"Fine alternate history tales"

This fifteen short story collection contains what if alternate history tales that will delight genre fans. Each tale takes a key scientific or technological element and changes when it occurred so that it either intersects at an earlier pivotal moment in history such as the Sumerians inventing the printing press in BC or never materialized such as Galileo fails to release his findings. The tales are all well written and the explanation of the REVISION point is fun to follow to ascertain whether the reader agrees with the author's logic. Intriguing are those with a modern aspect to include Tesla inventing a laser in the nineteenth century, Livingstone bringing AIDS out of Africa in the nineteenth century and the government pushing aquanauts over astronauts and banning the Internet. Mindful of the Marvel Comics What If series, this terrific collection will have the audience thinking of new ones such as what if an underpaid overworked book reviewer was given a guitar instead of Narnia?

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted August 15, 2004

Some of today's top science fiction writers explore the futures that might have been, including original stories from Julie E. Czerneda and other great names in the genre.