Other Earths

February 23, 2009
The well-known authors in this wide-ranging alternate history anthology strike out in welcome new directions, often focusing on obscure events or people. The musician Ralph Vaughan Williams appears as an aging ambulance driver amid an extended Great War in Alistair Reynolds's “The Receivers,” while an astronomical phenomenon leads the conquering Inca to become the world's dominant power in Stephen Baxter's “The Unblinking Eye.” Those taking on more recognizable themes—like a magical race's diaspora in Theodora Goss's “Csilla's Story,” or an America that never suffered a civil war in “This Peaceable Land; or, the Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe” by Robert Charles Wilson—reveal their twists' horror and grit without being gratuitous. The well-realized narratives and gripping details make each tale a good introduction for any reader new to alternate history.

March 15, 2009
The new weirdness is no stranger to this set of alternate-history tales. For instance, rather than tell a story, Benjamin Rosenbaum sketches nine possibilities suggested by the term alternate history. Those preferring character, plot, and development will find them in abundance, however, before reaching Rosenbaums head-scratcher. Robert Charles Wilson imagines a late-nineteenth-century South that has avoided the Civil War and ended slavery; Gene Wolfe, the American rescue of Churchill from Nazi-occupied Britain; neither story ends exactly all rosy. Alastair Reynolds realizes the aesthetic casualties an extended Great War inflicts on England. Jeff VanderMeer conjures a U.S. president whose consciousness shifts among parallel realities. Stephen Baxter turns the technological tables in Europes 1966 first contact with America. Paul Park posits different historical courses for the same family by strictly proceeding from what if questions. Best of all, Lucius Shepard contributes another of his palpably atmospheric novellas of Americans in a haunted Vietnam; here, the narrator is haunted by other versions, all flesh and blood, of himself. Theodora Goss, Greg van Eekhout, and Liz Williams also.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)