[.ca] The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (ISBN 0345439902)

From Amazon.com:
What if? Harry Turtledove, renowned alt-historian and the editor of this anthology, calls that question "those two mournful little words." But little though they might be, they inspired some of the previous century's most brilliant speculative fiction, including the 14 short stories collected here. 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

twisted thoughts:
It is a very good book. Some of it may not be exactly A/H but it's close enough interesting enough and certainly written well enough by all of the authors to be called Very Good A/H. I won't go into detail about all of the story's because there is enough on the books page that describes it well, however I will say that I found Niven's "All The Myriad Ways " a disturbing but new way for me to look at parallel universes and good enough for me to say it is the best story in the book (to me).

twisted thoughts:
It is a very good book. Some of it may not be exactly A/H but it's close enough interesting enough and certainly written well enough by all of the authors to be called Very Good A/H. I won't go into detail about all of the story's because there is enough on the books page that describes it well, however I will say that I found Niven's "All The Myriad Ways " a disturbing but new way for me to look at parallel universes and good enough for me to say it is the best story in the book (to me).

The Stories Don't Fit the Title:
Don't get me wrong. Most of the fourteen stories contained in this collection ARE good, but all too few of them are really alternative history (AH). Certainly, "Bring the Jubilee" and "Moon of Ice" belong in this collection, being pioneering works in the genre (though long-time readers of SF - like me - will have come across them before). The dated writing style of "Jubilee" (written in 1952) actually adds an air of authenticity to it. One might, however, argue it's not a short story, but a novella - it takes up nearly a quarter of the book. "The Lucky Strike" by Kim Stanley Robinson, and "Islands in the Sea" are solid entries. "Islands", by Turtledove himself, is possibly the best AH story in the book. "Suppose They Gave a Peace" is refreshingly subtle. "The Undiscovered" is also an interesting little tale that fits well in a collection such as this. And Poul Anderson's "Eutopia" explores an alternate America from the viewpoint of an inter-dimensional traveler in a similar vein to his Time Patrol books. The remaining stories, however, roam farther afield. Greg Bear's "Through Road No Whither" is a great mystical story that contains characters from an alternate history, but is not really an AH tale itself. "Manassas, Again" contains AH references, but they aren't integral to the story. And "The Winterberry", while excellent, might better be classified as a part of the "conspiracy theorist" genre. Three stories, "Dance Band on the Titanic", "Mozart in Mirrorshades" and Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" (the best of the three), are about inter-dimensional travel rather than the histories of those alternate dimensions. And Allen Steele's "The Death of Captain Future" concerns neither alternate history nor timelines, but is a mainstream SF story. I enjoyed the story a great deal, but that doesn't change the fact that it doesn't BELONG in a collection of this kind. I eagerly await a "best of" collection that is more on topic.

Some Representative Stories About History:
The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century has fourteen stories and an introduction by Harry Turtledove. The introduction is an excellent review of the genre and the stories themselves are gems that have long been buried in moldy magazines or ancient -- to the younger fans -- anthologies. I have encountered several of the stories, but others were entirely new to me. Robinson's The Lucky Strike has the Enola Gay crash on takeoff. DiChario's The Winterberry has JFK live through the shooting in Dallas. Turtledove's Islands in the Sea has Constantinople fall to the Muslims in the 8th century. Shwartz's Suppose They Gave a Peace has McGovern winning the presidency. Niven's All The Myriad Ways has humanity facing the realization of a probability multiverse where all uncertainities are resolved in each and every way. Bear's Through Road No Whither has the Nazis winning World War II...temporarily. Benford's Manassas, Again isn't really alternate history so much as cyclic history, with robots instead of Negroes. Chalker's Dance Band On the Titantic has an intercontinual ferry boat. Moore's Bring the Jubilee has a historian accidently disrupting the timeline so that the Union wins the Civil War. Anderson's Eutopia has a universe in which Greece never declined. Sanders' The Undiscovered has Shakespeare captured by American Indians. Sterling and Shiner's Mozart in Mirrorshades has 18th century Europe invaded by contemporary American culture. Steele's The Death of Captain Future is not so much an alternate history as the story of the birth of a folk myth. Linaweaver's Moon of Ice has another story of the Nazis winning WWII, but with a future much more different than they imagine. Some prior reviewers have pointed out that not all of these stories are alternate history. I must agree with this in two cases (see above) but the time travel stories do impact subsequent events to produce an alternate history and the intercontinual travel stories are tours of other histories. These stories could be classified differently but history is a prominent theme in ALL of them. This volume could have been titled "Some Representative Stories About History From a 20th Century Perspective", but you couldn't get all that on the spine in any reasonable size type. The publisher probably had something to do with the "Best" part of the title. These stories are not history per se, but they demonstrate some truths about history. They make you think about the consequences of accident and error, suggest that we can't ever know all about the past, and question whether we are any good at predicting the future. This volumes, and others like it, remind us that the past is unchangeable, but is also the source of today and tomorrow. Do we really know what our options are? Read and consider.

An Enjoyable but Inaccurate Collection:
This is a mostly enjoyable collection of innovative stories, but the title of the anthology is far from accurate. Of course anyone can argue about what the "best" stories are in a certain category, but the bigger problem here is that this collection is not entirely Alternate History (AH). This is surprising for a collection compiled by Turtledove, who of course is one of the great practitioners of that genre. This appears to be an editorial challenge as the publisher may have requested a collection applied to the "category" of AH, only to reveal that this is a very difficult label to define. Some tales like Jack L. Chalker's "Dance Band on the Titanic," Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," and others are merely time travel stories with the familiar don't-alter-the future theme. "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele is a fun story but an inexplicable addition to this anthology, as it is straight sci-fi without the slightest hint of AH. The stories that really are AH are high quality and make this collection mostly a success, but they only make up a distressingly small percentage of the book. In fact, the story of his own that Turtledove contributes to this book (perhaps suspiciously), "Islands in the Sea," is one of the best and actually sticks most closely to the supposed theme of AH. Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" is surely a classic of straight-up AH, while the most enjoyable story here is William Sanders' "The Undiscovered," a comic tale of Shakespeare trying to put on a production of Hamlet with an adopted tribe of New World Indians. Rest assured that most of the stories here are good and even great, but the title of the anthology is not entirely accurate.