Book picks similar to
The Fourth Lectern by Andy Cooke
alternate-history
alternative-history
politics
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.
Post-Apocalyptic Box Set: Ava's Crucible: A Saga of America's Coming Civil War
Mark Goodwin - 2019
An Unlikely Heroine. The Second American Civil War.
The deck is stacked against twenty-nine-year-old Ava. She’s a fighter, but she’s got trust issues and doesn’t always make the best decisions. Her personal complications aren’t without merit, but America is on the verge of a second civil war, and Ava must pull it together if she wants to survive.Trouble seems to follow Ava where ever she goes. The onset of the Second American Civil War should be no different. Caught in a vicious protest, she’ll have to do the unthinkable to stay alive.Life only gets more difficult for Ava when she spots a sinister figure watching her every move. Who is the strange man with the scar on his face and what does he want with Ava?
Political discord between right and left has reached the flashpoint. Hostile rhetoric has given way to bloodshed and brutality.
The tentacles of the deep state have infiltrated every facet of American culture. The public education system, entertainment industry, and mainstream media have all been hijacked by a shadow government intent on fomenting a communist revolution in the United States. The antagonistic message of this agenda has poisoned the minds of America’s youth who are convinced that capitalism and conservatism are responsible for all the ills of the world. Violent protest and widespread destruction will bring America to her knees.
Don’t miss this chilling tale of America’s Civil War 2.0! Start reading today and get a glimpse of the dark future in store for our country.
This is the complete three-book box set including:Book One: Divided We FallBook Two: Embers of EmpireBook Three: United We StandAs with all books by Mark Goodwin, this book contains no profanity and no embarrassing sex scenes. However, if you're offended by conservative principles and references to Scripture, this book might not be for you.
Ex Machina: The Deluxe Edition, Vol. 1
Brian K. Vaughan - 2008
Vaughan (PRIDE OF BAGHDAD, Y: THE LAST MAN) uniquely combines big city politics and superheroes in this criticially acclaimed series. Set in our modern-day world, EX MACHINA tells the story of civil engineer Mitchell Hundred, who becomes America's first living, breathing super-hero after a strange accident gives him the power to communicate with machines. Eventually Mitchell tires of risking his life merely to maintain the status quo, retires from masked crime fighting and runs for mayor of New York City, winning by a landslide after the events of 9/11.Illustrated by Tony Harris, EX MACHINA BOOK ONE is the first chapter of one of the finest series ever from Vertigo.Collects Ex Machina issues #1-11.
Red Zone: China's Challenge and Australia's Future
Peter Hartcher - 2021
Archangel
Robert Harris - 1998
But one night, at a symposium in Moscow concerning the release of secret Soviet archives, he is approached by Papu Rapava, a former Kremlin bodyguard with a story to tell. No one but the desperate Kelso would believe the tale, for what Rapava describes is a sort of Holy Grail among researchers: an actual diary left by Joseph Stalin himself. Such an artifact, if it's genuine -- and if Kelso can survive the fascist Vladimir Mamantov, who wants it for his own agenda -- would be the coup of a lifetime for the discredited researcher.Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.
Izanami's Choice
Adam Heine - 2016
Heine does a great job of building a world replete with rules and history and uses both to construct a mystery with an awful lot of intrigue and surprise." - Nerds on EarthSamurai vs. robots. In 1901, the Meiji Restoration has abolished the old ways and ushered in a cybernetic revolution. Androids integrate into society at all levels, following their programming for the betterment of every citizen, as servants, bodyguards, and bureaucrats. Jinzou are the future. Japan is at the threshold of a new tomorrow!As a ronin steeped in the old ways, Itaru wants nothing more to do with the artificial creations posing as human. But when a jinzou is suspected of murder, he's pulled into a mystery that could tear the nation apart.Malfunction or free will? When is a machine more than just a machine?IZANAMI'S CHOICE is an alternate history sci-fi novella set in Meiji Era Japan. It's samurai vs. robots as the author explores how Japan might grapple with the rise of artificial intelligence.
The Summer Isles
Ian R. MacLeod - 1998
A closeted gay teacher, Griffin Brooke has witnessed the monumental changes his nation has undergone since being crushed by Germany’s superior fighting forces twenty-two years earlier. First came the financial collapse and crippling inflation, then the fascist uprising in the thirties that brought John Arthur to power. Now, in 1940, England has resurrected itself—but at a terrible cost. With homosexuality decreed a serious crime against the state by the dictator who was once his most avid student, Griffin has remained silent while England’s gay population has mysteriously dwindled . . . along with the nation’s Jews. But in the twilight of his years, elevated to the role of tutor in an Oxford college, Griffin is getting anxious. Thinking back on a life lived in shadow—and on his one great love affair with a young soldier during the height of the Great War—Griffin knows that revealing a secret he has guarded for decades could have devastating consequences for Britain, the world, and especially for the fascist tyrant Arthur, who cites his former teacher as a mentor and major influence.
The Alteration
Kingsley Amis - 1976
Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
On Mutiny
David Speers - 2018
If we really do get the government we deserve, On Mutiny might provoke a civilian rebellion.
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
Robert Charles Wilson - 2009
Over a century after the Efflorescence of Oil, after the Fall of the Cities, after the Plague of Infertility, after the False Tribulation, after the days of the Pious Presidents, the sixty stars and thirteen stripes wave from the plains of Athabaska to the national capital in New York City. In Colorado Springs, the Dominion sees to the nation’s spiritual needs. In Labrador, the Army wages war on the Dutch. America, unified, is rising once again.Then out of Labrador come tales of a new Ajax—Captain Commongold, the Youthful Hero of the Saguenay. The ordinary people follow his adventures in the popular press. The Army adores him. The President is…troubled. Especially when the dashing Captain turns out to be his nephew Julian, son of the falsely accused and executed Bryce.Treachery and intrigue dog Julian’s footsteps. Hairsbreadth escapes and daring rescues fill his days. Stern resolve and tender sentiment dice for Julian’s soul, while his admiration for the works of the Secular Ancients, and his adherence to the evolutionary doctrines of the heretical Darwin, set him at fatal odds with the hierarchy of the Dominion. Plague and fire swirl around the Presidential palace when at last he arrives with the acclamation of the mob.As told by Julian’s best friend and faithful companion, a rustic yet observant lad from the west, this tale of the 22nd Century asks— and answers—the age-old question: “Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?”
Swastika Night
Katharine Burdekin - 1937
Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”
Alternate Empires
Gregory BenfordJames P. Hogan - 1989
or had not occurred at all? In this stellar collection, twelve of science fiction's most imaginative minds have altered the past to reveal a present of astonishing and startling possibilities...a rare glimpse of what might have been. From a Germany that won the war to a modern exodus from Egypt, from the death of ancient Greece to the true secret of the Soviets, these hold excursions in time depict bizarre new worlds -- oddly familiar, disturbingly different.Summary:Poul Anderson's "In the House of Sorrows" Gregory Benford's "We Could Do Worse"George Alec Effinger's "Everything but Honor"Karen Joy Fowler's "Game Night at the Fox and Goose"Barry N. Malzberg's "All Assassins"James Morrow's "Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant"Larry Niven's "The Return of William Proxmire"Frederick Pohl's "Waiting for the Olympians"Kim Stanley Robinson's "Remaking History"Robert Silverberg's "To the Promised Land"Harry Turtledove's "Counting Potsherds". Also includes one non-allohistorical work by James P. Hogan.
Resurrection Day
Brendan DuBois - 1999
has been crippled into a second-rate power dependent upon European allies for survival. In the shadow of this devastating chaos, a reporter stumbles across a man with secrets of the great war's origins--and lies about Kennedy's death.
Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders
Eric Cantor - 2010
But they believe the party had lost sight of the ideals it believes in, like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life, and putting families first. This isn’t your grandfather’s Republican party. These Young Guns of the House GOP—Cantor (the leader), Ryan (the thinker), and McCarthy (the strategist)—are ready to take their belief in the principles that have made America great and translate it into solutions that will make the future even better, solutions that will create private sector jobs, maximize individual freedom, and establish a better world for our children. This groundbreaking book is a call to action that sets forth a plan for growth, opportunity, and commitment that will propel this country to prosperity once again. Together, the Young Guns are changing the face of the Republican party and giving us a new road map back to the American dream.
The Collected What If? Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been
Robert Cowley - 2001
What If?