SEA LION PRESS

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

By Matthew Kresal. Mention the title Flashpoint to a fan of DC Comics and you’ll get a flicker of recognition. It was the title, after all, of a 2011 crossover event that reshaped the DC universe prior to the launch of the New 52 with alternate versions of various characters. An arc that not only inspired an animated adaptation released two years later but also influenced story elements that appeared in both TV and films adaptations of the Flash (with decidedly mixed results

By J. Concagh The Royal Artillery Monument in Hyde Park; image courtesy wikimedia commons. I have a soft spot for the Royal Artillery Memorial. It is not a conventional kind of memorial; dominated not by the people it commemorates but by their tools; the artillery shells, the chains of the gun train, the short, stout, towering mass of the Howitzer all dominate over the four human figures, the shrouded body of the fallen gunner, the workmanlike stance of the shell carrier and

By Gary Oswald. Argentina and France's national teams battle for the ball on the cover of a 1954 sports mag. Picture in public domain and courtesy wikimedia commons. Rugby Union, like a lot of sports, was first codified in the UK and as such the four home nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) have traditionally been the heartland of the game. From there it spread to France where it became popular, helped by Vichy France banning the rival Rugby League code in 1941 and

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

By Charles E.P. Murphy The spacesuit was watching them now. What was it thinking behind that screen? Could anyone ever know?   “I won’t...

By Gary Oswald. A 1905 postcard from Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the capital of Portuguese Mozambique... which was a lot more recent a...

By Ryan Fleming. A famous Hollywood celebrity poses with his co-star Julie Adams. Image courtesy the FDA (who Adams autographed it for...

By Charles E.P. Murphy. This time Gunnar didn’t get permission to leave for ‘trainspotting’, he just pretended to go to bed early and...

By Andy Cooke. The editor asked me to write a short article on “Why I wrote…” any of my SLP books. Naturally, I turned in an article on...

By Roshita Narasimhan. Off in the distant red giant system of Arcturus, the planet of Xenon was a prosperous civilization, having...