SEA LION PRESS

By Tom Anderson. While I am a veteran writer of both published and unpublished alternate history (AH) fiction, The Tenacity of Hope is my first published foray into the dicey world of American politics. In this article I’m going to discuss both why this field is a potentially rich one for AH fiction, and why I chose the specific scenario I did: of a world in which Barack Obama does not become President in 2008 so soon after becoming Senator, but instead at an advanced age in

By Tom Anderson. Waiting to go at Launch Pad 39B, 17th Ja 2026. Picture public domain by NASA, courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The 2000s Star Trek prequel series Enterprise had a controversial opening sequence; not so much for the imagery used (which shows technological progress in exploration from wooden sailing ships to aeroplanes to spacecraft) but for the poppy theme song ‘Faith of the Heart’, very different from the approach taken in previous series. Despite being poorly re

By Thomas Anderson. Real people ready to go versus the fictional aliens. Original US paperback cover for Worldwar book 3, image courtesy Amazon marketplace. Alternate History fiction (or some of it at least) can be considered a specialised form of historical fiction. In particular, if one has set a story in a timeline not many years after the Point of Divergence (POD) then in theory everyone one meets in such a story should be a person who existed in real history. Of course,

By Thomas Anderson. That boy is our last hope...? Force Unleashed featured a few more Jedi and a whole other force-sensitive youth. Cover courtesy Amazon market. In this article, I will examine a phenomenon of writing in which stated absolutes become an unintended restriction on future storytelling. In many ways, this is a counterpart to an earlier article I wrote entitled “The Romulan Straitjacket” which focused on a similar facet but with a sense of time rather than space.