100 Alternate History Writing Prompts


Book Description

100 Alternate History Writing Prompts is book 2 of 14, in the Science Fiction Writing Series. Combat writer's block with 100 Alternate History Writing Prompts. This book is useful for writing contests, short story inspiration, writing groups, NaNoWriMo, and writing workshops.




Build 100 Worlds: 100 Fantasy Fiction Writing Ideas, Inspirations and Story Starters


Book Description

Are you seeking fantasy writing ideas? Perhaps you’re already a successful fantasy writer or maybe you’re at the initial aspiration stage. Fantasy fiction is enjoying an immense and growing popularity. The blockbusters and bestsellers just keep coming to feed an audience hungry for more and more. And within you there are fantasy worlds waiting to happen! This title taps into the creative force within and goes far beyond quick general fantasy fiction writing prompts. It offers rich and fun longer descriptions of fantasy writing scenarios, inspirations and story starters. Enjoy reading through possible medieval writing ideas, urban and dystopian fantasy scenarios, sci-fi writing suggestions, alternate history possibilities, fantasy governments and social systems, enchanted realms that have never existed before, as well as “almost” earth-like societies with magic that lies just beneath the radar. Embedded within the 100 entries, you will also find possible fantasy book title name ideas, fantasy character names, fantasy creatures, and more. You might take any individual entry and run with it, or mix and match elements from several entries. Fantasy fiction has a way of reminding us of universal truths as it bypasses the critical left brain hemisphere and takes us on a journey of wonderment, suspense and new possibilities. Here’s to your enjoyment and success as a fantasy fiction writer, and to the birth of brand new fantasy fiction worlds!




100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers: Outstanding History Lessons


Book Description

No matter what you teach, there is a 100 Ideas title for you! The 100 Ideas series offers teachers practical, easy-to-implement strategies and activities for the classroom. Each author is an expert in their field and is passionate about sharing best practice with their peers. Each title includes at least ten additional extra-creative Bonus Ideas that won't fail to inspire and engage all learners. _______________ Part of the best-selling 100 Ideas series, this book offers teachers quick and easy ways to engage students, convey complex knowledge, and build history-specific thinking skills. The activities in this book aim to embrace what is mind-boggling, bizarre and extraordinary about history and tap into students' innate curiosity and wonder, while still catering to the twin pressures of exam results and observation. With these criteria in mind, there are plenty of tips on demonstrating progress, ways of differentiating, preparing students for history assessments and examinations – while still having fun.




The Years of Rice and Salt


Book Description

With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know. . . . “A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.”—The New York Times Book Review It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold New World. “Exceptional and engrossing.”—New York Post “Ambitious . . . ingenious.”—Newsday




The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to the speculative sub-genre of alternate history fiction, this book maps the unique terrain of this vibrant mode of storytelling and then explains how to write it. First giving a concise conceptual overview and the critical tools to differentiate the different forms of counterfactual fiction, Jack Dann lays out the 'tricks of the trade' such 'Heinleining', how to create recognizable 'divergent points' and how to employ paratextual elements and 'layering' to overcome readers' unfamiliarity with invented counterfactual events and cultures. Alongside this, Dann takes you step-by-step through a complete short story to demonstrate, line-by-line, how alternative history fiction works. As well as Dann's exacting methodology for writing professional quality alternate history stories, this book also features a live-on-the-page Q&A with some of the most esteemed alternate history writers working today, including Kim Stanley Robinson, John Birmingham and Lisa Goldstein among many others, who will detail their own particular hacks, theories, processes, methods and strategies. Combining extensive and deep knowledge of the field with accessible writing advice, this is the ultimate guidebook to the broad and complex sub-genre of counterfactual and alterative history fiction.




Red Delta


Book Description

In July of 1863, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia scored a narrow victory over the Union Army of the Potomac in the Battle of Gettysburg. Soon after, President Abraham Lincoln was killed during a Confederate raid on the outskirts of Washington. With the war at an effective stalemate, rising opposition at home, and the growing threat of European intervention, the United States was forced to recognize the CSA as an independent nation. This victory, however, carried the seeds of disaster. Within a decade of their independence, the Confederate States began to tear themselves apart over many of the same divisive issues that had led to their breaking from the Union. By the 1970s, the former CSA is a patchwork of minor countries, often clashing with one another over resources, territory and ideology. Many blacks in these nations, seeking to escape the discrimination and subjugation they have endured since slavery's grudging end in the 1880s, have turned to guerrilla warfare, under the banner of the Brotherhood Liberation Army. The United States has largely avoided becoming involved in this and other Southern conflicts, preferring to prop up or engineer the fall of this regime or that, seeking to maintain its influence and dominance over these former states without provoking another war against the entire South. Nation reporter Terry Garrison-descendant of discredited abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison-knows this history all too well, and what it has done to him and his family. Sent to cover a momentous peace accord between the Republic of Mississippi and the BLA, he views the assignment as pointless: one more doomed attempt to bring peace to the fractious South. Then he stumbles across a soldier with an earth-shaking secret-one that could not only destroy the fragile peace in Mississippi and the Delta region, but potentially set off a new conflagration across the entire continent. But there is more to this secret than even Terry can guess. And there are those-South and North-who will stop at nothing to keep it buried... Mark Ciccone is a writer from the American Midwest, specifically Wisconsin. He writes alternate history, soft science fiction, and historical fiction. This is his first novel-length work.




The Hindus


Book Description

An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds. The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms to consider history as a whole.




Rodham


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of American Wife and Eligible . . . He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever. “A deviously clever what if.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Immersive, escapist.”—Good Morning America “Ingenious.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • The Washington Post • Marie Claire • Cosmopolitan (UK) • Town & Country • New York Post In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced. In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton. But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life. Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.




Luftwaffe Victorious


Book Description

A bold reimagining of the Luftwaffe’s successes during World War II At the outbreak of World War II the Luftwaffe was considered by many to be the world’s most powerful air force. Driven by the new strategy of blitzkrieg, or lightning war, it stormed across Europe in a very short time. Opposing air forces were swept aside as the Luftwaffe blasted a path for the panzers and protected their flanks as they raced for the sea. Flushed with victory, its formidable reputation apparently justified, the Luftwaffe regrouped in occupied Western Europe for a final showdown with its one remaining enemy—Britain. Supremely confident, the odds seemed to be on their side. But in the summer of 1940 they suffered a dramatic defeat during the Battle of Britain, and by May 1945 the Germans had surrendered to the Allies and the Third Reich collapsed. What went wrong? How could things have been different? What if Göring, the brilliant yet flawed Luftwaffe commander, had died prematurely in September 1940? What radical alterations in the pattern of command would have transpired? What if a Luftwaffe strategic bomber force had become a reality? In this engagingly written and thought-provoking addition to the world of alternate history, aviation enthusiast Mike Spick asks these very questions, envisaging an altogether different series of events that culminate in a dramatic new conclusion to the war. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.




The Plot Against America


Book Description

Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president—is soon to be an HBO limited series. In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother. "A terrific political novel . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review