Category Archives: Alternate History

Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland

Alternate History, Female Authors, Regular Guy Book Reviews, Spunky Heroine, Stand-alone

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is brilliant, fast-paced, and will give you sore wrists because it’s a thick, heavy book, but you will not want to put it down.

An expert in ancient languages is hired by a mysterious government agency to translate some documents that suggest that magic actually once existed in the world. But the advance of science caused magic to disappear in 1851. However, the existence of a two-hundred-year-old witch and some fancy technology allow a limited amount of magic to occur in this world, and soon the language expert and others are being sent back in time to repair history. And, if they’re lucky, bring magic back to the world. Continue reading →

Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Alternate History, Literary, Regular Guy Book Reviews, Stand-alone

The alternate history Never Let Me Go follows the lives of several children who grew up in a strange, special school. It’s very well written (the author is the guy who wrote The Remains of the Day and won the Nobel Prize for Literature), but the real focus of the book is not really about the characters, but about the slow reveal of why the school and the children were special. Continue reading →

23 Best Alternate History Books

Alternate History, List
Possible Earths

Possible Earths

Since the present time is just the wildly unlikely result of several trillion coincidences, it makes sense that humans would occasionally wonder what would happen if one or two events concluded differently.

Most alternate history stories are some variation of “What if Hitler had won the Civil War, and was a dinosaur?” but there are some great, well, alternatives, in the list below.

Continue reading →