SEA LION PRESS

By Thomas Anderson. Well, not that sort of worldbuilding. (Logo from Alien franchise, copyright Disney; picture taken from Xenopedia.) The fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has become well-known for his advocacy of what he calls “Sanderson’s First Law (of Magic)”; that is, that an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. In one sense, this is a manifesto against deus ex machina  and inventing new rule

By Gary Oswald. So AH you can see an alternate version of it! Picture courtesy Amazon. Being enthusiasts of alternate history, everyone reading this is probably able to name an iconic piece of AH fiction in most formats. A book, a comic, a tv show, a video game etc. But it's maybe a little harder when it comes to motion pictures. There have obviously been a bunch of AH feature films but none have really been advertised as the big new AH media in the way TV shows like The Man

By Matthew Kresal. “Where do your ideas come from?” That’s almost an inevitable question one receives after a stranger finds out you’re a published author. One that is almost always in the wake of, “What do you write?” It’s an understandable question and one that I’m sure in my younger (and unpublished) days I asked myself. Since being published, I’ve come to realize that like a magician revealing a trick, there’s a risk that answering takes some of the magic out of proceedin

This year's seen the release of two novels from Sea Lion Press: a Cold War spy thriller in a world with a Nazi detente, and a political history in a world where Obama's time in office is delayed by twenty years. Both are still available now and in Funny Money 's case, in paperback too! Funny Money David Brook, ex-RAF, now British intelligence, faces a conspiracy that could ruin Britain. A British intelligence officer looking for counterfeit money. A mysterious French-Algeria

By Charles EP Murphy. On the Sea Lion Press Forums , we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the 86th contest was Workers . Right. This was going to be the tricky bit. Gene Narvy was going to have to: A) Land his jumping dropkick on Paul Plunder perfectly B) Not  look to make sure his partner Tommy Frank had landed his one perfectly, by which he meant Tommy had "botched" the kick

The ebook retailer Smashwords is running a sale until New Year's Day, and Sea Lion Press is part of it! We have dozens of books on a 25% discount , from our newest releases to some of our venerable classics, so now's the time to purchase one you've always had your eye on - but only for a few more days...

By Gary Oswald. Secretly a AH film? The Woman King's bluray, courtesy Amazon. Inglourious Basterds  is a 2009 Quentin Tarantino war film about allied agents operating in occupied France during 1944. Those agents are planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and, to spoil a 16-year-old film, they shockingly actually succeed. Hitler is killed by the French resistance in 1944 rather killing himself in 1945.   That obviously has huge political and military implications. But the f

By Matthew Kresal. Charles Dickens being bothered when he's trying to write, in the DVD cover for The Man Who Invented Christmas. Image courtesy Amazon marketplace. Christmas time. Presents. Turkey or a piece of poultry on the table for dinner. Stories of redemption and a new found chance of happiness (romantic or otherwise) amid the snows of the holiday season. All of these are hallmarks across the western world of that time up to and around the 25th of December every year.

Just in time for Christmas, we're back with our last release of the year. After a tumultuous year in US politics, SLP veteran Tom Anderson returns to spin a yarn that asks the question of what a much later Presidency of Barack Obama would look like. How might more experience and many more bruising defeats along the way to the White House affect the man who became the first African American President? And, of course, how are national and global politics changed by the absence

By Colin Salt. A Pan Am Boeing 707-121 hanging out at Worldport in 1961 - a terminal built by Pan Am themselves. Copyright the John Proctor Collection and provided to Wikimedia Commons. Pan Am Airlines is a cultural icon of an airline that nonetheless went out of business decades prior to this article. This naturally brings up the question people ask about any firm or organization remotely similar: could it have been saved? The answer is "almost certainly not."   I'm not goin

By Thomas Anderson. The subject of our article, when he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1863; photograph taken by Ernest Edwards, courtesy wikimedia commons via the State Library of New South Wales. I’m aware that on Youtube nowadays there is an irritating prevalence of using the word “forgotten” (or “that you’ve never heard of”) in video titles, which is frequently not true. Possibly the worst case I saw was a video describing Vichy France as “the forgotten Nazi

By Ryan Fleming. In no way mediocre! Special edition blu-ray, image courtesy Amazon. Mad Max: Fury Road was released in May 2015. It was the fourth film in the Mad Max  series, and the first without original leading man Mel Gibson. Though it saw disappointing returns as far as the studio was concerned, it received critical acclaim, received ten nominations at the Academy Awards and won six of them, was critically acclaimed, making multiple top ten films that year, and later

By Gary Oswald. "Oriental Warrior" by Pier Francesco Mola (1650), a painting of a contemporary Barbary pirate. Could they have dominated the Caribbean coasts? Art in public domain, provided by wikimedia commons. The European colonisation of the Americas was done by numerous countries. England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Netherlands, Prussia, Tuscany, Spain, France, Portugal, Norway, Malta, and Courland in modern day Latvia all made attempts to settle in vario

Smashwords is having a sale for the rest of the month and dozens of Sea Lion Press books have 25% off, just in time for Christmas! Whatever your favourite period of history and preferred tone for AH tales, there's going to be a SLP book for you at Smashwords. Discuss this Article

By Matthew Kresal. Cover courtesy Big Finish website. On the 27th of February 1985, Doctor Who was officially and quite publicly put on hiatus. The two years that followed were among the most dramatic in the series history, with an entire season worth of serials being scrapped in favor of an overarching narrative even before behind the scenes events played out in the public eye in fandom and the larger British press. Among the scripts for what could have been Colin Baker’s s

By John A. Hopkins Receiving my paperback copy of Atomic Secrets , my first AH novel, was a thrill. Whilst I had previously self-published a novel, this felt a bit different. Perhaps it was the engagement with the team at Sea Lion Press, the cover coming together, and a date for publishing versus me pressing the button on KDP. Whatever the reason, I opened the package and grinned like an idiot. Then I put it away – I had already read it hundreds of times, either all the way t

By Alex Wallace. On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the 87th contest was Pride . ***** Arkady Pavlovich Semyonov did not envy the poor page who had to tell Joseph Stalin that the world was coming to an end. Perhaps, speculated Arkady, that that page had to tell the Vozhd that the end of the world was in some sense his fault. At least, he hoped t

By Gary Oswald. Cover of the current UK e-book version, picture courtesy Amazon. The exact effect the smallpox epidemics had on the native populations of the New World is a deeply contentious historical argument. This is because there are no agreed upon population counts of how many Native Americans lived in the Americas prior to European contact in 1491. Alfred Kroeber suggested a number of around eight million people, Henry Dobyns however argued the number was above one hun

By Ryan Fleming. Not actually The Thief and the Cobbler, nor a family classic. DVD cover for the Arabian Knight edit (retitled) courtesy Amazon - could another world have an early 2000s DVD of the real thing? There are some films whose development hell has made them infamous, usually for ruining what could have been a good film. Then there are those whose development hell has made them legendary. We’ve touched upon a couple of these in this series already: A Confederacy of Du

By Paul Hynes. French soldiers seizing Lauterbach in their invasion of Germany. Photograph taken by Press Agency staff and in Imperial War Museum records, believed public domain; image courtesy wikimedia commons. The 2001 film The Pianist  contains many disturbing scenes but there is one at the very beginning which sticks out for this series. It involves the Jewish Szpilman family in Warsaw on the 3rd of September, 1939, three days into the German invasion of Poland. The fami