best alternate history/present/future
Explore the best alternate history, present, and future books that reimagine worlds and timelines. Discover gripping tales of what could have been or might be!
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The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
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Celestial Matters
by Richard Garfinkle
In an alternate world where Ptolemaic astronomy is real, scientists from the thousand year empire of Alexander the Great attempt a journey to the sun.
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The Guns of the South
by Harry Turtledove
"It is absolutely unique--without question the most fascinating Civil War novel I have ever read." Professor James M. McPherson Pultizer Prize-winning BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM January 1864--General Robert E. Lee faces defeat. The Army of Northern Virginia is ragged and ill-equpped. Gettysburg has broken the back of the Confederacy and decimated its manpower. Then, Andries Rhoodie, a strange man with an unplaceable accent, approaches Lee with an extraordinary offer. Rhoodie demonstrates an amazing rifle: Its rate of fire is incredible, its lethal efficiency breathtaking--and Rhoodie guarantees unlimited quantitites to the Confederates. The name of the weapon is the AK-47.... Selected by the Science Fiction Book Club A Main Selection of the Military Book Club
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Nineteen Eighty-four
by George Orwell
Eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity in this satire of totalitarian barbarism.