Philip Dick's Man in the High Castle coming to Syfy

"it may be the South Wins, but Winston Churchill and Mackinlay Kantor look sick compared to this...but put it up against Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain, where we all win the right kind of Civil War, thanks to John Brown!"

I'm sorry-what?

 

Thanks for the list I'll definitely have a look at those. I've heard a lot of good stuff about Turtledove, so that looks like a good starting point. I think in a way, Alt-Hist is a good way to excersize the mind, forcing your mind to look at things differently.

There was Poul Anderson Sci-Fi that I read a couple of years back that I don't think really qualifies as alt-history, but it had aliens visiting Earth during the crusades. That was great fun.

 

Winston Churchill and MacKinlay Kantor wrote two of the most well-known the South Won stories. But although Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee was also a South Won story, it is vastly superior to those (and by implication pretty much any other the South Won story.) Bring the Jubilee is widely regarded as an SF classic, for good reason.

Not widely known apparently, but also a wonderful story is Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain. In this, the South Won, in the sense that it achieves it's independence. But, since the insurrection that achieves independence is the one initiated by John Brown it is an entirely different kind of story. His insurrection in the story is the one whose victory would have benefited us all.

The "vs." is not literal, just a short hand way of saying that contrasting two different alt-hist stories sharing the same departure provides much of the same interest and fun that comparing alt-hist to reg-hist does.

Hope that clears it up?

 

Yes, thank you.