Showing results for "blackstone" in Alternate History

In 1349, one small town in Germany disappeared and was never resettled. Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical-physicist girlfriend, Sharon, become interested. By all logic, the town should have survived, but it didn't. Why? What was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago?

An epic saga of America’s might-have-been, Voyage is a powerful, sweeping novel of how, if President Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s. Imaginatively created from the true lives and real events, Voyage returns to the geniuses of NASA and the excitement of the Saturn rocket and includes historical figures from Neil Armstrong to Ronald Reagan who are interwoven with unforgettable characters whose dreams mirror the promise of a young space program that held the world in thrall.

Menedemos, the young dashing sea captain, and his helper, the scholarly Sostratos, are sea-traders from the Greek island of Rhodes. Fearless sailors, they will travel any distance to make a profit or to search for rich treasures. While they trade in fineries such as wine and silk (and even, to the chagrin of many, peacocks), they live in dangerous times with pirates, thieves, and barbarians.

In an alternate Renaissance Italy where the church regulates magic and licenses magicians, fiery Fiametta Beneforte wants to be more than her goldsmith-mage father's unpaid apprentice. But when the Duchy of Montefoglia is laid under military and magical siege, she unexpectedly must join with Thur Ochs, a young Swiss miner and foundryman, to tap their skills in both metalwork and necromancy to rescue her father's soul and combat an evil sorcerer.

Like the tentacles of an octopus, the railroad in California reached out across the state, grasping everything of value in the state. Based on the bloody Mussel Slough Tragedy - a conflict between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad - The Octopus is a stunning novel chronicling the twilight of the frontier West. A depiction of the tensions between the railroad, the ranchers, and the ranchers’ League. The book emphasizes the control of “forces” - such as the power of railroad monopolies - over individuals.

It is the 14th century, and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur - the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe's population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been - a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation.

When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina - a Jewish state established in the early 20th century - is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch. While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to act as though he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state's security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.

Menedemos, the young dashing sea captain, and his helper (and cousin), the scholarly Sostratos, are back in a new adventure. Soon after their successful return to Rhodes the two cousins find that Greece is a dangerous place after the death of Alexander. Various factions fight and vie for power and the neutrality of Rhodes itself is threatened as opposing forces maneuver for advantage in the eastern Mediterranean.

Socially awkward Will, grieving her mother’s death, is fascinated by Dolly, a beautiful, charming rebel with an insatiable taste for adrenaline. Both musicians come alive at Harlem jazz clubs and Prohibition-era speakeasies. Dazzled by the world they are discovering together, their romance ignites. But while Will is obsessed with Dolly, Dolly is obsessed with crime. The power dynamics keep shifting as Will agrees to commit petty crimes with Dolly in exchange for sexual favors. When the University and their rich families unite to split them up, passions escalate.

Three-year-old Vangie is mute and unresponsive. She shows no interest in the people or world around her, much to the frustration of her callous foster parents. Little do they know, Vangie is otherwise occupied observing “ghosts”—an infinite number of versions of herself, in an infinite number of parallel universes. When a tornado hits their trailer and Vangie is severely injured, she makes a desperate leap into another timeline where she survives the tornado, but her foster parents do not.

This time the stage is one of the greatest sea battles ever fought: the Battle of Salamis, 306 BC. The small, free, and independent polis of Rhodes is trying to stay neutral between the local great powers, each ruled by one of Alexander the Great’s marshals: one-eyed Antigonos, who controls Asia Minor, and Ptolemaios, ruler of Egypt. As tensions between the great powers escalate, Menedemos and Sostratos are trying to resolve their own problems, oblivious to the fact that one of the greatest navel fleets in ancient history is about to set sail.

1941. An hour before the attack on Pearl Harbour, a man from the future materializes in President Roosevelt's office. His offer of military aid may cut the war and its pending atrocities short and alter the course of the future. The future. Welcome to Mars, where the lives of three ordinary people become entwined in one dingy smokesbar the moment an assassin opens fire. The target: the mysterious Bill Glimmung. But is Glimmung even real?

Menedemos, the young dashing sea captain, and his helper (and cousin) the scholarly Sostratos, are back in their third adventure. This time around the two cousins end up in the Sacred Land, Jerusalem, where they encounter a strange religion. This fascinates Sostratos, who wants to learn as much as he can about the strange monotheists living there. The more worldly Menedemos looks toward more common pleasures, particularly those involving pretty women (not letting small inconveniences like their marriage to other men get in the way).

This is the tale of Lukka, the Hittite soldier who traveled across Greece in search of the vicious slave traders who kidnapped his wife and sons. He tracks them all the way to war-torn Troy, where he proves himself a warrior to rank with noble Hector and swift Achilles. Lukka is the man who builds the Trojan horse for crafty Odysseus, who topples the walls of Jericho for the Israelites, and who steals the beautiful Helen.

Two dates burn fiercely in the memory of millions of Americans: November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001. These two tragedies bracket Unafraid, a story grounded in a simple question: What if the fatal bullet fired on that sunny Dallas afternoon had veered three inches off target? Unafraid lays out a compelling answer, rich with the public adventures and private dramas of 20th-century icons—from J. Edgar Hoover to the Beatles—played out on a transformed world stage.

On the beach near his home, private investigator Wil Hardesty is approached by a Vietnamese fisherman. Vinh Tien is not convinced that the disappearance at sea of his only son was the accident it was ruled. Wil, a Vietnam vet, resisting the ghosts of a past war, decides to help Vinh Tien because Wil, too, lost a son to the ocean.

When the family patriarch, Elliot, dies, it's revealed that he had been keeping five separate families, and in the aftermath of their discovery, his widows and children must come together to keep from losing all they have. But their livelihood is threatened when Elliot's estranged son tries to blackmail them, unleashing a series of violent confrontations between different factions of the family. A sparse family drama reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, combined with the intimate first-person narratives of Kazuo Ishiguro, Lord of California is a powerful debut novel.

This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad—in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus “with minds and wisdoms”—humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce’s tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are—and who creates them—can be drastically different.

Alternating between nineteenth-century Europe and present-day New England, this tale follows the great British painter J. M. W. Turner - and his scene of artists, intellectuals, and lovers - and Henry, a middle-aged family man whose otherwise mundane existence is disrupted by the discovery of The Center of the World, Turner’s controversial painting of Helen of Troy that had been thought lost forever.

North America, 2065. In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.

The final volume in Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias triptych, Pacific Edge is a brilliant work of science fiction and an outstanding literary achievement.