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- A Different Flesh
series8 books1985
similar byalternate historynorth americascience fiction+2 more
Harry Turtledove's A Different Flesh is a collection of linked alternate-history stories imagining a North America where Homo erectus survived alongside Ice Age megafauna into the modern era, taking the ecological and historical place occupied by Native American civilizations in our own timeline. The linked stories follow European contact, exploitation, and study of these surviving hominids across centuries of altered American history, from early colonization through more recent settings. It's anthropological alternate history more concerned with what contact does to the newly "discovered" species than with conventional adventure plotting.
- The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinsonstandalone novel2002
similar bycolonialismchallengingalternate historyscience fictionreflective+1 more
What if the Black Death had killed nearly everyone in Europe instead of a third of it? Kim Stanley Robinson opens on that premise with a Mongol scout named Bold, who finds a Hungarian city emptied by plague and only narrowly escapes execution meant to contain the contagion; sold into slavery, he ends up serving aboard a Chinese treasure fleet alongside a young African companion. From there the novel follows a recurring cast of souls, reincarnated across centuries and identifiable book to book by the first letter of their names, through an alternate history in which Islamic and Chinese civilizations, not a devastated Europe, shape the world's future.
- The Island of Dr. Moreau
series12 books1896
similar by19th centuryscience fiction
H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau follows a shipwrecked man stranded on a remote island where a reclusive scientist creates human-animal hybrids through vivisection, using the scenario to probe questions of cruelty, control, and what separates humanity from the beasts it experiments on. The premise has drawn later reimaginings gathered alongside it here, including Brian Aldiss's Moreau's Other Island and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, each transplanting Wells's central idea into a new setting and voice. Taken together, the group traces one unsettling premise across more than a century of speculative fiction rather than forming a single ongoing story.
- Babel, or, The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
R. F. Kuangstandalone novel2022
similar bycolonialismchallenging19th century
Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution is a 2022 novel of speculative fiction by R. F. Kuang set in a fantastical version of Oxford in 1830s England. Thematically similar to The Poppy War (2018–20), Kuang's first book series, the book criticizes British imperialism, racism and capitalism, and the complicity of academia, knowledge, and language in perpetuating and enabling them.
- The Old Drift
Namwali Serpellstandalone novel2019
similar bycolonialismchallengingscience fiction+1 more
The Old Drift is a 2019 historical fiction and science fiction novel by Zambian author Namwali Serpell. Set in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, it is Serpell's debut novel and follows the lives of three interwoven families in three generations. It won the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
- Culture
series15 books1987
completed
part of The Culture
similar byscience fiction+2 more
The Culture series is a science fiction series written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks and released from 1987 until 2012. The stories centre on The Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main themes of the series are the dilemmas that an idealistic, more-advanced civilization faces in dealing with smaller, less-advanced civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds barbaric. In some of the stories, action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of the Culture in its plans to civilize the galaxy. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to the events of previous novels.
- Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Vladimir Nabokovstandalone novel1969
similar bychallenging19th centurynorth americaalternate historyscience fiction+1 more
An alternate-world novel by the celebrated author of "Lolita" in which North America is a 19th- and early 20th-century province of Russia still ruled by Tsars.
- The Crystal Empire
L. Neil Smithstandalone novel1986
similar bycolonialismalternate historyscience fiction+1 more
The Crystal Empire is a 1986 novel by American science fiction and alternate history writer L. Neil Smith. It is set in an alternate universe that shares with Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, Robert Silverberg's The Gate of Worlds and Harry Turtledove's In High Places a point of divergence where the Black Death kills much more of Europe's population than it did in reality, opening the way for a Muslim conquest of Europe. The plague also decimates the Mongol Empire, allowing a Mughal power to arise in the Far East in its place.
- Hainish
series33 books1964
completed
similar byscience fictionreflective
The Hainish Cycle consists of a number of science fiction novels and stories by Ursula K. Le Guin. The cycle is set in a future history that features civilizations of human beings on planets orbiting a number of nearby stars, including Terra ("Earth"); these humans are contacting each other for the first time and establishing diplomatic relations, as well as setting up a confederacy under the guidance of the oldest of the human worlds, the peaceful planet Hain. In this history, human beings did not evolve on Earth, but they were instead the result of interstellar colonies planted by Hain in the distant past, after which interstellar travel ceased for an extended period. Some of the human races have new genetic traits, a result of ancient Hainish experiments in genetic engineering; this includes people who can dream while awake, and a world of hermaphroditic people who only enter active sexuality once per month, not knowing which sex will manifest in them. In keeping with Le Guin's narrative approach, she uses varied social and environmental settings to explore the anthropological and sociological outcomes of human evolution in those environments. The author often discounted the characterization of a so-called "Hainish Cycle".
- Temeraire
series48 books2006
similar by19th centuryalternate history
Temeraire is a series of nine alternate history fantasy novels written by American author Naomi Novik. The novels follow the adventures of Captain William Laurence and his dragon, the eponymous Temeraire, and reimagine events of the Napoleonic Wars with "an air force of dragons, manned by crews of aviators". His Majesty's Dragon, the first entry in the series, won the Compton Crook Award in 2007 and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel the same year. Temeraire: In the Service of the King, an omnibus volume collecting the first three novels, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2007. Temeraire was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2017.
- Island
Aldous Huxleystandalone novel1962
similar bychallengingreflective+2 more
Island is a 1962 utopian manifesto and novel by English writer Aldous Huxley, the author's final work before his death in 1963. Although it has a plot, the plot largely serves to further conceptual explorations rather than setting up and resolving conventional narrative tension.
- Lost Continent of Atlantis
series5 books2005
similar by19th centuryalternate history+1 more
Atlantis is an alternate history series written by Harry Turtledove. The point of divergence occurs around 85 million years ago when the eastern portion of the North American continent splits off from the rest of the continent and forms Atlantis, a separate continent farther east in the Atlantic Ocean.
- Through Darkest Europe
Harry Turtledovestandalone novel2018
similar bychallengingalternate historyscience fiction+2 more
Through Darkest Europe is an alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. The book is set in an alternate present in which Islamic countries form a prosperous, democratic and progressive First World, while underdeveloped Christian countries suffer from religious fanaticism.
- Bring the Jubilee
Ward Moorestandalone novel1953
similar by19th centuryalternate historynorth americascience fictionreflective
From the flaps of the Farrar, Straus and Young first edition: ""Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921." So Hodge Backmaker begins his story of the harsh and curious world he lived in, a world in which the South won the Civil War and the all-powerful Confederacy dominated the poor and backward North; a North that had neither a transcontinental railroad, and where television was undreamed of. Like most Northerners, Hodge was poor - but he had ambition. A printer's handyman in 1938, he had since become an eminent historian. Hodge's special interest was the American past, when the States had been united and had seemed to be on the brink of prosperity and technical progress. And then he was offered an opportunity no historian could resist - he could go back in time. Hodge chsoe to return to a certain field near Gettysburg on a day in July, 1863... Bring the Jubilee is a novel of curious events, of adventures and reflection, of passions and comment. It at time Hodge's world, its horse-carriages and gas-lights, minibles and tinugraphs and the Great Emperors' War of 1914 faintly resembles our own, it is perhaps, because that world might well become a reality: on the battlefield of Gettysburg there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One July morning in 1863 the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which - in the view of many historians - was the turning point of the Civil War."
- Milton in America
Peter Ackroydstandalone novel1996
similar bycolonialismalternate historynorth america+1 more
An alternate history novel in which the 17th Century English writer, John Milton, emigrates to America to escape the wrath of the royalists for his Puritan views. He is elected leader of a Puritan colony in New England and leads it in a war against a Catholic colony. A tale of religious intolerance.
- H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds
universe65 books1898
Start hereThe War of the Worlds · Start here
similar byscience fiction+2 more
No one would have believed, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely from the timeless worlds of space. And then the cylinders fell. H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds opens in the quiet of the Surrey commons, where a falling star proves to be the first Martian craft — and from the pit rise the towering tripods, the Heat-Ray, the choking Black Smoke and the creeping red weed, wielded by minds that regard mankind much as we regard the creatures we boil for supper. This is invasion rendered as natural disaster: cold, methodical, and vast beyond argument. Wells' 1898 novel is the seed; everything else grows from that Martian soil. The catalogue gathers direct sequels and continuations alongside a wide field of other hands. In War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches the invasion is retold across the whole planet through the eyes of Twain, Verne, Tolstoy, Lowell and Kipling; in the Manly Wade and Wade Wellman crossover, Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Professor Challenger take the field against the machines; and Scott Washburn's Great Martian War stretches the fighting into a decades-long alternate history of steam, artillery and grinding attrition. It is a loose shared world — no single decreed sequence, many voices answering one calamity. What sets this world apart is its refusal of heroics: the invaders fall not to generals but to the smallest things of Earth, humbling and indifferent. Begin, always, with Wells' original novel — it is short, and it is the ground every later book stands upon. From there follow your appetite: Global Dispatches for the panorama, the Holmes campaign for adventure, Washburn for the long war.
- New Crobuzon
series4 books2000
similar bychallenging+2 more
The New Crobuzon books are three standalone novels by China Miéville set in and around New Crobuzon, a vast, corrupt industrial city in his invented world of Bas-Lag where magic, biopunk technology, and several sentient species coexist. Perdido Street Station follows a renegade scientist and his lover after an experiment unleashes something monstrous on the city, while The Scar and Iron Council return to the same setting with different casts and only loose continuity between books.
