Alternate Fiction

Apollo 32, commanded by career astronaut Vivian Carter, docks at NASA's Columbia Station in lunar orbit en route to its main mission: exploring the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon. Vivian is caught in the crossfire as four Soviet Soyuz craft appear without warning to assault the orbiting station. In an unplanned and desperate move, Vivian spacewalks through hard vacuum back to her Lunar Module and crew, and escapes right before the station falls into Soviet hands.

Frederick Radcliff is a descendant of the family that founded Atlantis's first settlement, and his grandfather Victor led the army against England to win the nation's independence. But he is also a black slave, unable to prove his lineage, and forced to labor on a cotton plantation in the southern region of the country. Frederick feels the color of his skin shouldn't keep him from having the same freedoms his ancestors fought and died for.

It's been five years since a cosmic incident known as The Ring of Fire transported the modern-day town of Grantville, West Virginia, through time and space to 17th-century Europe. The course of world history has been forever altered. And Mother Russia is no exception. Inspired by the American up-timers' radical notion that all people are created equal, Russian serfs are rebelling. The entire village of Poltz, led by blacksmith Stefan Andreevich, pulls up stakes to make a run for freedom.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging '60s’ never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates like wolves upon the fold. The Shah is dead, and Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; in Iraq, there has been a coup d’état, and civil war has broken out. Only a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered troops around the oilfields of the Middle East stand between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf.

The immortal knight battles an unstoppable horde of Mongol vampires. AD 1253. The immortal William de Ferrers sits at the right hand of the great Mongol Khan while his hordes conquer Persia and Syria. Soon, nothing will separate them from Christendom itself. And so Richard of Ashbury must cross the barbarian wilderness to destroy the threat to Christendom and fulfill his oath of vengeance.

What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? How would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers today? We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman enslaved and taken to the New World, movingly recounting experiences of tremendous hardship and the dreams of the people she has left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

When a witch in her best friend's coven is murdered, Ella must set aside her own battles to take down a supernatural assassin. She'll only have one chance because her best friend Deb is next on the hit list. But Ella didn't count on the dark and powerful magic that brought the assassin to life - or the man behind the assassin. It's a nightmare beast sent by none other than tycoon Jacob Gregori, and he aims to kill Deb and every last witch in Lynnette Leblanc's coven.

United States of Japan is set in a gripping alternate history where the Japanese Empire rules over America with huge robots. Is resistance possible in the form of subversive video games? Decades ago, Japan won the Second World War. Americans worship their infallible emperor, and nobody believes that Japan's conduct in the war was anything but exemplary. Nobody, that is, except the George Washingtons, a group of rebels fighting for freedom.

Under the One Child Policy, everyone plotted to have a son. Now 40 million of them can't find wives. China's One Child Policy and its cultural preference for male heirs has created a society overrun by 40 million unmarriageable men. By the year 2030, more than 25 percent of men in their late 30s will not have families of their own. An Excess Male is one such leftover man's quest for love and family under a state that seeks to glorify its past mistakes and impose order through authoritarian measures, reinvigorated Communist ideals, and social engineering.

Eddie Cantrell, now married to the king of Denmark’s daughter, is sent by Admiral Simpson to the Caribbean to secure access to the most valuable commodity on that continent - not the gold and silver which the Spanish treasure, but the oil which up-time machines and industry need. The admiral has also provided Eddie’s small task force with the new steam-powered frigates that have just come out of the navy’s shipyards. Even with the frigates, a giant obstacle stands in his way.

A shocking discovery in a Native American burial ground in present-day North Carolina reveals a history-changing link to ancient Rome. In 55 B.C. the Roman Senate orders their most honored general, Demetrius Varinica, to cease mourning his wife and return to Rome to lead a fleet on an ill-fated invasion. The general and a handful of survivors from the devastated Fifteenth Legion wash up on an unknown shore and find themselves in a terrifying new world where every moment is a battle to stay alive.

The year is 1961. The Cold War is in full swing and the space race is on. Russia aims to send humanity to space. But what if space comes to humanity instead? Yuri Gagarin’s epic flight into space is disrupted when an alien Mothership jumps into orbit, causing a cosmic car crash that defies all odds. Everything changes. The US and USSR must quickly put aside their differences. In exchange for the Earth’s help in the rebuilding of their Mothership, the mysterious aliens, the Vulbathi, offer promises of technology beyond humanity's wildest dreams.

In this clever and quirky follow-up to The Gates and The Infernals, Samuel Johnson's life seems to have finally settled down - after all, he's still got the company of his faithful dachshund Boswell and his bumbling demon friend Nurd; he has foiled the dreaded forces of darkness not once but twice; and he's now dating the lovely Lucy Highmore.

In the 23rd century, humanity has been hunted to the verge of extinction by an alien race. When an exploratory ship accidentally travels back in time to Viking-age Scandinavia, the human race is given a second chance. Pursued by the power-hungry King Harald, the four surviving crew members join a ragtag band of Vikings as they pillage their way across Europe. To save humanity, they must somehow return to the stars. Thus begins a decades-long effort to teach the Vikings to build a craft capable of reaching space - a ship that will come to be known as the Iron Dragon.

In an alternate 2009, the United States has been a second-rate power for a quarter of a century, ever since Argentina’s victory in the Falkland’s War thanks to their development of “psychopigments.” Created as weapons, these colorful chemicals can produce almost any human emotion upon contact, and they have been embraced in the US as both pharmaceutical cure-alls and popular recreational drugs. Black market traders illegally sell everything from Blackberry Purple (which causes terror) to Sunshine Yellow (which delivers happiness).

In the year 2021 a multinational fleet - experimenting with untested weapons technology - pitched through time, crash-landing in 1942. The world is thrown into chaos as Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, and Stalin scramble to adapt to new, high-tech killing tools, and twenty-first-century ways of war.

Master storyteller Walter Wangerin Jr. sweeps you into the life and times of the man who brought Christianity to the world. Here is Paul the person, viewed through the eyes of his contemporaries.

Kit Crockett lives on a farm with her grief-stricken, widowed father, tending the garden, fishing in a local stream, and reading Nancy Drew mysteries from the library bookmobile. One day, Kit discovers a mysterious and beautiful woman has moved in just down the road. Kit and the newcomer, Bella, become friends, and the lonely Kit draws comfort from her. But when a malicious neighbor finds out, Kit suddenly finds herself at the center of a tragic, fatal crime and becomes a ward of the court.

When Robert Catesby, the charismatic son of a Catholic gentleman, marries heiress Catherine Leigh and inherits the rich Oxfordshire manor house at Aston from his grandmother, it seems that the future happiness of the couple must be assured. However, Robert’s deep involvement in plots to overthrow the Protestant queen Elizabeth I and his increasingly dangerous behavior threaten the lives of his wife and their young son.

In medieval Europe, three explorers from the distant future begin an ambitious project: to build a craft capable of reaching the stars. While their leader oversees the construction of a secret underground base in Iceland, the other two travel thousands of miles to negotiate with the rulers of Europe and recruit the most brilliant minds of the age. When the Iceland base comes under attack, the travelers try to return to defend their home, but they are trapped in Paris just as an army of 20,000 Vikings lays siege to the city.