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In each of the book’s ten sections-which unfold as social histories spanning the years AD 1405 to about AD 2045-characters are reincarnated into each new time and only identified to the reader by the first letter of their name being consistent in each life. This massive, Locus Award-winning novel covers hundreds of years and explores how the world might have been if the Black Death had killed 99% of Europe’s population, instead of just a third. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (2002)Įvery day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. Detective Xavier March teams up with a US journalist to investigate the murder, and the pair soon find themselves embroiled in a sinister political conspiracy involving the upper echelons of the Nazi Party. On the eve of the now-reclusive Adolf Hitler’s seventy-fifth birthday, the body of a high-ranking official in the Nazi government is discovered in a lake near Berlin’s most prestigious suburb. The Greater German Reich maintains an uneasy détente with its nuclear rival, the United States. Violence crackled around him in the dry air, like static electricity. Manhattan lives among us, Watchmen is a sprawling, pitch-black vision of a broken world peopled by the jaded, the fallen, and the damned. Set in an alternative 1985 where Nixon is still president, the world is edging toward WWIII, superheroes have been outlawed as dangerous vigilantes, and an invulnerable superman known as Dr.
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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ dystopian superhero opus did change the way many people thought about both comics and caped crusaders. The greatest graphic novel of all time? Quite possibly. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors. In our list of ten great novels that rewrite history, you’ll also find a Jewish homeland in Alaska, a fifth-term Richard Nixon governing 1980s America, a steampunk nation of freed slaves, and an underground railroad that’s anything but a metaphor. However, not every classic of the genre features an aging Hitler presiding over a fallen world. Yes, when it comes to speculative fiction, we just can’t resist reading about the twentieth century’s greatest monsters goose-stepping their way into the information age. In contemporary alternate history literature, undoubtedly the most frequently explored premise is the what-if-the-Nazis-had-won postulation. They allow us to cherry-pick history’s most sensational what if… moments and disappear down their rabbit holes for a few terrifying hours. We all love a good alternate history yarn (no one more so, it must be said, than the genre’s most prolific practitioner, Harry Turtledove, none of whose books appear on the list below but whom we doff our hat to nonetheless).