Favorite classics in alternate history
Explore the best classic alternate history books, from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle to Lest Darkness Fall. A curated list of timeless what-if favorites.
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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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The Alteration
by Kingsley Amis
Taking part in the 1976 requiem for Stephen III of England, a boy soprano is unaware that his faultless voice has led his elders to select him as a castrato
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Lest Darkness Fall
by Lyon Sprague De Camp
In "Lest Darkness Fall," twentieth-century academic Martin Padway travels through time to prevent the fall of the Roman Empire, while in "To Bring the Light," Herosilla must forge the birth of Roman civilization.
