The ten best alternative history stories you may never have read (or even heard of)

There were only four issues of Stirring Science
ever published. The February 1941 edition
contained one of the 10 best extremely obscure
alternate history stories on my list (#9).

I don't think you can write alternate history without loving to read it, and these days that's a rapidly expanding field. There are plenty of lists out there that will send you to the same (often damn fine) dozen or so novels as "the place to start" or "the best of the best." Also, to be honest, there's a lot of crap out there, too (says the author who is modestly hoping you didn't think his story was such crap).

But what I wanted to do today is give you a list of alternative history novels and stories you've probably never read, and possibly have never heard of (in the case of #9 I'm pretty sure I'll hit both). Links are provided to get you to (when possible) the cheapest eBook version out there. Unfortunately, in a couple of cases there aren't cheap versions easily available, so you will have to hunt for it.

Special prize for the tenacious: the first person who can prove to me that he or she has found a copy of #9 and read it (by providing the story protagonist's name in a comment) will win a free copy of the upcoming Stalin's Wager (sequel to MacArthur's Luck), delivered to you at least a week before it becomes generally available online. Have it.

Meanwhile, my list of the really obscure and really good alternate histories. ...

1. Manly Wade Wellman, Twice in Time: 

Everybody who reads alternate history is probably familiar with L. Sprague de Camp's seminal novel Lest Darkness Fall, first published in John Campbell's Unknown in 1939. What you possibly don't know is that Campbell first accepted and then rejected an equally excellent time-travel/alternate history novel by Manly Wade Wellman (better known for his horror and supernatural fiction than his early SF). This was a novel about a man who intentionally traveled back to Renaissance Italy. Campbell wanted some editorial changes because he didn't like the personality of the lead character; Wellman, who didn't need Campbell when other SF pulps like Thrilling Wonder and Amazing were paying just as well, yanked the story and sent to Mort Weisinger at Better Publications. Weisinger (later the infamous editor of Superman comics for two decades) snapped it up for the May 1940 issue of Startling Stories. Unfortunately, thereafter Twice in Time languished in relative obscurity. Wellman's novel is meticulously well researched, involves engaging characters, and although it telegraphs it resolution just a little it is every bit as good as (if completely different from) the better-known de Camp novel. Thanks to Karl Edward Wagner, you can now find it for a reasonable price in paperback or on Kindle.

2. Keith Roberts, Pavane (the audiobook version is excellent)

This is one of those books that everybody has probably heard of, but few people today have actually read it. The Spanish Armada conquers England after the unexpected death of Elizabeth I and turns it into a Catholic-dominated kingdom. The "novel" is told in a sequence of several (sort of) interlocking novelettes, and the style of Roberts' writing is not necessarily attractive to those with more modern sensibilities. In reality, this is a work you should listen to; thanks to Neil Gaiman (who selected it) and Stephen Crossley (who narrates it) you can do just that. This is one you really should not miss.

3. Michael Moorcock, Behold the Man

This 1968 novella about a time traveller who goes back looking for Jesus only to. ... [we'll just leave that blank if you don't know] won the 1968 Nebula Award for Best Novella. Ponderous in the pretentious way that self-conscious New Wave authors often had about them, Moorcock's story is also well-researched and often (unintentionally, I fear) darkly funny.

4. Stephen Vincent Benet, The Curfew Tolls

A short story, too often eclipsed by Benet's better-known post-apocalytpic By the Waters of Babylon, this gem involves the question of what would have happened to Napoleon Bonaparte if he'd been born in a slightly different time. The answer is quite poignant, and this story alone is worth purchasing the anthology in which it appears.

5. Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry succeeds in setting off a massive slave revolt that itself leads to a very different Civil War--and a very different America 100 years or so later. A slender book, well told (as virtually all of Bisson's stories are), but usually excluded from lists of alternative history novels for some reason I've never been able to fathom.

6. James Thayer. S-Day (available in Kindle Unlimited)

Thayer is better known for spy novels and other potboilers (and I use that term respectfully), but this fairly obscure novel about an England in 1942 waiting for the German Army (which never invaded Russia) to hit the beaches even as the first American troops arrive. The Patton-analogue character is both compelling and tragic, and the conclusion of this book is literally almost heart-stopping.

7. George Bernau, Promises to Keep (available on Kindle Unlimited)

Originally published in 1988, this novel covers some similar ground as Stephen King's more recent novel about JFK's assassination. Bernau doesn't use time travel, however, he just decide to see what would happen if the shots fired in Dallas only seriously injured the young President Kennedy Cassiday, and examined the pitfalls of recovering after your VP has already taken power and there's still an active conspiracy to keep you out of the way ... permanently.

8. Malcolm Jameson, Time Column

A forgotten novel from Mort Weisinger's Thrilling Wonder (see #1 above) in which a beleaguered Great Britain discovers time travel in the midst of the Second World War, and uses it to send an army back in time to move to the coordinates of a then-undefended Berlin where it will re-appear and decide the war. Of course, nothing ever happens quite like you planned it, and the past turns out not to be quite what anybody expected, either. Jameson, a naval officer retired for health reasons who took up writing SF like Robert Heinlein, is one of the forgotten master writers of the 1938-1942 "Golden Age" of SF, primarily because he died of throat cancer in 1944. Thankfully, many of his works are becoming available again through eBooks; see especially Anachron Inc. and Other Stories.

9. Donald A. Wollheim, Strange Return

You probably won't manage to find this one because it's a short story that first appeared in Stirring Science (February 1941), a magazine that Wollheim himself edited on such a shoestring that he couldn't even pay his writers. So he wrote this one himself as "Lawrence Woods," and allowed the Canadian version of Uncanny Tales to reprint it six months later. Other than that, it has never been reprinted. That's shame. It's a neat little novelette about a guy who comes back to Earth after an experimental flight in his own rocket (a common enough theme for the period), only to find out that he didn't quite land on the Earth he left. History, it seems, has changed while he was gone. ...

10. Michael Kurland and S. W. Barton, The Last President

To many SF fans Michael Kurland is chiefly known for finishing some of H. Beam Piper's incomplete manuscripts in his Terro-Human Future History series (and I haven't met a lot of people who think well of them). He's also, however, a very well-known mystery writer. This novel asks the question that many of us who lived through the time have often wondered: "What if Richard Nixon hadn't botched the cover-up of Watergate?" It's sort of a riff on Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey's much more famous Seven Days in May, except that (because we've all seen the movie which includes unquestionably Burt Lancaster's best performance ever), in The Last President there's a very real question of whether our democracy will survive the crisis. I won't spoil the ending for you.