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By Matthew Kresal. Region 2 Special Edition DVD, image courtesy Amazon. Parallel worlds. What ifs? Elseworlds. Whatever you (or insert comic book company name here) might like to call them, there’s no doubt that the idea of seeing alternative versions of our favorite superheroes has a place among fans. Something that the long-running DC Universe Animated Original Movies series took advantage of with a number of their adaptations and productions. Among them was Justice League:

By Matthew Kresal. CD cover, via Big Finish's website. The decision in February 1985 to put Doctor Who on hiatus had an immeasurable impact upon the series. The series, which had already begun to bleed viewers, would continue to do so until BBC executives felt they could end it in everything but name nearly five years later. The decision also arguably tarnished the image of Colin Baker as the Doctor, which was further harmed when the same executives pushed him out of the role

By Alexander Wallace. This article was originally published at Nerds of a Feather and the original article can be found there. Please check that blog for more like this. The English translation's cover, courtesy Amazon. One of the things that consistently provides me with a mild degree of amusement as an alternate history fan is how writers from other genres, and especially outside the speculative fiction scene, and especially outside of genre fiction, accidentally reinvent a

By Matthew Kresal. Deathworld cover, image courtesy Big Finish website For Doctor Who’s tenth season, the programme celebrated a decade on-screen with a serial featuring the three actors who had played the Time Lord. But while The Three Doctors as broadcast primarily focused on the Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton incarnations (ill health left William Hartnell in a supporting role) as they faced off against the vengeful Time Lord Omega, the tenth anniversary serial was almos

By Matthew Kresal. Introduced in 1961, the Fantastic Four changed the face of comics. The foursome offered a new take on the genre as a dysfunctional but loving family; their presence put Marvel Comics on the map and set up a still ongoing rivalry with DC Comics both on the page and, later, on cinema screens. They’ve been the stars not only of their own comic for much of the last sixty years but a brief lived radio series, animated television shows, and sometimes ill-fated fe

By Charles E.P. Murphy Cover of first edition, courtesy Amazon. In another world’s 1960s, Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, achieves his dream of draining the lake of Lough Neagh to boost employment and gain land. While it doesn’t quite work out, it does cause an archipelago of small islands to rise out of the water: the “Ark”, so named after it becomes a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles. The world sees it as a beacon of hope in dark times, a place whe

By Gary Oswald. Cover courtesy Amazon Meljean Brooks’ The Iron Duke , the first book in the popular Iron Seas series, follows Detective Inspector Mina Wentworth as she investigates a dead body found in the Isle of Dogs, on the property of the Duke of Anglesey, the titular Iron Duke. This is not however, the book you might think it is from that description. This is not a detective novel or a crime novel. Who killed the dead man (who turns out to be one of the Duke’s friends)

By Matthew Kresal. Copyright Big Finish Productions The making of a television series, like any creative endeavour, is not without its difficulties. Pitches that don’t quite work out and scripts that aren’t up to scratch are part of that experience. Doctor Who was no exception to that. Indeed, some eras being notable for their production woes and the latter part of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Time Lord was such a period with at least one serial being abandoned so late

By Matthew Kresal. The 2016 edition. In the 1950s, the Golden Age of Comics gave way to the Silver Age. The real world changed and, with attention brought to the comics as a result, some old characters retired or evolved while a new generation of heroes came to the fore, culminating at DC with the creation of the Justice League. Suppose for a moment that there was an alternate history where the Golden and Silver Age characters existed in and interacted with the real world of

By Matthew Kresal. Image courtesy Big Finish website. The 1980s. A time of tensions related to all thing nuclear. A fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war dramatized so ably in TV dramas such as Threads and The Day After . Also present was a fear of nuclear power, stemming out of the previous decade and heightened by events such as Chernobyl and the secrecy surrounding the industry as a whole, something brought to life in the classic BBC thriller Edge of Darkness . For a tim

By Charles E.P. Murphy. Cover art by Keith Burns. 1993, the middle of the Third World War, the Asian Bloc and the Western Federation battling for the fate of Europe. Among WESTFED’s greatest assets are the multinational Harrier Squadron, piloting their state-of-the-art jump-jets against the ASBLOC menace. But what happens if there’s a shot at peace? Flight Lt. “Hob” Hogget wants to believe in an armistice but can’t quite trust that it can happen after all the bloodshed. And t

By Gary Oswald. Paperback cover, courtesy Amazon. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is the editor of the What Ifs of Jewish History AH book and owner of the Counterfactual History Review , a blog that has been running for twelve years and covers the way counter-factual thinking has been used and viewed in the mainstream, in both fiction and analysis of the real world. He is also a prominent academic, who serves as President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor

By Matthew Kresal. Cover courtesy Big Finish site. What would Doctor Who be without its monsters? The Daleks secured the series’ hold with the public in its earliest days while the Cybermen have offered a glimpse of what humanity could become should it chose to overly embrace technology. There have been countless others introduced over the decades that have become recurring foes for the Doctor from the Ice Warriors of Mars to the Weeping Angels of Modern Who . Among those foe

By Gary Oswald. The 2020 hardcover edition; image courtesy Amazon. Literary genres are a funny thing. On the one hand they are essentially advertising, 'did you like this book? Well, it's a fantasy book and here are 200 more fantasy books, you'll like them too, please buy them'. On the other hand, it's kind of a reader's guide, telling you, the consumer, what to expect and how to engage with the text. I will react differently to the introduction of a dark handsome neighbour i

In May and June 1970, viewers of the BBC’s Doctor Who were treated to an apocalyptic vision of a fascist Britain as Jon Pertwee’s Doctor crossed over in a parallel world. One where Britain was a fascist state that was risking its own destruction with an ill-conceived project unleashing energies from deep within the Earth with the power to transform men into monsters. Inferno fascinated viewers for more than a half-century and inspired speculation about what led that world t

By Charles E.P. Murphy In 2002, the "rage virus" swept through Britain; everyone infected went rabid and turned on the people around them. The world quarantined the nation and abandoned all who hadn't managed to flee. Twenty eight years later, the ageing Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), builder of a vast memorial hewn from human bones, makes a tentative contact with the Alpha infected he's dubbed 'Samson' (Chi Lewis-Parry). The young Spike (Alfie Williams), however, has met som

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. 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 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 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