List of alternate history fiction

Literally thousands of alternate history stories and novels have been published. Following is a somewhat random sampling:

• The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. In this world, Martin Luther, rather than beginning the Protestant Reformation, became pope. The novel concerns the attempt to prevent a young boy with a perfect singing voice from being recruited to the Vatican's eunuch choir. There are a number of in-jokes, where famous works of fantasy and science fiction appear, under slightly different titles.

• The Western Lights science fantasy series by Jeffrey E. Barlough posits a cataclysmic event that has "sundered" Western Europe from the rest of the world. The series features somewhat Steampunk Victorian technology and society juxtaposed with Ice Age-era creatures such as mastodon and saber-toothed tigers. Titles include Dark Sleeper, The House in the High Wood, and Strange Cargo.

• The Bilalistan series of novels (Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart) by Steven Barnes shows an alternate world in which Carthage destroyed Rome, with Europe remaining tribal and an Islamic-dominated Africa colonizing the New World.

• Weapons of Choice: Axis of Time series by John Birmingham, which is part alternate history, part military science fiction. Its point of divergence is 1942 when an American-led UN Multinational Force arrives uptime from 2021 via a wormhole that was accidentally generated as a byproduct of a scientific experiment. Of course one could say there is also a downtime point of divergence--the point at which the UN force disappears from its "normal" time. (In other words, within the framing logic of parallel universe science fiction, the fictional experiment creates two new worlds or histories, while presumably leaving unchanged the future of a third world--the one in which the wormhole was never generated.)

• Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card, in which scientists from the future travel back to the 15th century to prevent the European colonization of the Americas. It also makes a good case that our own time line is the result of a similar alteration from scientists in a now-vanished future who sent a fake vision to persuade Columbus to sail west in the first place, to undo their own history in which Europe was conquered by the Tlaxcalans. It's notable in avoiding the usual time-travel paradoxes in a very clever way.

• Alvin Maker by Orson Scott Card, in which Card imagines North America where people wield magic, or knacks, and the revolution was only partly successful. The second novel in the series, "Red Prophet," is currently being adapted into graphic novel form. The last novel in the series has yet to be published.
  • Seventh Son
  • Red Prophet
  • Prentice Alvin
  • Alvin Journeyman
  • Heartfire
  • The Crystal City
  • (one more yet to come)

• 1862 by Robert Conroy depicts what might have happened if England had entered the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy due to the RMS Trent incident.

• 1901 by Robert Conroy depicts a hypothetical war between Germany and the United States at the start of William McKinley's second term as President.

• SS-GB by Len Deighton is a detective novel set in 1941 Britain in which the Germans have successfully occupied the country.

• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II.

• The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution, a book by geologist and paleontologist Dougal Dixon, chronicling the world had the dinosaurs not died out 65 million years ago and kept the mammals in small rodent-like forms.

• The Belisarius series of novels by David Drake and Eric Flint take place when opposing factions from the future influence early times through intermediaries for their own purposes: the 'good' side operating through the Byzantine general Belisarius and the 'evil' side operating through the Indian state of Malwa.

• 1632 by Eric Flint - (found online at the Baen Books free library in various ebook formats.) Its sequels, starting with 1633 are available for sale. A series based on the premise that an entire modern West Virginia town is transported in time and space to Germany during the Thirty Years' War. [1]

• Rivers of War by Eric Flint is an alternate history of the American frontier. It posits that Sam Houston was not injured at the beginning of the War of 1812, and substantially revises the history of the Trail of Tears.

• John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting is set in a Europe where the Emperor Julian the Apostate lived long enough to re-establish paganism in the Roman Empire.

• "If Hitler Had Invaded England," by C.S. Forester, found in his collection of published short stories, Gold from Crete. The story is a fictionalized account of a German invasion of Britain in 1940, based on what Forester saw as realistic projections of German and British capabilities. The German invasion fails short of reaching London due to continued British supremacy at sea and in the air. The resulting lack of river transport capability leads to an Allied victory.

• Making History (1996) by British actor, comedian and novelist Stephen Fry is set in a parallel world in which Adolf Hitler was never conceived, let alone born.

• The "Lord Darcy" fantasy series by Randall Garrett; a number of short stories and one novel (Too Many Magicians) based on the premise that King Richard I of England returned safely from France and that Roger Bacon had systematized the laws of magic. The stories are a series of traditional detective fiction-style murder mysteries with forensic magic being used in the investigation.

• The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling is a steampunk novel which deals with a Victorian society in which Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine takes on the roles of modern computers a century early.

• 1945 by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen assumes that the Germans perfected long-range jet aircraft by the end of World War II and conducted successful raids in North America against the US nuclear program.

• Fatherland by Robert Harris is also set in the 1960s in a Germany which won World War II.

• GURPS Alternate Earths (ISBN 1-55634-318-3) and GURPS Alternate Earths II (ISBN 1-55634-399-X) a pair of "What might have been" supplements for the Third Edition of the GURPS role-playing game, by Kenneth Hite, Craig Neumeier and Michael S. Schiffer, include a world with a surviving Confederacy, a Nazi/Japanese Empire world, an Aztecs-rule-America scenario, a Viking empire and a unique "Gernsback" world in which the dreams of mad scientists and Doc Savage have become reality. The conflict between the Infinity Patrol and Centrum across the multiplicity of parallel Earths detailed in these supplements (and originating in GURPS Time Travel) was made central to the Fourth Edition of GURPS as the default setting in the Basic Set and in the supplement GURPS Infinite Worlds.

• The Coming of the Demons by Gwenyth Hood imagines what would have happened if the execution of Conradin Hohenstaufen in Naples on October 29, 1268 was averted by the arrival of the Pelezitereans, exiled alien wanderers from another galaxy, seeking an uninhabited planet on which to reestablish their advanced culture.

• The Shadow of the Lion and This Rough Magic, collaborations between Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer, are set in a renaissance Europe where the Library of Alexandria was not destroyed by a Christian mob and the now sainted Hypatia of Alexandria and John Chrysostom shaped religious thought, significantly altering how the Church developed. The novels center around the Republic of Venice.

• Michael Moorcock's The Nomad of the Time-Streams trilogy (aka The Nomad of Time), a series of novels featuring a grown-up version of E. Nesbit's Oswald Bastable (from The Treasure Seekers and other books) who experiences a variety of alternate realities that have diverged from his own time-line.
  • The War Lord of the Air
  • The Land Leviathan
  • The Steel Tsar

• Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, in which the South was not defeated in the American Civil War because it won the Battle of Gettysburg.

• Back in the USSA by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne, a collection of short stories in which the United States of America experiences a Communist revolution in 1917 instead of Russia (owing to increased governmental oppression and a greater divide between the turn-of-the-century 'robber barons' and the workers) and thus becomes a Stalinist communist superpower under Chairman Al Capone.

• Fox on the Rhine by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson, imagines that the attempt by German generals to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 succeeded but their attempt to take power failed. Heinrich Himmler takes over as leader and shocks everyone by arranging a cease-fire with the Soviet Union to free German forces. He then appoints Erwin Rommel to command over the German forces in Europe. As the story goes on, Rommel realizes the depths the Nazi command have gone through with the Holocaust and that the Soviet Union will become a major threat. At the end of the book, he surrenders to George Patton after losing the Battle of the Bulge. The sequel "Fox at the Front," has Rommel and his loyal soldiers now fighting for the Allies as they attempt to defeat Germany and rebuild it as a "buffer" against the growing Soviet empire.

• Mamoru Oshii's manga Kerebos, a.k.a Hellhounds Panzer Cops in the United States, and the film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, both of which take place in a 1960's Japan that was defeated and occupied by the Germans.

• Pavane, by Keith Roberts, assumes that Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated, and in the ensuing disorder, the Spanish Armada was successful in suppressing Protestantism; the novel (actually a series of shorter pieces) is set in a 20th century where technology has advanced less than in our world, and where the Inquisition still has power.

• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt imagines a world in which the Black Death of the 14th century kills 99% of the people in Europe. Over the next seven centuries, China and the Islamic world come to dominate the planet as they colonize a North America whose native peoples have all united in the Hodenosaunee League under the Iroquois, clash in India (a place of many scientific innovations), and the Muslims resettle a depopulated Europe.

• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, in which Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States in 1940 and collaborates with Nazi Germany.

• Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas, edited by Mark Shainblum and John Dupuis features stories by Eric Choi, Dave Duncan, Glenn Grant, Paula Johanson, Nancy Kilpatrick, Laurent McAllister, the late Keith Scott, Shane Simmons, Michael Skeet, Edo van Belkom and Allan Weiss. The collection garnered an Aurora Award in the "Best Other Work in English" category, while Edo van Belkom's short story "Hockey's Night in Canada" captured another for "Best Short-Form Work in English."

• Captain Confederacy is two comic book miniseries by Will Shetterly and Vince Stone set in an alternate history in which the South won the Civil War. The comics are set in the late 1980s and early 1990s of this altered time line. There was no World War II in this time line, so nuclear weapons were never invented. Instead, the various nations occupying our USA territory (including the USA, CSA, Free Louisiana, Republic of Texas, People's Republic of California, Deseret, Great Spirit Alliance and Pacifica created superheroes by various means for propaganda purposes.

• Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna is set in a world where the Red Sea did not part before Moses. As a result, the Roman Empire grew and prospered without the influence of Christianity. The novel is a series of short stories set in the same alternate history, up to 2753 AUC.

• The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith One single word in the Declaration of Independence differs and the US becomes the North American Confederation, a libertarian society. In the present some scientist will invent the Probability Broach and make contact with other universes.
  • The Venus Belt
  • Their Majesties' Bucketeers
  • The Nagasaki Vector
  • Tom Paine Maru
  • The Gallatin Divergence

• The Indians Won (ISBN 0-8439-1012-7) by Martin Cruz Smith imagines that the Native Americans had won the Indian Wars and kept their land.

• For Want of a Nail (1973) by American business historian Robert N. Sobel - details a world in which the American Revolution failed. The British colonies become the Confederation of North America (CNA), while the defeated rebels go into exile in Spanish Tejas, eventually founding the United States of Mexico (USM) - a bitter rival to the CNA. The gigantic multinational corporation Kramer Associates, originally from Mexico but later based in Taiwan, is the third world power, and the first power to detonate an atomic bomb. This book is of particular interest because it is written in the format of a standard popular history, complete with footnotes and discussions of differing historical interpretations, and for the fact that for many years, at least one major municipal library (the Denver Public Library) had this book filed in its history collection rather than as fiction.

• Conquistador by S.M. Stirling a novel in which an inter-dimensional gateway is discovered in California, which gives access to an alternate Earth in which the empire of Alexander the Great flourishes, and where Europeans never discovered America.

• The Domination by S. M. Stirling is the first of a series in which, after the United States conquers Canada in the War of 1812, the Loyalists move to South Africa, where they join with the Boers to set up a slavery-based empire called the Domination of the Draka. The story tells of the struggle between the Domination and the free world.

• How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove is set twenty years after a Southern victory in the American Civil War established the Confederate States of America. This novel is followed by the Great War trilogy, set in the 1910s, the American Empire trilogy, taking the time line up through the 1920s and 30s, and the Settling Accounts trilogy, detailing an alternate World War II.

• The Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove, which depicts a World War II rudely interrupted by an extraterrestrial invasion, and its aftermath.

• The Two Georges by Harry Turtledove and actor Richard Dreyfuss is set in modern times under the assumption that King George III of Great Britain and George Washington reached a settlement where the 13 Colonies remained within the British Empire with increased autonomy and virtually all of their grievances redressed.

• Lighter than a Feather (1971) by David Westheimer, a story of the American invasion of Japan, Operation Olympic, which was to have taken place in November 1945. The novel is seen from the point of view of both low-level Japanese military and civilian and American military members.