Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History

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Product Description

Alternate History: The What-If? fiction that has finally come into its own! Shedding light on the past by exploring what could have happened, this bold genre tantalizes your imagination and challenges your perceptions with thrilling reinventions of humanity's most climactic events. Enter worlds that are at once fanciful and familiar, where fact and fiction meld in a provocative landscape of infinite possibilities. . . .

"An Ink from the New Moon" by A. A. Attanasio
"We Could Do Worse" by Gregory Benford
"The West Is Red" by Greg Costikyan
"The Forest of Time" by Michael F. Flynn
"Southpaw" by Bruce McAllister
"Over There" by Mike Resnick
"An Outpost of the Empire" by Robert Silverberg
"Aristotle and the Gun" by L. Sprague de Camp
"Must and Shall" by Harry Turtledove
"How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion" by Gene Wolfe

With these dazzling stories, discover just how different things might have been!

Amazon.com Review

Although none of the stories in this anthology take place in the future, they qualify as science fiction (or perhaps speculative fiction would be more accurate) because at the heart of each one lies the question "What if...?" Only in this case, instead of a question like "What if we had faster-than-light travel?" all the questions revolve around alternative historical events. What if the Chinese had colonized America before the Europeans? What if Joseph McCarthy had become president? As in science fiction, the question is the seed from which the author extrapolates a future and a narrative.

The stories in this anthology cover a wide range of other pasts and presents. Highlights include "Must and Shall" by Harry Turtledove, the modern master of alternative history. His fictional present stems from an alternative Civil War, one that the North still won, but in a very different manner. Gene Wolfe presents a timeline in which World War II is settled by an automobile race, and Robert Silverberg looks at a modern-day world in which the Roman Empire never fell. This anthology will definitely appeal to those who enjoy the curious mental frisson that comes from exploring worlds that are in many ways similar to our own, but also quite different. --Brooks Peck