Radiance
Catherynne M. Valente - 2015
Valente, the phenomenal talent behind the New York Times bestselling The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1946 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars. For this is not our solar system, but one drawn from classic science fiction in which all the planets are inhabited and we travel through space on beautiful rockets. Severin is a realist in a fantastic universe.But her latest film, which investigates the disappearance of a diving colony on a watery Venus populated by island-sized alien creatures, will be her last. Though her crew limps home to earth and her story is preserved by the colony's last survivor, Severin will never return.Told using techniques from reality TV, classic film, gossip magazines, and meta-fictional narrative, Radiance is a solar system-spanning story of love, exploration, family, loss, quantum physics, and silent film.
Lest Darkness Fall/To Bring the Light
L. Sprague de Camp - 1996
The Dark Ages had begun. Could a man from the 20th century prevent the fall of Rome? When lightning struck, Martin Padway was hurled backward into the sixth century. Like him, her fate was to bring Rome into being. Together, they must strive to bring the light, lest darkness fall.
American Hippo
Sarah Gailey - 2018
Now readers have the chance to own both novellas in American Hippo, a single, beautiful volume.Years ago, in an America that never was, the United States government introduced herds of hippos to the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This plan failed to take into account some key facts about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.By the 1890s, the vast bayou that was once America's greatest waterway belongs to feral hippos, and Winslow Houndstooth has been contracted to take it back. To do so, he will gather a crew of the damnedest cons, outlaws, and assassins to ever ride a hippo. American Hippo is the story of their fortunes, their failures, and his revenge.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The Shadow of the Lion
Mercedes Lackey - 2002
The great winged Lion stares over a Venice where magic thrives. The rich Venetian Republic is a bastion of independence and tolerance. Perhaps for that reason, it is also corrupt, and rotten with intrigue.But for the young brothers Marco and Benito Valdosta, vagabond and thief, Venice is simply--home. They have no idea that they stand at the center of the city's coming struggle for its very life. They know nothing of the powerful forces moving in the background. They have barely heard of Chernobog, demon-lord of the North, who is shifting his pawns to attack Venice in order to cut into the underbelly of the Holy Roman Empire. All Marco and Benito know is that they're hungry and in dangerous company: Katerina the smuggler, Caesare the sell-sword, Montagnard assassins, church inquisitors, militant Knights of the Holy Trinity, Dottore Marina the Strega mage... and Maria. Maria might be an honest canaler, but she had the hottest temper a boy could find. Yet among the dark waters of the canals lurk far worse dangers than a hot-tempered girl. Chernobog has set a monster loose to wreak havoc on the city. Magic, murder and evil are all at work to pull Venice down. Fanatical monks seek to root out true witchcraft with fire and sword. Steel-clad Teutonic knights, wealth traders, church dignitaries and great Princes fight and plot for control of the jewel of the Mediterranean. And somehow all of these, from thieves to mages to princes, must gather around Marco and his brother Benito, under the shadow of the great winged lion of Venice.
The Kingdoms
Natasha Pulley - 2021
Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.
The Anubis Gates
Tim Powers - 1983
But while attending a lecture given by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1810, he becomes marooned in Regency London, where dark and dangerous forces know about the gates in time.Caught up in the intrigue between rival bands of beggars, pursued by Egyptian sorcerers, and befriended by Coleridge, Doyle somehow survives and learns more about the mysterious Ashbless than he could ever have imagined possible...
Jack Faust
Michael Swanwick - 1997
But nothing that has come before can quite compare to this, Swanwick's finest creation to date.It is Wittenberg, Germany, and Dr. Faust is burning his books. The alchemist is in deepest despair, for even his vast learning is powerless against the ignorance and superstition of his fellow man. Then, in his darkest moment, a voice whispers: Faust. And so begins Swanwick's masterful reinvention of Goethe's story of a scholar who sells his soul to the Devil for the gift of unlimited Knowledge.But the wisdom this Mephistopheles offers goes far beyond anything even imagined in Goethe's day. The principles of flight, technology and economics, the mysteries of the cosmos, medicine and the atom -- all are made known to Faust as he remakes the world in his own image, ushering in the New Age of Mechanization centuries before its rightful day. Ultimately it is love -- for his creations and for a woman named Margarete -- that damns Jack Faust, as this brilliant story spins forward through time, pulling the reader to the very brink of the new millennium to confront the "progress" Faust has wrought.Lyrical, arresting and provocative, "Jack Faust" is a cause for celebration -- it is an extraordinary work that entertains gloriously as it takes a deep and disturbing look into the collective soul of humankind.
Ring of Fire
Eric FlintDave Freer - 2004
A cosmic accident has shifted a modern West Virginia town back through time and space to land it and its twentieth century technology in Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. History must take a new course as American freedom and democracy battle against the squabbling despots of seventeenth-century Europe. Continuing the story begun in the hit novels 1632 and 1633, the New York Times best-selling creator of Honor Harrington, David Weber, the best-selling fantasy star Mercedes Lackey, best-selling SF and fantasy author Jane Lindskold, space adventure author K. D. Wentworth, Dave Freer, co-author of the hit novels Rats, Bats & Vats and Pyramid Scheme (both Baen), and Eric Flint himself combine their considerable talents in a shared-universe volume that will be a "must-have" for every reader of 1632 and 1633.
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!
Harry Harrison - 1972
The place is Earth—in a way. The project: build a tunnel over four thousand miles in length, intended to sustain a pressure of one thousand atmospheres while accommodating cargo and passengers traveling in excess of a thousand miles per hour. The Transatlantic Tunnel will be the greatest engineering feat in the history of the British Empire, a structure worthy of Her Majesty’s Empire in this, the eighth decade of the twentieth century.If the project is a success, the credit will belong to Captain Augustine Washington, the most brilliant engineer of our age. It is Washington’s greatest hope that his success will at last erase the family shame inspired by that other Washington: George, traitor to his king, who was hanged by Lord Cornwallis more than two centuries ago.Harry Harrison, that incomparable creator of alternate worlds, has crafted a brilliant double exposure of history and a typically superb reading experience.
In War Times
Kathleen Ann Goonan - 2007
Afterwards, Sam promises that he will do anything he can to stop the war. During his training, Sam begins to show that he has a knack for science and engineering, and he is plucked from the daily grunt work of twenty-mile marches by his superiors to study subjects like code breaking, electronics, and physics in particular, a science that is growing more important to the war effort. While studying, Sam is seduced by a mysterious female physicist that is teaching one of his courses, and given her plans for a device that will end the war, perhaps even end the human predilection for war forever. But the device does something less, and more, than that. After his training, Sam is sent throughout Europe to solve both theoretical and practical problems for the Allies. He spends his free time playing jazz, and trying to construct the strange device. It's only much later that he discovers that it worked, but in a way that he could have never imagined.
The Oppenheimer Alternative
Robert J. Sawyer - 2020
Sawyer takes us back in time to revisit history…with a twist.While J. Robert Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project team struggle to develop the A-bomb, Edward Teller wants something even more devastating: a bomb based on nuclear fusion—the mechanism that powers the sun.Teller’s research leads to a terrifying discovery: by the year 2030, the sun will eject its outermost layer, destroying the entire inner solar system—including Earth.As the war ends with the use of fission bombs against Japan, Oppenheimer's team, plus Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun, stay together—the greatest scientific geniuses from the last century racing against time to save our future.Meticulously researched and replete with real-life characters and events, The Oppenheimer Alternative is a breathtaking adventure through both real and alternate history.