Below The Beltway

Despite it’s title, S.M. Stirling’s The Protector’s War, the second volume in a trilogy that started with Dies The Fire isn’t about war in the Post-Change Williamette Valley so much as it’s about the precursors to a war between survivors in a new world that seems all but inevitable.
This second volume starts eight years after […]

Imagine if, in a split-second, every piece of technology that you depend upon stopped working. Not just televisions, computers, and cell phones. Add in cars, trains, and anything based upon electricity or the internal combustion engine. To make things even more interesting, let’s add in firearms and gunpowder too.
What kind of world would result, what […]

The Collected What If ? is nothing less than a comprehensive look at some of the most important turning points in history. And, once you get started considering the possible ways in which history could have turned out drastically different, it’s hard for the imagination not to start running wild.
With contributions from some of the […]

Through three novels, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen have told the story of a Civil War that might have been. It started with Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee withdraws from the field of battle in Pennsylvania and forces the Army of the Potomac to fight a battle on his terms, with devastating results. Then, in […]

Continuing the counter-factual history of the Civil War that they started with Gettysburg, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen came up with another literary hit out of the park with the second volume of their trilogy, Grant Comes East.
When the last volume ended, the Army of the Potomac had been decimated at Union Mills, Maryland and […]

I don’t say this very often, but in Gettysburg, Newt Gingrich and William Fortschen have created a masterpiece.
The Civil War itself, and the Battle of Gettysburg in particular, have been the subject of countless historical books, novels, and films. The war has also been the subject of more than one “what-if” scenario; imagining how history […]

Through eleven volumes and nearly 100 years of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has been writing the story of a North America quite different from the one that we’ve lived in.
It’s a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 thanks to a twist in history. In our world, just prior to the […]

Harry Turtledove that is:

I’m already at Chapter III.

In Final Impact, John Birmingham brings to a conclusion that story that started with Weapons Of Choice when an advanced flotilla of Naval ships was transported back in time from the world of 2021 to 1942 and the eve of the Battle of Midway.
When this final volume opens, two years have passed since the Transition […]

Brad Warbiany wonders how the past 60 years might have been different if nuclear weapons had never been developed.
Here’s a few scenarios that I think are quite likely:

Read more »

[…]