Below The Beltway

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:

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In the tenth volume of Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 series, the United States finally get the chance to turn the tide on Jake Featherston’s Confederate States of America. After being dragged into the Second Great War by a surprise Confederate air attack on Philadelphia followed up by a blitzkrieg-like advance of Confederate armor through Ohio to [...]

This second volume in Harry Turtledove’s Settling Accounts series picks up right where its predecessor left off. The Confederacy has driven through Ohio to Lake Erie and thrown the United States back on its heels. Rebellion is once again stirring up among the Mormons in Utah. And, the President of the United States is dead [...]

When we last left the world that Harry Turtledove has crafted in seven books starting with How Few Remain, the Confederacy, firmly in control of Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party was launching its Operation Barbarossa-like attack on the United States and war was once again returning to the North American continent.
In Return Engagement, the [...]

At the end of Harry Turtledove’s Days Of Infamy, the Japanese empire was firmly in control of Hawai’i, the Americans who had tried to defend Oahu in the months after the attack and invasion of December 7, 1941 were POW’s, and the Kingdom of Hawai’i was restored under a puppet King and Queen hand-picked by [...]

As I’ve written in the past, there is sometimes much to criticize about Harry Turtledove’s writing style. As demonstrated most aptly in the Timeline-191 Series, he has a tendancy to repeat himself to the extent that it can become annoying. At other times though, he can write a book that is just extraordinary. Fortunately, the [...]

It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of book Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle actually is. Part science fiction. Part alternate history. Part meditation on the nature of reality. Whatever you call it, though, it’s easy to see why it won the Hugo Award in 1963 and why it’s considered one [...]

In the first volume of his Axis of Time trilogy, Weapons Of Choice, John Birmingham threw the ultimate monkeywrench into history — a naval task force from the 21st Century finds itself transported into the middle of World War II. While the bulk of the new technology found its way in to the hands of [...]

As John Birmingham’s Weapons Of Choice opens, it is 2021 and a MultiNational Force is heading for the waters off of Indonesia in response to an Islamist coup. Though Birmingham doesn’t paint the world of 2021, or the 20 years that preceded it, in great detail, we are given enough glimpses to show that the [...]