The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century |
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The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century
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by Harry Turtledove and Martin Harry Greenberg
Sales Rank: 244213
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$2.09
At Amazon
on 6-18-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 432 pages
Published by: Del ReyEdition: 1st Edition October 2, 2001
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0345439902
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0345439901
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.1 pounds
Product Review
What if? Harry Turtledove, renowned alt-historian and the editor of this anthology, calls that question "those two mournful little words." But little though they might be, they inspired some of the previous century's most brilliant speculative fiction, including the 14 short stories collected here.
And with contributors like Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, and Turtledove himself, there's truly not a clunker in the bunch. All of these stories revolve around Turtledove's central beard-tugging question, but they vary wildly in style, mood, and approach. Many toy with how the future might be altered had some particular event turned out differently (what if the Confederates had won at Gettysburg, or the Enola Gay had crashed before making its fateful flight?), while others follow dimension-hoppers traveling through tangled branches of our timeline (as in Sterling's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," Anderson's "Eutopia," and Jack L. Chalker's surreal ferry ride through "Dance Band on the Titanic").
All but four of these stories were written in the last two decades of the century--before then, Turtledove suggests in part, we weren't scientifically certain about whether Martians and "oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters" might exist, so we were satisfied by more conventional, planet-faring SF. But the ideas that the contributors wrestle with here, and that irresistible human urge to speculate about the implications of our actions (and whether our decisions matter at all), prove timeless. --Paul Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
A ghostly ferry makes passages between coexisting "different Earths"; a 20th-century man describes his impact on the Civil War, brought about by time-machine tricks; and Mozart, Thomas Jefferson and Marie Antoinette end up as employees at an oil refinery in The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, edited by Harry Turtledove with Martin H. Greenberg. Contributors include Poul Anderson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ward Moore and Susan Shwartz.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Reader Reviews
This is a mostly enjoyable collection of innovative stories, but the title of the anthology is far from accurate. Of course anyone can argue about what the "best" stories are in a certain category, but the bigger problem here is that this collection is not entirely Alternate History (AH). This is surprising for a collection compiled by Turtledove, who of course is one of the great practitioners of that genre. This appears to be an editorial challenge as the publisher may have requested a collection applied to the "category" of AH, only to reveal that this is a very difficult label to define. Some tales like Jack L. Chalker's "Dance Band on the Titanic," Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," and others are merely time travel stories with the familiar don't-alter-the future theme. "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele is a fun story but an inexplicable addition to this anthology, as it is straight sci-fi without the slightest hint of AH. The stories that really are AH are high quality and make this collection mostly a success, but they only make up a distressingly small percentage of the book. In fact, the story of his own that Turtledove contributes to this book (perhaps suspiciously), "Islands in the Sea," is one of the best and actually sticks most closely to the supposed theme of AH. Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" is surely a classic of straight-up AH, while the most enjoyable story here is William Sanders' "The Undiscovered," a comic tale of Shakespeare trying to put on a production of Hamlet with an adopted tribe of New World Indians. Rest assured that most of the stories here are good and even great, but the title of the anthology is not entirely accurate.
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The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century
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Price: $2.09
Updated on 6-18-2008.
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