The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

And with contributors like Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Larry Niven, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, and Turtledove himself, there's truly not a clunker in the bunch. All of these stories revolve around Turtledove's central beard-tugging question, but they vary wildly in style, mood, and approach. Many toy with how the future might be altered had some particular event turned out differently (what if the Confederates had won at Gettysburg, or the Enola Gay had crashed before making its fateful flight?), while others follow dimension-hoppers traveling through tangled branches of our timeline (as in Sterling's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," Anderson's "Eutopia," and Jack L. Chalker's surreal ferry ride through "Dance Band on the Titanic").

All but four of these stories were written in the last two decades of the century--before then, Turtledove suggests in part, we weren't scientifically certain about whether Martians and "oceans on Venus full of reptilian monsters" might exist, so we were satisfied by more conventional, planet-faring SF. But the ideas that the contributors wrestle with here, and that irresistible human urge to speculate about the implications of our actions (and whether our decisions matter at all), prove timeless. --Paul Hughes