Alternate World Fantasy

Alternate Worlds is a Magic: the Gathering memoir written by Brian Schneider, one of the game’s early R&D leads, about the fun and merit of growing up a gamer. Consider Alternate Worlds a love letter to Magic: the Gathering, to gamers, and to anyone who woke up one day and thought, “I miss my friends.” If I were to summarize why this book exists, I’d say that I got pretty fed up with the cloning culture in the gaming industry and just wanted to make something that felt like the opposite of that.

Bloomsbury presents I Hear A New World by Alan Moore, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. 'Extraordinary' Susanna Clarke, bestselling author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell A continuation of The Great When; a dark and beguiling tour through the streets of London - fictional and real -...

In this, the first volume of renowned author and historian Peter G. Tsouras’s alternative history trilogy, Great Britain’s support for the Confederacy takes it to the brink of war with the Union. The escape of a British-built Confederate ironclad finally ignites the heap of combustible animosities and national interests. When the US Navy seizes it in British waters, the ensuing battle spirals into all-out war. Napoleon III eagerly joins the British and declares war on the United States.

From boardrooms to befuddled aliens, what if the high-tech absurdities of modern life accelerated to warp speed? The stories in Neil Rackham's debut science fiction collection, Elliptical Billiard Balls, explore the worlds of business and tech - not to mention English-speaking dogs and aliens who communicate via smells - to create strange new futures.

August 1, 1914, Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm II cancels the German invasion of Belgium over the objections of his generals, sending his armies east against Russia instead of west to France, and sets off a chain of events that will radically change the course of modern history. Gray Tide in the East is the best-selling counterfactual history of the First World War, if the Germans had not invaded Belgium in 1914 and thereby brought Great Britain and, eventually, the United States into the war.

The war had taken everything from Lina Sucherin - her parents, sisters, a fledgling romance...even her faith in herself and her psychic abilities. All of it ripped away with the fall of the Third Reich and the brutal Soviet sack of Berlin. Three years later, amid the suspicion, paranoia, and fledgling brutality of communist East Germany, danger threatens the only people Lina cares about, forcing her to overcome her lingering self-doubt.

Proto thought he’d saved the world and found true love. Or at least, he’d achieved some sort of ending, happy or otherwise. So when he wakes up in his bed, right where he’d gone to sleep before arriving at Somnus’ Palace, it’s highly disconcerting. “It really was a dream!” he muses sadly. But, for better or for worse, things are never that simple for Proto. He finds out that what he did back at Somnus’ Palace really was quite important. Overall, he did a good job there as a visitor of dreams, with one exception.

Proto wakes up in the misty halls of the palace of Somnus, the Lord of Dreams. Why is he there? Who knows? But as long as he’s there, he’s been given a job—to visit sleeping people’s dreams and try to make sure they turn out properly. By guiding dreams to the right conclusions, Somnus and his crew of dream visitors help keep the world from going off the rails. During his adventures as a dream visitor, Proto fails, makes a fool of himself, and—against all odds—makes friends too. And maybe more than friends . . . ? It’s hard to tell. There’s something off in how people here are looking at him.

Lionel Wallace is a man of enviable success - a brilliant politician on the verge of the Cabinet, a pillar of Victorian society, and a master of his own destiny. But behind his mask of achievement lies a devastating secret: a green door in a white wall that he first stumbled upon as a lonely...

To save humanity from being consigned to oblivion and to prevent war between elves and men, Eltanin, the first and greatest wizard there ever was, performed a terrible ritual that shattered the one world into two. For 20,000 years the two dimensions, unknown to each other, existed side by side. Aralia, home to the elfin race known as the Ferrishyn, and Earth, home to humanity, are both weakening. On Aralia, Magick is fading and will extinguish unless the two worlds are reunited.

Three hundred million years ago, the galactic community was taken by surprise. A catastrophic war with a hostile entity threatened to destroy all life until the fight was postponed by a calamitous event known as the Great Conflation. With the majority of pre-Conflation empires in ruins and the Ascended Biologicals wiped out, the hastily formed Wanderer Enclave tasked its fleet with unearthing answers and continuing the fight. One lone ship has found something: an innocuous world it had marked for routine decontamination that may hold vital answers.

When 20-year-old police recruit Kiera Hudson sets off to the remote town of Ripper Falls, in search of her missing brother, her life is changed forever. But when Kiera's life collides into a stranger, she finds herself tangled up in a world unlike anything she has even known.

After returning from a campaign in the Third Afghan War, Major Thomas Waller and the Royal Newfoundland Regiment are assigned to escort two mysterious ladies into the unknown lands of the new world. With the help of an American drifter named Smith, Waller and his men must face daunting hordes of savages that roam the steppes of the alien planet, and help to uncover the ladies' secrets - and the secrets of the new world itself. A dangerous mission awaits on the Grasslands....

Returning triumphantly to the brilliantly evoked near-Renaissance world of A Brightness Long Ago and Children of Earth and Sky, international bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay deploys his signature ‘quarter turn to the fantastic’ to tell a story of vengeance, power, and love. On a dark...

Three teams of warriors are on Aerth - two human, one Dwarven. All three want the Gate over Rotterdam closed, and all three are working separately to accomplish their goals. At the same time, the situation on Earth is detiorating. Germany is once again at war, this time with the Swiss. The unstable situation in Germany's leadership only gets worse as Hagirr's mate and powerful sorceress does her job of keeping humanity off balance. Fascist Germany is her tool. Or is it?

From New York Times best-seller and science fiction and fantasy mistress of adventure Mercedes Lackey, together with a team of topnotch collaborators, comes Book Two in The Secret World Chronicle, a pulse-pounding saga of superpowers - and the very human men and women who must learn to wield them without losing themselves in the process.

The world where the straights are hated for hundreds of years is about to turn for the worse and shatter to pieces. The involvement of Eliza X, a police officer, in the killing of a straight, Jeffrey Antinoro, becomes the singular event and the catalyst that sends humanity into a tailspin. A revolution erupts, and Eliza is the sole cause of it. Nevertheless, her journey forces her to rediscover herself and find love in the arms of her professor Linda Pelc.

Irene Radford offers new and old stories that reach from a weapon of mass destruction that could change the outcome of the U.S. Civil War, the truth behind why the ballet Giselle disappeared for nearly fifty years, pirates in Indonesia questioning whether we should control technology or be controlled by it, to a glimpse of Princess Victoria coming of age as secret operatives try to protect her from madmen acting in the name of long dead Lord Byron.

In a world where scientists have become the new superstars, Rick Hamilton, once a celebrated rock icon, has lost his passion for music amid the clamor of shallow fame. One night, in a haze of disillusionment, a portal from a parallel universe brings back his long-lost college roommate, Andy. The visitation offers Rick a chance to explore a reality where his life took a different turn.

Tony Fallow has a sticky problem: Everything that isn't bolted down literally wants to be near him! Fearing he must be one of the Sovereign, a remarkable new minority of superpowered people who recently revealed themselves, Tony travels to the Donner Institute for Sovereign Studies with hopes of being cured. But as he tells his story to a human doctor working at the institute, the boorish Tony soon finds his problem might be more complicated than he suspected.