Weekly Update #29

Editor's Note

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, so I will not be writing my usual number of weekly posts.  I do plan to post a review of Prologue by Greg Ahlgren and post an interview with said author this week as well.

I am still polishing up my untitled, alternate history short story and hope to have it ready for the publisher by next month.  Kier Salmon has been very helpful as a beta reader and I wanted to give her a special thank you in this Weekly Update.

Meanwhile, we got our first readers from Kenya and Pakistan.  Welcome.  On top of these new readers, we are less then 200 page views away from breaking our monthy view record!

And now the news.

The Future of Airship Updates

So I have written two Airship Updates (which can be seen here and here), but I am questioning whether I will continue with this feature of Alternate History Weekly Update.  While I love reading about airships, I just do not know if I can give justice to the topic.  So I am playing around with the poll feature of Blogger and I am leaving up the future of Airship Update to you, the reader.  Your question is "Should Mitro keep writing Airship Updates" and you have three answers to choose from:

• Yes.
• Yes, but someone else should write it.
• No.

 The final decision is up to you.

Update on Matthew Quinn

Matthew Quinn is the author of the short story "Coil Gun" and is a friend of Alternate History Weekly Update.  According to his blog, he has been very busy as of late.  He has has wrote some comments on the Destroyermen series and is writing a screenplay for "Coil Gun".  This sounds like an excellent idea to me and I wish Quinn the best of luck in this endeavour.

Thomas Mallon on Alternate History

For those who do not know, Thomas Mallon is a famous novelist and critic.  Mallon is the author of the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, and most recently Fellow Travelers; as well as writing four works of nonfiction. He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column for ten years, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and Harper's. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and became Director of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2004. He then served as Deputy Chairman of the NEH.

So he has a pretty impressive resume, but does he know what he is talking about when he discusses alternate history?  You can check out his article on The New Yorker Never Happened: Fictions of Alternative History and listen to him talk about the genre on The New Yorker Out Loud.  On that podcast he discusses the Harry Turtledove books he read over the summer and Stephen King's new novel 11/22/63.

Links to the Multiverse

Articles

10 Themes Shared By Historical Fiction and Science Fiction by Annalee Newitz at i09.

Universe or two-niverse by Frank Mulligan at Wicked Local Plymouth.

The Multiverse and Theism: Theistic reflections on many worlds by J. W. Wartick.

Steampunk powers female characters forward by Ashley Strickland at Geek Out/CNN.

When Time is a Battlefield: The Most Brutal Time Wars! by Charlie Jane Anders at iO9.

Books

Review of 11/22/63 by Stephen King done by Mike Fischer at The Kansas City Star.

Review of Anno Dracula by Kim Newman done by The Virtual Victorian.

Review of Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove done by Agamedes at PissWeakly Reviews.

Online Works of Alternate History

Begun that revision of Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 I've mentioned a few times at Fiat Lux.

Fifth-place teams put 'wild' in Wild Card by Christina Kahrl at ESPN MLB.

Newt Gingrich Is an Author of Alternative Histories. What If He Wrote an Alternative History of Himself? by John DeVore at The New Republic.

Trimback by Jim Reid.

Two Interesting Alternate-History Scenarios... at The World According to Quinn.

Television

‘Family Guy’s 9/11 Counterfactual by Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress.

Games

Review of Cold War Gone Hot done by Whisperin' Al at The Wargame Shed