New Releases 5/17/16

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Paperbacks

Warlock Holmes - A Study in Brimstone by G.S. Denning

Sherlock Holmes is an unparalleled genius. Warlock Holmes is an idiot. A font of arcane power, certainly. But he’s brilliantly dim. Frankly, he couldn’t deduce his way out of a paper bag. The only thing he has really got going for him are the might of a thousand demons and his stalwart companion. Thankfully, Dr. Watson is always there to aid him through the treacherous shoals of Victorian propriety… and save him from a gruesome death every now and again.

E-Books

Wrath of Athena: A Snapshot Novella by Dale Cozort

For eighty million years, the Tourists have taken Snapshots of Earth, creating living replicas of continents. Life in the Snapshots quickly diverges from the real world, creating a universe where humans and animals from Earth’s history fly between Snapshots, exploring, fighting, and sometimes meeting themselves.

A fly-by-night petting zoo lands in Madagascar-24M, the Snapshot of Madagascar the Tourists made 24 million years ago, and promptly finds itself slapped in quarantine. After all, exotic animals from off-Snapshot are a risk, for people, local wildlife, and the environment.

Scott Hardy’s title may be Assistant Veterinary Engineer, but his actual job is shoveling crap out of cages and protecting the “talent”—the nubile youths hired to run the petting zoo.

That doesn’t include protecting the zoo’s star performer, Athena Anders, Hardy’s redheaded, volatile, dish-hurling, on-again-off-again girlfriend. Not because Athena isn’t talented, but because she does just fine taking care of herself. The one thing Athena really loves are the zoo’s stars, a pair of talking dinosaurs.

Then the dinosaurs go missing. And it’s mating season.

The only thing worse than the havoc a pair of breeding dinosaurs can create on an unprotected, unsuspecting world? The wrath of Athena when she finds out who’s responsible.

To readers, authors and publishers...

Is your story going to be published in time for the next New Releases? Contact us at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.  We are looking for works of alternate history, counterfactual history, steampunk, historical fantasy, time travel or anything that warps history beyond our understanding.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger for Amazing Stories, a volunteer interviewer for SFFWorld and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not exploring alternate timelines he enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the day when travel between parallel universes becomes a reality. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

Those Pesky Butterflies

Guest post of Dale Cozort.

If you visit the AH forums, you'll quickly figure out that alternate history has its own vocabulary. ASB. OTL, ATL and Butterflies are terms that get tossed around a lot.

The Butterflies bit comes from weather forecasting and refers to the claim that weather systems are so interconnected that a butterfly in Mongolia can cause a cascade of events that leads to a hurricane in the North Atlantic.

What does that have to do with Alternate History? Alternate history butterfly advocates claim that history is similarly connected, that major changes, or even minor ones, from real history anywhere in the world would rapidly cascade, making the resulting world unrecognizable within a surprisingly short time.

For example, if someone went back in time and stepped on a bug, the impact on history might appear to be trivial. The bug dies a few hours or days earlier than it would have and the world goes on without much change. Don't count on that though. Let's say that in reality the bug dies an hour after the time traveler would have stepped on it. No big deal, right? Well, actually it could be a big deal. As a matter of fact, the odds are pretty good that it would eventually be a big deal, though it might take a thousand or ten thousand or even a million years before that's apparent.

Whenever it dies, the bug's body would be recycled, feeding some kind of predator or scavenger. The molecules of that bug's body get recycled time and time again throughout the rest of the life of the planet, but if it died an hour earlier and in a slightly different location it goes along a different set of pathways. How many recyclings does it take before the bug's molecules are or aren't part of something important, like the sperm or egg of the ancestral wolf that either did or didn't kill one of Columbus's remote ancestors? It probably takes thousands of recyclings, but given enough time those molecules will probably be involved in something crucial.

Also, the bug has a more direct impact. Something ate the bug or didn't eat it. Maybe a predator doesn't survive long enough to mate as a result of not eating the bug--it continues foraging and something bigger eats it. Or maybe it survives and has offspring whether or not it eats the bug, but at subtly different times--which, given the low likelihood of any given sperm being the one that fertilizes the egg, means that it has different offspring depending on whether or not the time-traveler stepped on the bug. Whatever ate the bug has a different life trajectory, probably chasing and eating different prey at different times than it did in real history. Each of those chases starts a new cascade of changes from historical reality. So does anything the bug's descendants and the predator's descendants do. Actually changes start cascading from two sources, not one, because something probably ate the bug that wouldn't have without the time traveler and something didn't eat the bug that otherwise would have.

The time traveler walks across a field, with every step starting a cascade of changes from his reality. Some of those changes may damp out, though the odds are against it. Some may be apparent only at the microscopic level for years or decades or even hundreds of years before changing something noticeable.

It's even possible that the time traveler's changes don't become noticeable until after his own time. That's a nightmare scenario: Go back a million years from 2016, take a walk in a field and come back to a seemingly unchanged world of 2016 where the microscopic changes you made eventually, long after your departure date. cause a nuclear war that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't gone back.

The structure of how things happened in reality is fragile. A point of divergence starts a cascade of changes, probably unpredictable beyond a decade or two at the most. Unfortunately, that takes a lot of interesting questions out of the realm of "hard" alternate history.

What would Columbus have found if most of the big North America animals hadn't died off at the end of the ice age? An interesting question, but all those animals existing over thousands of years would have almost certainly butterflied Columbus out of existence. They would probably take  Spain and even a recognizable Europe with him. Too many fragile events went into the existence of that Europe. A Europe would undoubtedly exist and probably parallel the historic one in some ways, but with different languages and genetics.

Butterflies make it difficult to get to a lot of interesting questions. What if there had been a natural sea level Panama canal? No Columbus. No Spain. Probably not the same human species, though they might look a lot like us. The natural Panama canal closed several million years ago, changing climate across the world. If it hadn't closed, our ancestors might not have survived. Even if they survived, they wouldn't have gone along exactly the same path we did and genetic drift would mean that they probably couldn't produce fertile offspring with us after so many years.

That spoils a lot of alternate history (and time travel) doesn't it? How can we get to the interesting questions that butterflies make impossible? As a science fiction writer I don't let butterflies kill a good story. I get as much as I can right and ignore the logical holes butterflies rip in the story.

I did that to some extent in my novel All Timelines Lead to Rome. In All Timelines, primitive humans similar to the Flores Hobbits survived on a large Mediterranean island long enough that when Neolithic settlers reached the island around ten thousand years ago, those settlers decided to enslave the primitives rather than killing them off. So far, so good. The next step requires hand-waving though. The primitive humans remain slaves but don't spread through the ancient world and don't change the processes that led to the Roman Empire. Rome spreads them throughout the empire and remodels the empire around them, using them as crosses between slaves and pets. It's an interesting idea, but the chances of Rome creating a recognizably Roman Empire with a point of divergence over seven thousand years before the founding of Rome are slim.

I introduced a way to get around the butterflies in my novel Snapshot. Extraterrestrials with godlike powers make backups "snapshots" of Earth continents for tens of millions of years. Each Snapshot is an exact copy of a continent at some time in history. The Snapshots are each in a separate but interconnected universe. How does that get around butterflies? If you want a North America with Indians and big ice age animals, just time the Snapshot right. I'm currently writing stories set in a Snapshot taken of North America including Mexico in 1519, in the middle of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. The Snapshot cut off Spanish West Indies and Mexico from the Old World. Result: independent conquistador kingdoms in Mexico, which are hard to realistically get any other way. Future stories may involve a Snapshot of Europe taken in the summer of 1942--Europe isolated from the rest of the world and forced to cope with the Nazis on their own, Rainforest Australia, Africa before the dinosaurs went extinct and enough others that I can't do them all justice to in a lifetime.

The bottom line: Butterflies are a real issue if you're serious about your alternate history. They make some types of questions unrealistic. At the same time, we shouldn't allowed them to keep interesting questions from being explored, especially if they lead to interesting story settings.

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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.

"Snapshot" Started With a Question

Guest post by Dale Cozort.

Snapshot: Power, Sex & Revenge started with a question: What if someone was making backups of Earth--the way we should be backing up our computers? A comet hits and wipes out the dinosaurs or us? Not a problem. There is an off-site backup.

That was an interesting idea, but as I thought about it, I realized that the backups could be more interesting than what was happening on Earth. What if the backups were living rather than static? With the right technology you could essentially travel through time by going from backup to backup.

I refined the idea more and ended up with the backups--I call them Snapshots--becoming continent-sized and sitting in snow-globe-shaped artificial universes, sort of like the 'pocket universes in PJ Farmer's World of the Tiers books.

Snapshots are connected like strings of pearls by vents high over their oceans, which means that a plane that can fly to thirty-thousand feet can fly between Snapshots, between realities, a cross between flying through time and flying between alternate histories.

About that "Power, Sex & Revenge" bit in the title: if you're looking for explicit sex scenes you'll be disappointed. Sex occurs, as does revenge, but the sex is not explicit, nor is it a major focus of the novel.

Fair warning: the Snapshot universe is huge and complex, with two-dozen known Snapshots. Several human powers are exploring, competing for influence on or colonizing Snapshots, including the obligatory Nazi, Napoleonic France, both Tsarist and Soviet Russians and two versions of the US, one isolated in its Snapshot since 1953, the other essentially the modern US, complete with a President Obama that the 1953 Snapshot of the US finds incomprehensible.

Another fair warning: I throw a LOT at you about the Snapshot universe in the first thirty pages of the novel and it inevitably slows the pace a bit. You'll need that info, though. Snapshot's characters and plot grow out of the universe and wouldn't work outside it. Don't prejudge what is going to be important and what isn't. I have a mystery-writer's habit of including red herrings and setting up later plot twists with seemingly trivial details sitting in plain sight.

Plot and characters: Major Delia Stiener, posted to the German colony of New Prussia, is both far more and in some ways less than what she seems. Her job in New Prussia is to keep an eye out for incursions from a lurking menace (every fictional universe needs a lurking menace, right?) on the other side of a barren Antarctic Snapshot. That knowledge makes her special because the existence of the menace is a closely guarded secret among top German leaders from the Europe-1939 Snapshot.

Stiener also has her own agenda, stemming from being the only survivor of a decades-old massacre of German ranchers during the Lemur Republic rebellion, a successful attempt by US ranchers to break away from German control. Think Texas versus Mexico. At nine years old, Stiener spent weeks trapped and starving in a cave as a result of that massacre. The resulting trauma shut down many of her memories from that period. She can't remember the location of the cave.

Stiener is obsessed with revenge against one of the leaders of the massacre, Neil McLaury. She has never actually met McLaury, though she has seen him in pictures and on TV. Her obsession is natural, but unhealthy, with hatred sometimes mixing with sexual images.

Stumbling unwillingly into this toxic mix: Greg Dunne. The novel starts moments after a new Snapshot, this one of North America as of late 2014 (Halloween to be exact). One moment Greg has a good job as a Middle East analyst with a think tank that sometimes works for the CIA. He has a wife, daughter, twin sons moments away from being born and a large, supportive extended family. Unfortunately for Greg, almost that entire family is at a family reunion in Hawaii and he isn't. Hawaii isn't a part of the Snapshot, so effectively, for Greg his family no longer exists. He wants desperately to get them back, but the rules of his new universe say that can't happen. Oh, and with no Middle East, his job will soon be gone too.

What I like about the book: I love world-building and then finding characters and situations that make a strong story, but couldn't happen anywhere else but in the universe I set up. The Snapshot universe is by far my most ambitious effort yet, five years in the making, with twenty-four continent-sized interacting Snapshots and hundreds if not thousands more lurking on the unknown frontiers. The Snapshot universe allows something very much like space opera, but with competing cultures out of Earth's history. It also offers the opportunity to explore a limitless frontier--like exploring the stars, but with each new exploration finding some portion of Earth's history.

I also love the characters. Major Stiener, Neil McLaury and Greg Dunne each have their own traumas and dark sides, but each is also strong. They fight for what they want, risk everything for it, even if, as in Greg's case, the laws of the universe say they have to lose.

If you like unique, thought-provoking universes and science fiction adventures, you'll enjoy Snapshot. Don't give up on it. There is an epic story in a wonderful  universe there for your enjoyment.

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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.