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Why I Wrote… Chamberlain Resigns, And Other Things That Did Not Happen

By Charles E.P. Murphy It was the internet’s fault. I’d been into history as a general interest since I was a kid, and alternate history was introduced to me through a barrage of sci-fi stories, most especially Sliders on BBC2. It was the internet that turned this mild interest in AH, “oh yeah that’s a fun source of stories”, into a bigger thing because the internet was where fanfiction writers had long written “What If Character X Was Like Y”, “What If Bad Guy Won”, “What

3 days ago5 min read

Vignette: Method Killers

By WM. Garrett Cothran 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 67th contest was Slasher . Method Killers: Dispelling the Myth of the Slasher Introduction The Bombay Bicycle Club is a restaurant which faces the Standford University campus, and if you look hard enough you can just make out the statue of Leland Standford and his family. You notic

7 days ago10 min read

Alternate History Halloween!

Today is the week to get spooky, and Sea Lion Press has several books with a touch of horror to them: Travellers in an Antique Land...

Oct 271 min read

Review: Doctor Who: Leviathan

By Matthew Kresal. The Colin Baker era of Doctor Who , filled as it was with various trials and tribulations, left behind a plethora of unmade serials. Some were scripted for the originally planned season 23 before the series went on hiatus, only to be replaced by Trial of a Time Lord . Others were serials grandfathered into the era (such as The Space Whale aka The Song of Megaptera ) or commissioned but never produced (such as The First Sontarans from Andrew Smith). Amon

Oct 266 min read

The Pharaohs That Matter

By Gary Oswald. You all know this guy. Tutankhamun's funerary mask on display in the museum in Cairo, picture courtesy wikimedia commons. So, as I think is probably clear by my contributions to this blog, I find Alternate History interesting. I find the idea of making changes to the past and seeing what results from that exciting and compelling. But I also find the much more obscure parlour game of Alternate Historiography equally interesting. With the latter, you do not chan

Oct 2410 min read

Review: The Art of Saving the World

By Owen Michael. Cover courtesy Amazon. The Art of Saving the World was a birthday gift from my younger sister, who (accurately) thought a fantasy story with an asexual heroine and heavily featuring alternate universes was a concept that would appeal to me. It's not quite alternate history as traditionally defined; only one alternate universe is depicted as having clear and major world differences, as opposed to clear differences for the main character and her family. But it

Oct 2110 min read

For Want of a Giant Mechbear: The (Alternate?) History of Mascot Horror

By Colin Salt. Hi, kids! Freddy Fazbear goes for a walk in the Five Nights At Freddy's 2 trailer (cropped off youtube) The most common story about the creation of Harry Turtledove's classic breakout hit Guns of the South goes like this. An author complained to Harry Turtledove about how her cover was botched and that it looked as anachronistic and out of place as “Robert E. Lee holding an Uzi”. A light bulb then clicked and the rest is history. I can understand covers (laugh

Oct 173 min read

Prequel Problems: Forever and a Day (James Bond)

By Thomas Anderson. Cover to the book, picture courtesy Amazon. This is the first article I’ve penned in my “Prequel Problems” series for quite a while, so it may be worth briefly recapping the purpose and goal behind these articles. As a voracious reader growing up, I was exposed to a number of examples of fiction (mostly children’s fiction) in which an author had to manage a fictional setting and character histories while releasing books in an anachronic order. The Chronicl

Oct 1411 min read