Standing On the Edge of the Abyss

Guest post by Thomas Diana.

What if Japan changes its strategy and tries to stop the war before it’s too late?

What if the 20 July plot succeeds?

What would the world look like during the Cold War or in the 2000s?

In June 1942, Japan suffers a major defeat during the battle of Midway losing four aircraft carriers. Most Japanese leaders will not admit it, but they lost the war that day. Few of them understand it and they will work to overthrown the Tojo military government, protect the Emperor and change the course of war in the Pacific.

From the Solomon Islands to the Mariana Trench, from Burma to China, the war will follow a different path, because Japan wants to win the peace. The only way is to push the US Navy to strike before she’s too strong to be beaten.

In Europe, the 20 July plot and Operation Valkyrie succeed in killing Hitler and his staff in the Wolfsschanze. The plotters will also convince most of the SS that the coup has been staged by Himmler, Goebbels and Goering. Once again, some politicians and military leaders will try to achieve peace in honor in the West so they can focus their forces in the East.

Unfortunately, after what happened in Asia only few month ago, Stalin wants a total victory against Germany and to avoid any conflict with the Man of Steel, the allied leaders will not change their mind either: unconditional surrender. This is the only way to not unleash the anger of Koba.

But even in this new Germany, some leaders can’t accept the humiliation of unconditional surrender.
The war will be long. The war will be bloody.

This is the story of the French alternate history book Au Bord de l’Abime, the first book in a trilogy.
It’s not a novel but a compilation of fake articles, book extracts and web pages (even a thread from a discussion forum) which details this alternate World War II and gives various points of view over 734 pages. Chapters alternate from political and technical stuff, to epic and bloody battles, or simple biography and OOB. You can expect new destinies for people like Isoroku Yamamoto, Kanji Ishiwara, Tomoyuki Yamashita, Claus Von Stauffenberg, Erwin Rommel and others. Even FDR will enjoy a different destiny.

The book also contains a hundred illustrations, maps, flags and insignias. The illustrations (portraits, battle scenes, vehicles) are made to looks like the real picture from this time.

On the technological side there is already two alternate vehicle design. The Japanese Navy has two anti-aircraft battleships and the German Luftwaffe has an additional variant of the Me-262 jet-fighter. But to know more about it you’ll have to read the book.

Au Bord de l’Abime is also an opportunity to show some details and historical figures from a different angle. The first volume ends with some hints on what will happen during the second and third volumes. You can also expect some Easter-eggs from other alternate history and science fiction books, plus some cryptozoology and nerd stuff.

The book is available on Kindle and there is also a collector's edition with some color illustrations and bonuses.

The bad news is the book is only available in French.

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Thomas Diana is a French self-taught writer and illustrator, who previously worked in the video game industry. Passionate about history and geopolitics, he found a cool way to understand and manipulate them thanks to alternate history. He also wrote a short alternate history called Platine, which is available on Kindle. You can follow his current project on Facebook and discover his illustrations on DeviantArt and Artstation. He’s also the founder of a French Alternate History forum.

Remember, Remember the 6th of November?

Guest post by Tony Morgan.

On November 5th 1605 a major terrorist atrocity was prevented in England. If this had not happened the King would have been killed, Parliament and his government destroyed and the modern world would be a very different place.

Fascinated by the parallels between the England of 1605 and today – concerns over Europe, terrorism and government surveillance – I have written an exciting new alternate history based novel, REMEMBER, REMEMBER THE 6TH OF NOVEMBER, which explores the events of the so-called Gunpowder Plot and asks two questions – what if things had turned out differently and do we ever learn from the mistakes of history?

November 5th is a hugely important date in the calendar of the United Kingdom. Each year, the evening is filled with smoke from our bonfires and fireworks light up our skies. We call it Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night but what is it all about?

These events mark an annual celebration, not for what Guy Fawkes did but for what he was prevented from doing. On the eve of the Opening of Parliament, Fawkes was found hiding beneath the building, watching over an arsenal of gunpowder. The plan was to detonate this in the morning and destroy the building with the King, his sons and government inside.

Fawkes and his fellow plotters, led by the charismatic Robert Catesby, were Catholics, outraged at Protestant King James I’s policies of persecution of their religion, particularly as they believed he’d promised a more tolerant approach. Following Fawkes’s arrest, he was tortured and the other conspirators rounded up. Many were killed during the ensuing pursuit and in a bloody gun battle. The survivors, including Fawkes, were placed on trial for treason and eventually hung, drawn and quartered, a particularly brutal form of execution, in London.

But what if they had been successful? Would our world have been different? The answer is a categorical yes, and in many ways. In our reality, King James lived on for another 20 years. He was eventually succeeded by his son, Charles, who led the country into a divisive and bloody civil war, which eventually led to his own execution. If James and Charles had been murdered as intended by the plotters, could the English civil war have been avoided?

King James oversaw early English expansion into North America, as part of an embryonic British Empire. He actively encouraged the Protestant “plantation” of Ireland, sowing the seeds for centuries of sectarian hatred and violence. If he’d died in 1605, both activities may have turned out very differently. What would have been the impact on the history of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, the US and so many other countries?

Of course, we can’t know for sure. The future would have depended on what happened next, immediately after the explosion of Parliament. Who would have taken control of England? Would the country have been able to remain strong and independent or would it have been invaded and subsequently controlled by Spain or France? All these factors would have been critical determinants for our own present day way of life.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the real events of November 1605 and exploring one view of how things may have ended differently, read REMEMBER, REMEMBER THE 6TH OF NOVEMBER and support two very good causes, as all profits made in 2016 are being donated to charity – and please let us know what you think.

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Tony Morgan is 51, a Welshman living in Yorkshire in England in the UK. He has taken a gap year from work at the age of 50 to explore a range of interests, including writing two alternate history based novels. He returns to his day job in IBM on 7th November 2016.

U-234: Hitler's Last U-Boat...The Hail-Mary Pass to Japan

Guest post by Ian Hall.

Crew from the USS Sutton board the U-234 in May, 1945

On April 30th, 1945, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, were placed in a bomb crater and doused with petrol. Trusted guards were stationed to ensure their bodies were burned beyond all recognition.

In the wake of Hitler’s suicide, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz assumed the position of head of state. Among his first orders was a radio broadcast for all submarines to surface and surrender.

“My U-boat men, six years of war lie behind us… you have fought like lions… U-boat men, unbroken and immaculate, lay down your arms after a heroic fight…”

Few knew the impact his simple statement made in the war against Japan.

U-234 being 'tugged' into Portsmouth, USA

In the middle of the Atlantic, on May 4th, German submarine U-234 first received a garbled version of Dönitz’s message. After much deliberation, six days later, they surfaced to affirm the news. Captain Johann-Heinrich Fehler assembled his crew and passengers, telling them of his intention to surrender to the Americans in Portsmouth.

The only objection to their surrender came from two Japanese Naval officers, Lieutenant Commanders Hideo Tomonaga and Shoji Genzo, who re-stated the U-boats mission; to sail to Japan and deliver essential cargo and weapons. To the Japanese officers, surrender was not an option. The German guards found the two officers on their bunks in full uniform; they had taken poison.

U-Boat U-234 was a modified mine layer, and the largest German submarine still in service, but for her last mission she had been turned into a cargo vessel. Packed into every section of the hull were goods destined for the defense of Japan…

U-234 being 'tugged' into Portsmouth, USA

• A fully functional ME 262; the world’s first jet fighter.
• A Henschel HS 293 guided missile; the world’s first cruise missile.
• Parts for building a V-2; the world’s first intercontinental missile.
• Several tons of blueprints for every weapon built, designed and considered by Germany.
• 1200lbs of Uranium 235 (about 20% of the amount required for an atomic bomb).

ME-262, the fastest plane in the world

Sailors laughed when the Uranium was taken aboard, labeled U-235, they thought they had got the number of the submarine wrong.

Unknown to most of the world, the war had taken a sharp and decisive turn.

As far back as July 1943, the Japanese had one stumbling block to their own Nuclear-bomb project; they could not get enough U-235 to provide them with ‘critical mass’ (the phrase used to denote the amount of Uranium needed to create the chain reaction powering the explosion). Three Japanese submarines had almost got back to Japan with their crucial U-235 cargo, but all were sunk in the attempt.

After the surrender of the U-234, and hearing of its strangely-labeled cargo, Robert Oppenheimer himself searched the Submarine.

The US Uranium enriching plant was situated at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Here, the German uranium was processed, and included in the Manhattan Project’s critical mass.

Three months later, in August 1945, the Americans bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In a material so rare on the earth, it is inconceivable that German Uranium, once destined for Japan's own nuclear program, was not used in the American bombs.

History…. You just can’t make this stuff up.

* * *

Ian Hall's latest series, Avenging Steel, is available in paperback, and in eBooks of all formats. The streets of Edinburgh were his home... this is WW2 alternative history written from the heart.

The Symposium Where Everyone Dies

Guest post by PK Lentz.

In fiction, Greece is not the word. Putting aside the present Scotland craze, for every one novel set in Greece, there are probably ten Roman books. That's understandable. Rome ruled the known world for a good long while, and not by making friends and signing treaties. That makes for good war stories. Meanwhile, when most people think of Greece, it's all silent temples and jury duty and drinking wine at symposia while sharing theories on the nature of virtue.

I studied ancient history in college and read a bunch of Homer in the original epic Greek dialect, from when grammar was a loose set of suggestions. When I decided that instead of writing SF, as I had been, I would put my degrees to use in fiction, there was never any possibility I would draw from anywhere other than Greece. But if not that tranquil Greece of Socrates and Plato, then what? There's the Iliad, of course, arguably the ultimate war epic and deserving of all the praise it gets. But it's been used to death, really, by authors of Historical, SF, and Fantasy alike.

No, my starting point could only be Thucydides. If you only ever read one book on Greek history, it should be Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War (abridged is fine; I understand). The Greece you'll read about there is not the Greece of Platonic dialogues. It's a bloody, brutal world where disagreements between factions of one city turn quickly to open slaughter, where towns are emptied of life because they gave the wrong answer to a herald, and where there are no such things as morality or human rights, only what is most favorable and expedient for a given side. This was the Greece that appealed to me—well, creatively, anyway.

Given that you're visiting this site, you'd probably agree with me that however not-boring history is, there can be a certain something lacking in straight historical fiction. Hence, even though all my viewpoint characters and setting would be purely historical, I planned to have a far-future woman drop in from another dimension and change things. But just as I didn't want any over-civilized, stereotypical Greece, I didn't want your typical time-traveler, either, always thinking things out and fretting about the time-stream. Mine would be pure ass-kicking chaos, the kind of girl your parents would ban from the house if you brought her home.

As for ancient characters, there was only ever one choice for a protagonist. Most people familiar with ancient history know the name Demosthenes as that of an orator of the fourth century BCE. But another Athenian named Demosthenes lived a century earlier and served as an elected general (yes, Athens elected its generals—which makes more sense when you consider that every male citizen of fighting age was in the part-time army). Thucydides provides the primary record of this Demosthenes' existence. He doesn't really give him much attention, but the few mentions suggest Demosthenes was ahead of his time as a strategist, conscious of notions like surprise and ambush and taking advantage of terrain at a time when battles generally were fought by lining up and pushing, with the gods bestowing victory on the worthier city. One of Demosthenes' attempts to be clever ended in disaster, leading to a brief period of disgrace in which he was afraid to go home, lest the voters decide to exile him, as would later happened to Thucydides.

The historical Demosthenes avoided exile and erased his disgrace with a tide-turning victory at Pylos, where he made several hundred besieged Spartans surrender—even though Spartans never, ever surrendered. Ever. Years later, he would go on to co-command Athens' ill-fated Sicilian Expedition, an operation conceived by the much more famous Alcibiades. With very good reason, Demosthenes was not pleased with the assignment. During the expedition, he was captured by Sparta's Syracusan allies and executed on the spot with his fellow (also more famous) general Nicias, essentially winding up 'dead in a ditch.'

My Demosthenes, armed with help from above, could avoid that fate and shape the war to a far greater degree. The aforementioned Athenians, Alcibiades and Nicias, would make appearances. But I would need a Spartan viewpoint. Who better than Styphon, who according to Thucydides was the Spartan to whom fell, after the deaths of two superiors, the unprecedented decision to surrender to Demosthenes? Poor Styphon; it's the only mention of him anywhere in history. And hey, maybe in a brief aside I could even kill off Socrates so those dialogues that Plato gave us never happened...

Crafting alternate history is a bit of a highbrow pursuit, what with the need to work out plausible consequences for a change, and successive changes after that. But at some point in the process of creating my series The Hellennium (from the words Hellenic and millennium, if that's not clear) it became something other than that. Demosthenes and Thalassia (the aforementioned ass-kicker from elsewhen) took over. Their highly dysfunctional relationship became the driving force of events, and I think there's something to that. Real history is not shaped by gray-bearded Father Time sitting in a drawing room crafting consequences: what if this, what if that? It's shaped by humans; by their fears, their loves, their jealousies, their bitterness, their rage, their hatred, their grief. And thus did the world of The Hellennium become populated with broken people, both Greek and alien—because the more broken the people, the more broken the history. It's more fun that way, and ultimately I didn't want to write 'Sci-Fi-Historical' novels as an intellectual exercise in politics, society, and economy. However dark and violent things get (which is very, mind you), I wanted this to be fun. For you and me anyway. Maybe not for Demosthenes.

My original draft of Athenian Steel ended with a Greek army assaulting the young Roman Republic, but on the advice of a literary agent (currently managing the biggest Historical Fantasy series in the world) I cut back the plot and pushed off Rome to Book III. I didn't think there was such a thing as 'too epic,' but I guess there is. Some of the material from that original ending was too good to go to waste (in my humble opinion) so I turned it into a novella with the subtle and intellectual title, Roman Annihilation. You can get it free on Amazon or at my website linked below. In the latter case, you'll also get a free Mythological Fantasy novel and a short story about an ancient Athenian in space which was a bit of a precursor to Athenian Steel.

It's been loads of fun giving the 'other Demosthenes' a do-over, and I have much more in store. He might not exactly enjoy it, but at least I can guarantee he won't wind up dead in a ditch.

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P.K. Lentz is author of Athenian Steel, the sequel to which, Spartan Beast, is due out shortly. Get three free SF&F ebooks by joining his newsletter at www.ironage.space. Signing up will also get you an alert when the full-length Athenian Steel is free for a day or two (including later this month), so you can be ready for Book II. In addition, you'll get access to a 50% preview of Spartan Beast prior to publication and exclusive related bonus material afterward.

The Lion and The Elephant

Guest post by Theo Taylor.

In 326 BC, the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great spanned most of what was considered the known world. Maps of civilization sparsely reached beyond the phalanx laced tendrils of Alexander's empire. From Macedonia in Northern Greece to the banks of the Hydaspes River in modern day India, there was no worldly power present that could best Alexander.

Alexander was a known conqueror, but there exists--even to this day--a hotly contested debate on his competencies as a statesman. On the very border of the Nanda Empire of India, Alexander stumbled most greatly when his ability to politicize his ambitions was met by mutiny by his own army. Having campaigned for nearly a decade, the Macedonian army was fraught with men who began to know and understand quandaries that a legend of their own literature--Ulysses and his long journey home--had suffered himself: home sickness, campaign fatigue and demoralization. The men under Alexander had marched over fifteen hundred kilometers from Pella in Macedon to the very border of India. Imagine setting out from Los Angeles on foot, your destination: Dallas. This is the burden of the Macedonian soldier under the Lion of Macedon.

The campaign in India faltered at the behest of men weary of combat and perhaps the realization that the man they followed carried with him an endless ambition. "Just one more empire," you could imagine Alexander shouting to the assembled ranks of his men. "Just one more empire and we'll turn back." There would be no turning back. Scholars who were present during Alexander's campaigns in Persia allude to the idea that Alexander believed the fathomed "end of the world" rested on the opposite edge of India's great mass. It can be said with some admirable clarity however that once he realized he was wrong, he might've shrugged his shoulders and ordered his men further on. Just one more empire.

Not only were these men left longing for their wives, sons and brothers at home, Macedonian scouts had returned from the further Ganges river with reports of armies under the Nanda Empire awaiting them. Two hundred thousand infantry, eighty thousand horsemen and four thousand war elephants. The forty-thousand man Macedonian Army had no hope to defeat such a vast foe.

The reality is that Alexander was presented with only one option when his men threw down their arms at the banks of the Hydapses: relent. Without an army, Alexander was no conqueror, no champion, no son of Zeus. If ever Alexander possessed a heel akin to the legendary hero Achilles, it was the loyalty of the Macedonian Army. A Macedonian general, Coenus, was allegedly one of the more prominent proponents for turning back and returning home. So bold was Coenus' speech, Alexander agreed that the campaign would end in India. But what if such fate had been kinder to Alexander's ambitions?

Coenus was a reliable commander of one of Alexander's distinct phalanxes. Imagine instead that Coenus falls in battle, either at the Hydaspes or in a previous battle against the Achaemenid Empire. His absence will cast the mutinous lot without a distinct voice to reason with Alexander. Consider this second--albeit less important point of divergence: the Battle of Hydaspes goes entirely in the favor of Alexander the Great. This feat is more probable than Coenus' unlikely death. The Battle on the Hydaspes River was the most brutal of Alexander's entire campaign, with an entire thousand men dead. Considering modern bouts such as Stalingrad and the Somme, a thousand dead seems a pittance. Even in stark comparison to similar ancient battles of Cannae and Lake Trebia (both stunning victories by the Carthaginian general Hannibal), a thousand dead might be at very best an expectation. No, these kind of casualties gave very genuine concern to the average foot soldier in Alexander's comparatively sized field army.

Outnumbered three to one, Alexander faced off against an army--like the Persians--that was under armored, under equipped and intending to use overwhelming force to win the day. Against the long reaching sarissas of the phalanx, it was only a matter of time before they broke. Porus, the king of the Paurava Kingdom that called the Hydaspes River home, was captured. His two sons, his uncle Spitakes and the majority of his commanders were killed. Over 12,000 Indians met their end with almost an equal amount wounded.

The Macedonians were victorious, but it had been earned. The Indians utilized mighty elephants, clad in armored harnesses that often deflected javelin and arrow shot. The Indians fought with tenacity and were led by men that did not flee at the first sign of defeat.

Plutarch later said this of the Macedonians' perspective after the battle had been won: "But this last combat with Porus took off the edge of the Macedonians' courage, and stayed their further progress into India. For having found it hard enough to defeat an enemy who brought but twenty thousand foot and two thousand horse into the field, they thought they had reason to oppose Alexander's design of leading them on to pass the Ganges, too, which they were told was thirty-two furlongs broad and a fathom deep, and the banks on the further side covered with multitudes of enemies."

Had the casualties been lessened, had a more complete victory been won, could Alexander have convinced the men to forge on into the Indian subcontinent? Those unfamiliar with India's daunting history must be reminded here that a mere five years following Alexander's victory at the Hydaspes, the Nanda Empire which sought to oppose Alexander at the Ganges, fell apart completely.

Alexander, with at best a reluctant army, would cross the Hydaspes and make way for the Nanda Empire. The last great foe before reaching the proclaimed "end of the world." The climate of India, a world the likes a Macedonian would have never seen before, might very well become a much more sinister opponent than any Indian army. Thick foliage, flora and fauna so exotic as to be considered alien, and treacherous hazards in the form of razor sharp rocks embedded in deep valleys, jungles so thick to only allow a single man to cross at a time and insects aplenty.

Considering the suffering Alexander's army took through attrition just in returning through the Geodrosian Desert, it's likely he would have suffered similar casualties in a world so distinctly different than the one he was familiar with in the Greek Peninsula and Anatolia.

Militarily, he would have been up against the most terrible armies mustered so far. Historians quote that the Nanda Empire could field over four thousand war elephants, though it's unlikely they could have brought them to bear all at once. Alexander dealt with some forty at the Hydaspes, harassing them with the sarissas of his phalanxes while killing the mahouts who kept the animals under control. Whether or not he could replicate this is uncertain.

How many more battles Alexander would have to win before the Nanda Empire crumbles is the question that determines whether or not Alexander succeeds. Already close to collapse, the Nanda Empire possessed the bottomless manpower to go toe to toe with Alexander, lose battle after battle and remain afloat--if only for a little while. Unfortunately for us--and perhaps thankfully for Alexander--a man named Coenus, on the banks of the Hydaspes in the summer of 325 BC, wasn't to let it be so.

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Theo Taylor is a science fiction writer and essayist. His works have appeared in Asimov's, Every Day Fiction, Aphelion Stories and Thought Catalog. When not penning science fiction stories, he's almost always researching some obscure historical fact or in the gym. Check out his book Rogue Cosmos.

Writing About Racism and Sexism in Historical Fantasy

Guest post by Michael J. Martinez.

Writing about racism and sexism is daunting no matter the medium, whether it’s a novel or, indeed, even this guest post. And when I wrote MJ-12: Inception, set during the Cold War in the late 1940s, I really wrestled with how to approach it.

I firmly believe that women, non-hetero folks, non-binary folks and people of color should absolutely tell their own stories. So right from the start, I felt a bit like an intruder, trying to approach characters in my book who, historically, would deal with ingrained societal sexism and racism. (I feel like I should also note that I’m not Latino – my dad was Spanish and my mom was full Lithuanian. I’m very much a white hetero cis-gendered guy.)

But here’s the thing. I wanted to write diverse characters in MJ-12. The protagonists of this book, called Variants, have been mysteriously imbued with paranormal abilities – superpowers, in essence – and it’s a rather random thing. So imbuing a bunch of white guys seemed plain old dumb.

So of the five main protagonists, one is a woman and another is an African-American man. (There are other women and people of color mentioned, and more coming in the next MAJESTIC-12 book in 2017.) And if you’re going to set a book in 1948, you’re going to have to deal with that systemic racism and sexism.

It was pretty bad back then. The armed forces were still segregated, and African-American soldiers were treated poorly. Back home, women were pressed into the workforce and were empowered in so many ways – only to be sent home after the war to make room for the men returning from overseas. The end of the war actually made things worse for women and people of color, even as their treatment sowed the seeds of the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

Yes, MJ-12: Inception is historical fantasy, but the fantasy part – at least in my worldbuilding – wouldn’t magically erase those issues. And frankly, I didn’t want to whitewash things either. Ignoring sexism and racism in the time period seemed disingenuous, and I felt would really disrespect what women and people of color went through during this period.

Thus, there’s racism and sexism among the characters in MJ-12: Inception. It was amongst the most painful stuff I’ve had to write as an author, and I made damn sure to research things carefully, to understand the points of view of all involved, to talk with women and people of color about it to bring as much care and diligence to it as possible.

And yet at the same time, there was a story that had to be told – a paranoid spy thriller with superpowers and exotic locales and, yes, even some nifty gadgets. The whole thing was a balancing act that left me uncomfortable at times. But then, I suppose that’s a good thing for a writer to experience.

In some ways, the MAJESTIC-12 series is an exploration of being different, being feared for being different, and what all that can do to people. I’m particularly interested in what it will do to Maggie, a woman who can manipulate emotion with a thought, and Cal, an African-American man who can heal – or harm – with a touch. Prior to gaining these abilities, Maggie and Cal were still treated differently and unfairly by society at large. Now, they’re very different, and while that gains them a bit of acceptance among some of their fellow Variants, it scares a lot of other people even more.
And what happens when Maggie and Cal face these biases again and again, knowing that they’re actually more powerful than the average person?

To me, those are fascinating questions, and as I write more in this series, I’m looking forward to uncovering the answers.

* * *

Michael J. Martinez is the author of MJ-12: Inception, newly released in hardcover from Night Shade Books, as well as the Daedalus trilogy of Napoleonic era space opera novels, now out in mass-market paperback. 

Fantastic Maps and Where to Find Them

Guest post by Lynn Davis.

As a decently experienced cartographer with work featured on this site and elsewhere, I like to give advice to potential cartographers—both of alternate history and not—who seek to create high-quality maps using programs like Inkscape or Photoshop (if you are using GIS, well, that’s a talk for another day).

One of the toughest parts of starting out using these programs to design maps is finding of the most essential tools in a burgeoning cartographer’s toolkit: basemaps. That is, unless you are able to freehand a perfect map of the world to make a derivative map, particularly for alternate history purposes, you are going to need maps that already exist which you can trace over and change into a piece of art of your own making.

To help with this, I will present to all you cartographers the top 5 best map resources around the internet. With these sites, your library of basemaps will quickly grow and, hopefully, so too will your body of work.

#1. Wikimedia

From old atlases to modern user-made data, the maps available on Wikimedia are perhaps the most diverse of any source. Like the rest of Wikipedia’s foundation, the point of the map database is to give people an open and free database to use, and any aspiring cartographer would be advised to take advantage of this fact.

The biggest disadvantage is that, like much of the Wikimedia site, the database can be difficult to navigate, particularly if you are looking for specific kinds of maps or maps from specific artists. If you’re willing to put up with the layout, however, it’s one of the best and most diverse of the examples given and well worth your time.

The database is available here to access. Make sure to click around categories and don’t be afraid to use the main Wikipedia site to poke around as well.

#2. University of Texas at Austin Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

Though just roughly 30% of the collection’s 250,000 maps are available online, the UT Austin map collection is an extremely valuable one. While Wikimedia and other sources tend to be a bit more random in what they choose to upload, due to problems of availability or varied sources, this map collection focuses more on specific atlases where each and every page is carefully cataloged and digitized for those who wish to view them.

The maps are available to directly download and in the public domain, which eases using them around the internet without having to worry too much about copyright. Most of the maps on here also tend to be clearer than those from the same atlas posted elsewhere. As a bonus, there are even some maps that I have simply not found elsewhere around the web, and for that alone it is extremely valuable.

Always continuing to grow as the collection receives money to digitize its records, this collection can be viewed here and is well worth checking out to find the basemap that is right for you.

#3. West Point Atlases

This source is one that is not only surprising, but also one that I have seen very few cartographers ever recommend, let alone use. Available as a courtesy of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the atlases available on their website to the public contain a wide array of subjects related to warfare, from ancient conflicts to the modern campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Naturally, being a military academy, it is hard to find maps not related to warfare; alternate history being what it is, however, that doesn’t tend to be a down side.

The one caveat I could give is that some of the maps, notably the larger-scale pages in the atlases, seem to be rather inaccurate and give a very simple idea of worldwide or continental political geography. That said, this drawback is more than made up for by the highly-detailed country and local maps available through the atlases that look like they have been pulled from the pages of official military atlases. Suffice to say, accuracy at the local level is extremely important to the military so you can count on these to be among the best you can find. In this way, they are perfect for maps of specific historical or alternate historical military campaigns that you may want to show.

To check out these atlases, follow the link here for more information.

#4. Alternate History Wiki

That is, the wiki site created specifically for alternatehistory.com and not to be confused with the independent alternate history wiki (yes, it’s confusing). This is a site that is simply not used as often as it should be. While admittedly even harder to navigate than the others, the AH wiki is a fine resource for maps that have been made or found by users of alternatehistory.com as part of a community-wide project assembled by the good people at the wiki.

Maps can include anything from the wonderfully-detailed “world-a” style pixel maps to larger, more complete blank maps that anyone can use. Taken from well over a decade of gathering from all across alternatehistory.com, this archive is one that is well worth using for anyone who wants to make specifically alternate history maps, as this site tends to cater toward it. However, it also provides a good amount of material for those who lean toward real life history and who want to make maps of their own.

It's a really fantastic resource that I, personally, would enjoy seeing get a bit more love from the cartographical community. You can find the map portion through here, though some searching around the site may be required to find exactly what you’re looking for.

#5 David Rumsey Map Collection

In many ways the Holy Grail of basemaps, the David Rumsey Map Collection is a cornucopia of maps for every possible or thinkable part of the world that were created anywhere from centuries ago to just a few decades beforehand. The collection has been painstakingly digitized over the course of two decades and resulted in a database of more than 71,000 maps of all sizes, shapes, and containing a wide variety of subjects.

Not only are the maps available for download in high quality image sizes, but they are also organized by artist, date published, and geographical location covered in the map that allows anyone looking for a specific kind of basemap for a specific map in mind to quickly find something that will suit them. This can range from a large-scale political map of the Holy Roman Empire to a travel map from the 1930s of the United States to a landform map of eastern China before the Second World War.

I would caution that, unlike the other sites, the Creative Commons license is a little more complicated, so it’d be a good idea to look that up before you dive in. That said, for those of us who seek to make the best maps we possibly can in Inkscape, Photoshop, GIMP, or other programs, this site is far and away the best I’ve used and I cannot recommend it enough. You can find the collection’s homepage here and from there dive right in.

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Lynn Davis is a cartographer and writer both of alternate history that can be found on her website, Toixstory.com, and has been featured around the internet. In addition she runs a tumblr, Facebook page, and is funded by generous donations to her Patreon.

President Washington's Third Term

Guest post by Theo Taylor.

By 1798, George Washington boasted undoubtedly the most impressive resume of any man in the United States, a country so new the ink had barely dried on its new constitution. He had led the Continental armies to victory against a fierce and determined enemy--the British Royal Army, aided in the manifestation of the American Republic and served two terms as its first Commander in Chief. So important was he, that the second President, John Adams, demanded Washington's return in Summer, 1798 to the United States Army to plan for a potential conflict with France.

Less than twelve months later he was implored by his contemporaries to seek a third term as President of the United States. Most Americans are aware that he denied such a request, putting in place a time honored tradition not broken until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's monumental third term in 1940. What if, however, George Washington, the Cincinnatus of the West, as his colleagues referred to him, decided not to shirk the responsibility of his fledgling Republic, what then would the modern political conflict look like?

An argument against implausibility is a contemptible one. Washington would have won any third term election, against any challenger. The evolution of the position of the President of the United States would have likely become more monarchic. Without a term limit set in place--whether by law or tradition--it exists only as an inevitability that a future president would simply continue as president until death or he lost an election. Considering George Washington's life, he may very well have died during his third term and no precedent on it may ever be established.

A minor inconvenience in this alternate world would be a handful of one term presidents would never come about, those presidents such as George H.W. Bush who would have been replaced by a three term Ronald Reagan. Presidencies such as FDR's, which ended only by death, would be more commonplace. The speculation thus, is what more good--or evil--could a President do, knowing he is not bound by term limits? An answer best left to speculation.

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Theo Taylor is a science fiction writer and essayist. His works have appeared in Asimov's, Every Day Fiction, Aphelion Stories and Thought Catalog. When not penning science fiction stories, he's almost always researching some obscure historical fact or in the gym. Check out his book Rogue Cosmos.

Anime Review: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

Guest post by Sam McDonald.

I can think of any way to open this review so let's get right to it. Today we'll be taking a look at the anime movie Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. It takes place in a world where Germany won the Battle of Stalingrad and conquered the Soviet Union. After that it wasn't long before all of Europe was under Germany's control. With Europe secured Germany began to turn its attention towards its former ally Japan. Despite a valiant effort Japan ultimately surrendered after Germany used atomic bombs. Shortly thereafter Japan was formally occupied by Germany.

Jin-Roh takes places during the 1960s. The Germans are beginning to pull out and Japan is finally getting some room to breathe. The Japanese government has instigated several rapid industrialization programs in order to boost their economy. Unfortunately, there's also quite a bit of social unrest as a result of these programs. Riots frequently breakout, socialist movements are getting worryingly popular and anti-government terrorists seem to get more numerous by the day. To restore law and order a special paramilitary police force known as the Kerberos Panzer Cops has been established.

The movie follows a member of the Panzer Cops named Kazuki Fuse. He's allways considered himself a loyal member of Kerberos, but he's shaken to his core after witnessing a young girl blow herself up during one of the riots. He finds himself increasingly drawn towards the girl's sister, Kei Amemiya. At the same time there's an ongoing investigation into a possible counterintelligence cell that has infiltrated the Panzer Cops. This cell is known by the name Jin-Roh.

Okay, before we go any further we need to talk about how this movie came to be. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is based upon the Kerberos Cycle manga by Mamoru Oshii, who also helped with the production of the movie. It's actually the third adaption of the Kerberos Cycle. There are two live-action movies, The Red Spectacles and Stray Dog, which came out before Jin-Roh. Chronologically, however, Jin-Roh comes first since it takes place in the 1960s while the live-action movies take place in the 1990s. Mamoru Oshii has also been involved with several classic anime films such as AKIRA and Ghost in the Shell. Now let's examine the alternate history itself.

Plausibility wise this movie is probably on the softer side. Nazi Germany never had any plans to expand into East Asia or to stab Japan in the back. Then there's the reason Japan fell to Germany: the atomic bomb. For multiple reasons Germany was nowhere near developing atomic bombs in our world, and they wouldn't be any closer in the world of Jin-Roh. On the flip side, the socioeconomic situation in post-occupation Japan is a bit more believable because it echoes the real world. We see several left-wing movements gaining popularity, particularly among the youth, just like in our world's Japan in the 1950s. The rapid industrialization and urbanization, along with all of the resulting problems, parallels South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s.

Now let's talk about the art style. Nine times out of ten if you watch an anime it's probably going to employ the standard anime art style. The technically term for this is Mukokuseki, which roughly translates as statelessness. This often employed to add visual diversity to a cast characters and make them easier to differentiate. Jin-Roh falls into the remaining one tenth that forgo Mukokuseki in favor of a more realistic art style. Personally, I tend to favor the typical anime look, but Jin-Roh's art style does make for an interesting change of pace.

This movie has really great atmosphere to it. It has a very gritty and cynical feel to it, and there's shades of grey all around. The terrorist may have legitimate grievances, but their violent and destructive methods aren't serving anyone. The Panzer Cops are certainly necessary to maintain order and protect the populous, but they have to resort to increasingly harsh measures to do so. At the end of the day nobody really looks that good, and there really aren't any easy answers. This is very much a movie steeped in cynicism, and if you're the kind of person who likes happy endings you might be disappointed.

There's a lot of wolf imagery throughout the movie. For example, the members of the Panzer Cops frequently get compared to wolves and their organization's flag features a wolf. The original version of Little Red Riding Hood also features prominently throughout the movie. If you're not familiar with that version, I won't give the ending away. I will, however, mention that in the original version there was no woodsman. The guns, uniforms and vehicles are all clearly German and very accurately depicted. This does make sense, given that Germany has only recently pulled out of Japan.

Overall I found this movie to be enjoyable, but there were a few minor flaws here and there. I felt like Fuse and Kei's relationship could have been developed just a bit more. The pacing of the movie also felt like it got a bit rushed towards the end. It's not really a flaw, but I do kind of wonder what happened to America in this world. Granted, the movie is focused on Japan, so that wouldn't be plot relevant, but I still wonder about how America fared.

The English language dub is absolutely top-notch, and the whole cast does a great job. The English dub was licensed by Bandai Entertainment, which closed its North American division a few years ago. Fortunately, Discotek Media was rescued the license and re-released Jin-Roh on DVD and Blu-ray.

Well there you have it. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is a dark and cynical alternate history political thriller. If you enjoy darker anime movies you won't want to miss this one. As a side note, I know you guys enjoy The Audio File, and I assure you that slowly but surely I'm putting together a new edition. Though I may have one more anime movie to share before we get to that just yet.

Well I think that's enough from me for now. I will see you guys next time.

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Sam McDonald is a college student from Shreveport, LA.  When not involved with his studies he can be found blogging on Amazing Stories, making and posting maps across the web and working on short stories that he hopes to have published in magazines such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and the Escape Artists Podcasts.

World War II Was a Team Effort, Deal With It (Part 2)

Guest post by Dale Cozort.

The first part of this looked mostly at the lead-up to Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, with only a few minor incursions into the actual invasion.

How was World War II a team effort in the last half of 1941 and early 1942, after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union? The Soviet Union was certainly doing the vast majority of the ground fighting at this point, with the vast majority of the German panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe committed in the east.

The Germans were in a war of attrition in the east, and even in those early days of the invasion, the Germans lost a horrendous amount of men and material. David Glantz gives a partial list of the men and material the Germans lost from the start of the invasion until November 1942. The Soviets were doing the bulk of the fighting and inflicting the bulk of the loses, while losing men and material at a high multiple of German losses. The Allies were fighting hard too, but their victories and losses seem like side shows in comparison to the huge number of divisions on both sides of the eastern front, the huge number of tanks and planes  produced and destroyed.

Even before the Soviets encircled the German sixth army at Stalingrad, the Germans had suffered around a million casualties--dead or wounded. They had lost around four thousand planes. That had to have consumed a huge number of pilots who would have otherwise been available to fight the US and British air offensive over Germany. Also, when the Soviets surrounded the sixth army at Stalingrad, they forced the Germans to bring in their "school flights"--partly trained pilots and instructors, along with their equipment--for the airlift. The huge aircraft losses at Stalingrad crippled the German pilot training program as it was just recovering from losses in the airborne invasions of Holland and Crete, cutting into Germany's supply of new pilots at the worst possible time, when the western allies were gearing up for their air offensive over Germany.

So where does the team effort bit come in during this period? What did the Allies contribute? Several things, actually. Not many German divisions were actually fighting the Allies, but a lot of German divisions were tied up guarding against British or American invasion in the west. These were usually not first-rate divisions, but they would have probably done better than the Italian and Romanian divisions on the flanks of Stalingrad, for example.

How many German divisions were tied up in guarding against attacks in the west? A surprising number. Norway alone tied up more Germans than were surrounded at Stalingrad, though the quality and equipment of those troops was by no means comparable. The occupation of France also tied down a large and growing number of German troops. The Mediterranean theater was less of a drain in terms of manpower, at least until the Italian surrender, but the war there required a huge amount of logistics support--scarce oil, scarce air transport, scarce trucks to get fuel across the long stretches of desert from port facilities and railheads. It took far more German resources to support a division at the front line in North Africa than it usually did in the Soviet Union.

Direct British and US supply of tanks and aircraft to the Soviet Union was huge in absolute terms, but not in proportion to Soviet production and much of it came after the Soviet Union had weathered the worst of the German invasion. The Western Allies sent a little over eleven thousand tanks and another couple thousand self-propelled guns--enough  to equip the equivalent of roughly sixty German panzer divisions, as many tanks as the Germans produced in 1943 and two-thirds as many as they produced in 1944.

At the same time, the Soviets produced considerably more T-34s every year after 1941 than they received in total Allied tanks. Lend Lease tanks were well under twenty percent of the total Soviet tank force and many of them were obsolete by eastern front standards. The Western Allies sent over twenty-one thousand planes to the Soviets, and those planes played a somewhat bigger role in the Soviet air battle than the tanks.

If you've researched the Eastern Front, you've probably heard most of that before. What kinds of team effort do most people miss?

1) The elephant in the room: The Western Allies kept Germany from accessing the rest of the world's raw materials. Most of the time that was by naval blockade, but sometimes it was by cornering the supply of vital raw materials in neutral European countries like Portugal and Turkey. Imagine a World War II where the western allies decided to remain neutral in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Germans could buy or barter for Mexican oil as they did before the start of World War II. They could buy iron and nickel and chromium and bauxite and natural rubber from any country in the world willing to sell it to them. All the enormous effort that the Germans put into making ersatz materials could have been used to build tanks and planes and artillery, with the only limit being the German economy's ability to pay for the material.

That's not a trivial limitation, of course. The Germans were always short of hard currency before the war and would have quickly run into limitations after they invaded the Soviet Union. At the same time, they could have imported material to fill in the worst of their gaps.

Granted, a scenario where the west decided to sit out the German/Soviet war isn't likely, but if we're purely trying to figure out relative contributions, the British and American blockade of Germany played a major role in depressing German military production.

2) Throughout the war, the Germans had to look over their shoulders at an approaching avalanche of US men and material. That meant that the Germans knew they had a limited amount of time to defeat the Soviet Union. The Nazi hierarchy reacted to that closing time window by a lot of wishful thinking, seeing victory in the Soviet Union when objectively it wasn't there and they had the resources to know the Soviets weren't beaten. That pattern of wishful  thinking started even before the invasion began, when the Germans produced the munitions and equipment they thought was necessary to beat the Soviet Union, then, before the invasion even started, switched production over to a mix intended to prepare for battle against the US and Britain. It continued through much of the early part of the war, with Hitler holding back tanks and tank engines throughout the summer of 1941 to build up for the coming battle against the Anglo-Americans. Even in 1942, Hitler saw victory after the early summer encirclements and moved key elite units from the eastern front to prepare for the Allies. In the leadup to Stalingrad, he could airlift whole divisions to North Africa and launch a lightning invasion of Vichy France to counter Operation Torch, while leaving sixth army's flanks to be guarded by demonstrably inadequate Romanian and Italian troops, with only threadbare backup from German units that had been bled white and given few, if any replacements.

3) The Allies filled crucial gaps in the Soviet economy. The Soviets did a miraculous job of moving key industrial plants out of the way of the German advance, but losing territory where nearly half of pre-invasion Soviet industrial activity happened caused important gaps that the Allies filled.

 a) Food. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of the pre-invasion Soviet Union. The Soviets made an enormous effort to get food and farming resources out of threatened territory and to destroy anything they couldn't take with them. They were generally very successful in doing that. Instead of finding rich, exploitable farmland, the Germans often found lands where the grain had been hastily harvested and sent east, along with tractors, farm animals and able-bodied men. All of that effort to remove food supplies complicated the German advance because the Germans had expected to feed their armies by seizing food. To a certain extent they did, but the Soviets made it as difficult as they could, even destroying stocks of food they couldn't get out. This was the Soviet system at its most ruthlessly practical--they were leaving millions of Soviet citizens with little food for the coming winter.

At the same time, no matter how ruthless and efficient the Soviets were, they couldn't take the Ukraine's farmland or climate with them and without the land that they lost to the Germans, the Soviets couldn't feed the population already in unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union, much less the thirty million Soviet citizens that they evacuated in front of the German advance. Using the 1941 harvest and slaughtering livestock could provide a short-term solution, but when those stocks were exhausted, Soviet citizens were going to go hungry and they did, not just in Leningrad but in the rest of the country. When the Soviets released several tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war to the Allies in 1942, many of them were so malnourished that it took months to get them back in fighting shape. The western Allies protested the condition of the men, but eventually had to concede that they hadn't been fed significantly worse  than Soviet citizen outside the military and vital war industries. There simply wasn't enough food to go around and the Soviet Union was on the edge of starvation.

The western allies, especially the US, had plenty of food and they sent a lot of it to the Soviets. They didn't single-handedly stave off Soviet starvation, but they helped a lot. Enough American food came in to keep a million Soviet soldiers supplied. That helped substantially. If that food hadn't come, the Soviet soldiers would have still been fed, but a lot of Soviets outside the military and defense industry would have died of starvation or malnutrition.

b) Aviation gas: The US, alone of the World War II powers, could mass-produce 100 octane aviation gasoline. That gas gave planes that used it a major edge over planes that didn't. As a result, the US produced the vast majority of Soviet aviation gas, and provided additives to upgrade Soviet oil. At any given design level, US aviation gas allowed US and Soviet planes to fly further and faster than they could have otherwise.

c) Aluminum. The US provided over two thirds of the Soviet aluminum supply, vital to Soviet airplane production and for producing engines for Soviet T34 tanks.

d) Rubber: The Soviets had no native sources of rubber and their synthetic rubber efforts lagged behind those of the US and the Germans. As a result the Soviets were chronically short of rubber. That was a huge potential bottleneck. It was simply impossible to build World War II tanks, trucks and planes without rubber and lots of it. Planes averaged half a ton of rubber, while a tank took a ton. Add in tires for military trucks and airplanes and replacement tires for the trucks that kept the Soviet economy going, and you see the problem. The US sent as much as it could spare, with the amount increasing as the US synthetic rubber industry took off.  In terms of tires alone, US Lend Lease to the Soviets totaled a little under 3.7 million units. That's a lot of vehicles driving a lot of miles.

e) Radios. Radios and other communication equipment were a huge force multiplier. In 1941 and through the summer of 1942, the Soviets didn't have enough of them. As a result, Soviets commanders often lost track of where parts of armies were and what was happening to them, often units as large as whole divisions. Where were they? What was happening to them? Were they still in the fight? Without that information the Soviets simply couldn't fight the kind of fast-moving war that the Germans forced on them. The US and Britain, with their advanced electronics industries, filled that gap. For example, the US sent over 380,000 field telephones and well over thirty five thousand radio stations.

f) Training tanks. A lot of the thousands of Lend Lease tanks never saw frontline service, but they did play a major role on the Eastern Front: training tank crews. The Soviets built their tanks the same way they ran most of the rest of the war--with a ruthless peculiarly Soviet type of rationality. They had plenty of raw materials but not a lot of skilled laborers. Given that combination, they built essentially disposable tanks. If a T-34 was unlikely to survive more than X hours at the front, the Soviets didn't build it to last more than X hours plus a small margin. Automotively, the few that didn't get knocked out by X hours were scrap--ready for a major rebuild at best or for scrap recycling. That approach meant that the Soviet could build a lot more tanks with a given number of person-hours and it didn't usually cost them much, because the tanks were usually knocked out by the Germans before they broke down anyway.

The problem though: how do you train tank drivers? Using Soviet tanks meant using a lot of them and leaving them as scrap. Using Lend Lease tanks was the ideal solution. Many of the wouldn't have lasted long on the Eastern Front battle zone, but could be driven a lot longer in training roles.

This is getting long, and we still haven't looked at the impact of the Western Air Offensive. More in a few weeks.

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Dale Cozort is a novelist, editor of Point of Divergence, the alternate history APA, and a long-term Chicago area fan and writer. Check out his website, blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles.

Rewriting the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

Guest post by Beth Cato.

The pitch line for my new book Breath of Earth is pretty straightforward: "1906 San Francisco with geomancy and not-so-mythological creatures. Spoiler alert: there's an earthquake." I can't hide the fact that the earthquake happens--the date, the setting, and the cover give that away--and I'm fine with that. The cause of the quake is quite different from our reality.

This is a world where the American Civil War ended early due to an alliance between the Union and the steam-powered forces of Japan. In 1906, they are a world power dubbed the Unified Pacific, and in the process of dominating China. Much of their military might arises from geomancy. Geomancers act as a buffer during earthquakes as they pull in energy that otherwise would cause the earth to shake. That energy is then transferred into rare rocks that are used as batteries in everything from airships to flashlights.

San Francisco is a safe place thanks to the presence of the Cordilleran Auxiliary, a boarding school and base of operations for geomancers along the Pacific coast. After a disaster befalls the auxiliary on April 15th, Easter Sunday, the novel builds up suspense leading up to the day and time that the earthquake actually happened: the 18th, at sunrise.

One of the most famous incidents around the real earthquake is the opera Carmen performing on the night of the 17th, with the world-renowned tenor Enrico Caruso as Don Jose. I include the opera, but with a twist. I bring in a performance of a controversial opera, Lincoln, which celebrates the late president's Emancipation Proclamation and his late-life work on behalf of Chinese refugees. Abraham Lincoln lived to a ripe old age in this timeline.

The actual earthquake provided such a wealth of data that it was difficult to decide what to include. Even with the magic twist to the plot, I still use important places such as the epicenter at Mussel Rock and the presence of large cracks in the earth to the north of the Bay. San Francisco itself became a scene of horror, one that is well-chronicled in photographs, journals, and early film work. The earthquake knocked down a wide swath of downtown, and to make things even more devastating, broke both water mains and gas lines. Survivors trying to cook breakfast accidentally caused gas to alight, and firefighters could do little to contain any blazes throughout the peninsula. I incorporated many of these details--with the addition of a blue miasma of escaped energy forming an eerie fog throughout the city.

When it came to the actual feel of the earthquake, I didn't need to rely on books. I'm a native Californian. One of my earliest memories is being three-years-old and in the bathtub when a quake devastated nearby Coalinga. Tremors caused water to splash out of the tub on its own. I felt many more earthquakes as I grew up, included the last major quake to hit the Bay Area in 1989. I lived over two hundred miles away, but the feel, the rumble, was distinct.

It's that personal connection with earthquakes that inspired me to write Breath of Earth and look deeper into the history of my home state. It's my hope that readers will be inspired to read more about the actual earthquake, too. To that end, I include my research bibliography in the back of the book and on my website.

The book may be fantasy, full of magic and incredible creatures, but the foundation is firmly built on actual history, spoilers and all.

More about Breath of Earth: http://www.bethcato.com/breath-of-earth/

Online Research Bibliography: http://www.bethcato.com/breath-of-earth/research-bibliography/

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Beth Cato is the author of the Clockwork Dagger series from Harper Voyager, which includes her Nebula-nominated novella WINGS OF SORROW AND BONE. Her newest novel is BREATH OF EARTH. She’s a Hanford, California native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cat. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

Long Live King Frederick!

Guest post by Joseph T. Major.

I decided to go back a little in time.

A passionate defense of an exiled prince leads to changes that shake the course of European and world history, and lay the stage for a wider and wider yet monarchy.

In our world, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, sister of the gallant Prince Rupert of the Rhine, was made heir to the British throne, only to die just too soon, leaving the succession to her son.  Once, though, she got a little too exercised about the poor exiled Pretender . . . and if she had been just a little more exercised, William of Orange might have changed his mind.

Such a change could put a strange and striking monarch in reach of the British throne.  But the heirs of the Stuarts were not yet gone, and they could strike back.  The result of this bold decision would mean wars across the world, involving people from lands spreading from Poland to Virginia, from Scotland to Naples.  It would mean battles in the Cockpit of Europe, in the wilds of Saxony, and indeed on the green fields of England itself.

Not all is war.  Literary figures such as Swift, Johnson, and Voltaire have strange and different meetings.  The universal genius Benjamin Franklin, Printer, has an entirely new field of endeavor.

The opposed royal houses, and the other princes of Europe, face off in new and strange alliances in this novel.

It is interesting to write about Frederick the Great, particularly when you realize how close he was to the British throne.  His grandmother, Sophia of Hanover, was the heir designated by William III after his nephew the Duke of Gloucester, Anne’s only surviving son, died so young.  And if the line of the Georges died out, or was excluded . . .

Frederick despised slavery, even though he forcibly drafted people into his army.  He was a patron of the arts but he found German writers and indeed the German language barbarous.  He restricted Jews, and had a Jewish general in his army.  He spoke several languages, including English, and misspelled all of them.  In short, he was a man of many contradictions, and yet very modern.

The hopes of the exiled Jacobites are also interesting to note.  Reality was bad enough for them; in later times all sorts of romantic notions have been attached to the exiled royal house.  And yet, they were interesting and intriguing people.

It’s a pleasure to get to write about them, and I hope enough people buy my new book, The Sun Never Sets, for me to write the second one.

Out from Amazon Kindle Distribution, $2.99.

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Joseph T. Major learned to read at the age of two and a half and is reported to have stopped to sleep occasionally, if you can believe rumors. Check out his new book The Sun Never Sets,

Technology in Alternate History

Guest post by Rvbomally.

Technology is an important aspect of any speculative fiction, and alternate history is no exception. One of the most common questions I get in my work is "what is the tech level?" While I do find that question annoying at times (mostly because it is so vague that any answer I could give would be incomplete), I cannot fault people for asking. Technology is not independent of history and society; these three shape each other and help distinguish an alternate world from our own.

Surprisingly, technology is one of the few aspects of alternate history that are detailed more in mainstream alternate history than they are in online alternate history. I would attribute this to the medium through which mainstream alternate history is presented, as opposed to online alternate history. A greater percentage of mainstream alternate history is told through a visual medium, such as television, film, or comics. These forms of media allow for the seamless integration of strange technology into the story. Consider the infamous alternate history zeppelin. Unlike in written works, the story does not need to pause to describe the zeppelin. All it needs to do is float around in the background, and the viewer is immediately tipped off that this is another world.

Contrast this with online alternate history fiction, which is overwhelmingly in a text format. The visual media in online history is overwhelmingly maps and flags, with very few examples of alternate objects. This form of media does not lend itself to technological descriptions, because the entire story needs to take a detour just for the technology. This is particularly bad in the "encyclopedic" format I often write in. The bulk of the text describes history and the geopolitical situation, and must make an abrupt turn just for the technology.

I have noticed that alternate history works tend to have four different approaches to alternate history: OTL, OTL Plus/Minus, Post-Apocalypse and Punk. This does not include worlds which have implemented magic, because those expressly throw out the laws of reality that we are familiar with.

OTL

By far the most common approach to technology in alternate history, predominantly in written works, is simply paralleling OTL's technological development. The appeal of this approach is obvious: it is easy to implement and easy for the reader to understand. This approach is most often used in written alternate history, because the work can focus on the history and geopolitics of this alternate world. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A work that is focused on history and geopolitics may actually become worse if there is too much focus on the technology. Technology may be an unnecessary distraction, irrelevant to the tale being told.

Another, closely related approach to OTL is retarding or advancing the timeline's technology by a couple of decades, but more or less keeping technological development constant save for the time period. This is often done by killing off an OTL "great man" and setting back theoretical development by a couple of decades, or inventing a fictional "great man" to advance it. This approach is simple, and has the advantage of informing the reader that this is an alternate world.

OTL Plus/Minus

OTL Plus/Minus is the OTL approach, but with the addition of some anachronistic technology, or the removal of a technology that should have been developed by some point. This approach is also common in written alternate history, but also with visual alternate history. This is the approach of the infamous Zeppelins from Another World. Want a convenient way to show the reader that this is another timeline? Have a zeppelin dock with the Empire State Building in the modern day!

OTL Plus/Minus, like delaying or advancing OTL technology, is also simple, and can be accomplished by introducing or removing a "great man." Want to slow down the development of rocket technology? Kill off von Braun. It is also a simple way of getting across a difference in the world, without going too far. The rocket planes in The Man in the High Castle are mostly in the background, and their development is never touched upon, but they demonstrate the technological superiority of that timeline's Third Reich over the Japanese and over OTL in the 1960s.

A frequent technology of focus on OTL Plus/Minus timelines (apart from the zeppelin) is nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are like liquid nitrogen for a geopolitical situation: they freeze wars in their tracks, and can keep conflicts preserved for decades. Introducing nuclear weapons allows the author to be more creative with the geopolitical situation of his world, particularly with regard to ideology, while being able to explain why these opposing states have not yet gone to war.

Post-Apocalypse 

The post-apocalypse approach is a simple approach, one that even people who have never heard the term "alternate history" are familiar with. It is a world with a smattering of high technology from before the apocalypse, while most people are reduced to a primitive existence. This makes for interesting worldbuilding and compelling storytelling. Mixed with a punk approach (see below), and a world can be very different from our own. The Fallout series' popularity is largely in part due to that series' unique take on technology.

Punk

Punk is different from the above approaches, because technology takes center stage. Indeed, in some punk works, the alternate history is incidental. A usual suspect would be Charles Babbage, whose difference engine is a staple point of divergence for steampunk settings. However, the alternate history aspects of a punk setting exist not only to explain how this alternate world came about in the background. Alternate history allows the "feel" of the punk setting to be maintained. While it is certainly possible to have a cyberpunk setting without a superpowered Japan which never suffered from an economic decline in the 1990s, a cyberpunk setting is generally better off for it.

Punk-style alternate history is notable in that it ignores plausibility in favor of the narrative. Setting aside the fact that most punk technologies simply would not work, the geopolitics is often implausibly "frozen" in order to maintain the feel of the punk setting. Steampunk settings will often have the Tsar in St. Petersburg, the Chinese Empire, and of course, Britannia still ruling the waves (and the skies, and even possibly Mars). Of course, this is not a negative of the genre, and indeed makes a punk work more entertaining.

The punk approach is also frequently used with the Nazis, and is either a convenient way to explain their victory, or a way to explain why their Thousand Year Reich has yet to collapse by the time of the story's events. Personally, I find punk technology convenient because it informs the reader that what they are about to read is not a serious analysis of how the OTL Third Reich could have won WWII. Nazi giant robots are a great way to deliver the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Mantra.

Conclusions

Technology is an important aspect of the alternate history genre, but one that is often ignored given the focus of the genre. Unlike science fiction, alternate history focuses on the politics, the people, and the history, not the technology, first and foremost. However, technology is an important part of any history, and readers are always curious as to alternate world's technology. A word to the alternate history authors out there: you will be asked about your world's technology if you do not talk about it. ;)

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Rvbomally is some guy on the Internet who likes history and science fiction. You can find his all of work on deviantArt. You can support him on Patreon.

Rewriting History for Your Entertainment

Guest post by Brooke Johnson.

In 1882, Chroniker City did not exist. There was no known conspiracy to start a war between the British Empire and the French. There was no Guild of Engineers. There were no floating warships, no overland war machines, no taking of Calais, no battle of Amiens. There was no Chroniker University, no clockwork engineer named Petra Wade.

But I’m not writing about our world—not as it was, anyway.

History is a vast playground for the writer willing to delve into it, rich with the rise and fall of empires, conflict and tension between nations, numerous wars and battles ripe for the picking, political leaders both good and evil, and a variety of cultures spread across every possible geographical landscape, stretching back to the beginning of recorded time. With millions of stories hidden in the depths of the past, there is no limit to the number of novels you could write, whether those stories are true to history as we know it or mere speculation based on what little historical information we can find on a subject.

And altering that history opens up even more potential for story fodder. You can unravel the very fabric of the past and shift the threads to your will, unfolding a tapestry of endless possibilities. Change one thing in our history, and you have the opportunity to create a slightly different world from our own. Change several things, and it could be unrecognizable.

We writers of alternate history have the coveted key to the time machine and the means to change the course of the future. Whether that means rewriting the victors of World War II, changing the tragic fate of a historical legend, or building a city of inventors off the coast of Wales, we get to imagine how the world might be different if only history had taken a different course. We get to change the rules, and it’s up to us to see just how far that path takes us into the unknown, into the untraveled and untested waters of a different time.

What would happen if a man did build a technologically advanced city and then founded a guild of engineers to run it? What course would modern technology take? How quickly would it advance compared to our own time? Now, what would happen if a man rose to power in that city, a man with a vision for a different kind of future? What if he had the tools to see it done? What would it take to start a war between two countries already in conflict over international affairs? What would the First World War have looked like on the front lines if it had taken place thirty years sooner, with the hyper-advanced technology of the late Victorians?

How easy it is to change the course of history.

All it took was an idea—a man and his vision for the future—and by extrapolating on that idea, by exploring the consequences and asking what if, a story emerged.

But my work doesn’t end there. Writing alternate history comes with its own quirks and challenges, especially for those of us who strive for authenticity. Despite the differences in my alternate worlds, I try to include as much truth and fact as can be managed so that the story feels real. I may have changed history, but it’s still our world—a different one, to be sure, but similar enough to be familiar.

And that leads to one very important thing: RESEARCH. Lots and lots of it.

From the style of British military uniforms to the intricacies of clockwork mechanics; the street layout of a small port town to the operation of early telephones; storm patterns and shipping routes and the time of a sunrise in the early days of June—that much remains the same.

Tapping into that realism makes for some very detailed Google searches (bless you, internet) and lots of combing through historical records, maps, images, and other documents to find what I need to know to bring that authenticity to the story. Sometimes, I run into a problem—yeah, that airship flight I thought would take just a few hours to complete actually takes ten hours if I use the maximum recorded speed of dirigible flight around that time in our history—which means I just have to get a little more creative in order to make the story work within the confines of my historical rules.

Sometimes, that means fudging the details or rewriting another facet of history to fit the story. Sometimes, it means revising the story to fit history. But at the end of the day, writing with real world history, changing it, making it my own… there’s no greater feeling than figuring out how to marry fiction and reality in a way that serves both the story and the history I’ve chosen to include.

My job is to create that bridge, and hopefully tell an entertaining story in the process.

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Brooke Johnson is a stay-at-home mom and tea-loving author. As the jack-of-all-trades bard of the family, she journeys through life with her husband, daughter, and dog. She currently resides in Northwest Arkansas but hopes one day to live somewhere a bit more mountainous.