The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

Author: Ian Watson
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1849014280
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 757

Book Description
Every short story in this wonderfully varied collection has one thing in common: each features some alteration in history, some divergence from historical reality, which results in a world very different from the one we know today. As well as original stories specially commissioned from bestselling writers such as James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod, there are genre classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson's story of how World War II atomic bomber the Enola Gay, having crashed on a training flight, is replaced by the Lucky Strike with profoundly different consequences. Praise for the editors: 'Mr Watson wreaks havoc with what is accepted - and acceptable.' The Times 'One of Britain's consistently finest science fiction writers.' New Scientist

The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

Author: Ian Watson
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1849014280
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 757

The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

Author: Sean Wallace
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1472119460
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 559

Book Description
Dieselpunk: an emerging retro-futuristic sub-genre, similar to steampunk, based on the era between the First World War and the start of the Atomic Age, merging elements of noir, pulp, and the past with today’s technology . . . and sometimes a dash of the occult. Award-winning editor Wallace presents a cutting-edge collection of twenty-five vibrant stories that explore the possibilities of history while sweeping readers into high-powered hydrocarbon-fuelled adventures. Join us in an era when engines were huge, fuel was cheap and plentiful, and steel and chrome blended with the grit and grease of modern machines. Praise for The Mammoth Book of Steampunk: 'World Fantasy Award-winning editor Wallace has compiled an outstanding anthology . . . sure to satisfy even the most jaded steampunk fans and engage newcomers and skeptics. Each story exemplifies steampunk’s knack for critiquing both the past and the present, in a superb anthology that demands rereading.' Publishers Weekly

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

Author: Mike Ashley
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472100263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
This thought-provoking collection not only takes us into the past and the future, but also explores what might happen if we attempt to manipulate time to our own advantage. These stories show what happen once you start to meddle with time and the paradoxes that might arise. It also raises questions about whether we understand time, and how we perceive it. Once we move outside the present day, can we ever return or do we move into an alternate world? What happens if our meddling with Nature leads to time flowing backwards, or slowing down or stopping all together? Or if we get trapped in a constant loop from which we can never escape. Is the past and future immutable or will we ever be able to escape the inevitable? These are just some of the questions that are raised in these challenging, exciting and sometimes amusing stories by Kage Baker, Simon Clark, Fritz Leiber, Christopher Priest, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Silverberg, Michael Swanwick, John Varley and many others.

Mammoths of the Great Plains

Author: Eleanor Arnason
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 160486382X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected—he hoped!—that they might still roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage. PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.

The Mammoth Book of One-Liners

Author: Geoff Tibballs
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1780335369
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 607

Book Description
A collection of 10,000 side-splitting one-line jokes arranged in categories from bestselling humour editor Geoff Tibballs. 'Is my wife dissatisfied with my body? A small part of me says yes.' 'Letting the cat out of the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back in.' 'I read somewhere that 26 is too old to still live with your parents. It was on a note, in my room.'

The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

Author: Sean Wallace
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472135652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 630

Book Description
Giant monsters whose every roar and footstep shakes the earth, whose simple stroll through a city wreaks havoc: KAIJU! And even though humankind has never really seen such monsters - we tremble at the thought of them and love to shiver as their screen versions make mayhem: the beast from twenty-thousand fathoms, Godzilla demolishing Tokyo, the massive creature in Cloverfield destroying New York, all of Earth warring with the colossal monsters in Pacific Rim. Now, for the first time, a definitive anthology that gathers a wide range of larger-than-life short fiction with creatures that run a gargantuan gamut: the stealthy gabbleduck of Neal Asher's Polity universe; Gary McMahon's huge sea-born terror; An Owomoyela 's incredibly tall alien invaders; Frank Wu's city-razing, eighty-foot-high, fire-breathing lizard; Lavie Tidhar's titanic ship-devouring monstrosity; a really big Midwest US smackdown related by Jeremiah Tolbert . . . and many more mega-monster stories to feed your need for killer kaiju! With an introduction by Robert Hood, co-editor of the groundbreaking, Ditmar Award-winning Daikaiju: Giant Monster Tales and host of Undead Backbrain, the premier website for matters relating to giant monsters.

How Few Remain

Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0307531015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Book Description
From the master of alternate history comes an epic of the second Civil War. It was an epoch of glory and success, of disaster and despair. . . . 1881: A generation after the South won the Civil War, America writhed once more in the bloody throes of battle. Furious over the annexation of key Mexican territory, the United States declared total war against the Confederate States of America in 1881. But this was a new kind of war, fought on a lawless frontier where the blue and gray battled not only each other but the Apache, the outlaw, the French, and the English. As Confederate General Stonewall Jackson again demonstrated his military expertise, the North struggled to find a leader who could prove his equal. In the Second War Between the States, the times, the stakes, and the battle lines had changed--and so would history. . .

A Different Flesh

Author: Harry Turtledove
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504009452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
This novel by the New York Times–bestselling “master of alternate history” explores an America reshaped by a twist in prehistoric evolution (Publishers Weekly). What if mankind’s “missing link,” the apelike Homo erectus, had survived to dominate a North American continent where woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers still prowled, while the more advanced Homo sapiens built their civilizations elsewhere? Now imagine that the Europeans arriving in the New World had chanced on these primitive creatures and seized the opportunity to establish a hierarchy in which the sapiens were masters and the “sims” were their slaves. This is the premise that drives the incomparable Harry Turtledove’s A Different Flesh. The acclaimed Hugo Award winner creates an alternate America that spans three hundred years of invented history. From the Jamestown colonists’ desperate hunt for a human infant kidnapped by a local sim tribe, to a late-eighteenth-century contest between a newfangled steam-engine train and the popular hairy-elephant-pulled model, to the sim-rights activists’ daring 1988 rescue of an unfortunate biped named Matt who’s being used for animal experimentation, Turtledove turns our world inside out in a remarkable science fiction masterwork that explores what it truly means to be human.

The Company of the Dead

Author: David Kowalski
Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA)
ISBN: 0857686674
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 946

Book Description
Can one man save the Titanic? March 1912. A mysterious man appears aboard the Titanic on its doomed voyage. His mission? To save the ship. The result? A world where the United States never entered World War I, thus launching the secret history of the 20th Century. April 2012. Joseph Kennedy - grand-nephew of John F. Kennedy - lives in an America occupied in the East by Greater Germany and on the West Coast by Imperial Japan. He is one of six people who can restore history to its rightful order -- even though it would mean his own death. "A magnificent alternate history, set against the backdrop of one of the the greatest maritime disasters." Library Journal “Imaginative, monolithic, action-packed… The reader will not be disappointed.” — Bookseller and Publisher "Time travel, airships, the Titanic, Roswell ... Kowalski builds a decidedly original creature that blends military science fiction, conspiracy theory, alternate history, and even a dash of romance." Publishers Weekly "Kowalski effortlessly smashes together high art and grand adventure in this alt-history juggernaut." John Birmingham, acclaimed author of Weapons of Choice "Exciting action, twisty and ingenious characterisation, and complicated time-travel plotting, deftly handled." S.M. Stirling, NYT bestselling author of The Tears of the Sun "A non-stop chase that takes place across two thousand miles ... and one hundred years of perdurant time." Walter Jon Williams, NYT bestselling author of Deep State