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Title: The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century by Harry Turtledove, Martin Harry Greenberg ISBN: 0-345-43990-2 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Could have been MUCH better . . .
Comment: I guess I'm too avid a reader of "alternate history" to expect to find anything in an anthology of previously-published stories I haven't read several times before, and that's the case here. But are these the "best"? Yeah, some of them. Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" certainly is, and so is "Moon of Ice" by Brad Linaweaver, and Jack Chalker's "Dance Band on the Titanic" is one of my favorites. But Susan Schwartz's "Suppose They Gave a Peace," while it's a pretty good story, was published less than a year before this book was compiled, which simply isn't enough time for any story to become a classic. Others really don't seem to fit the theme: Larry Niven's "All the Myriad Ways" is an exercise in philosophy/psychology in which alternate history plays only a small, background role. "Mozart in Mirrorshades," by Bruce Sterling and Lew Shiner, while also a good story, is time travel, not alternate history, and Allan Steele's "The Death of Captain Future" has nothing to do with it at all. I think Harry also made a mistake by including Ward Moore's truly classic "Bring the Jubilee," which is a novella, not a short story, and takes up a quarter of the book; that space would have been better allocated to one of the pieces from _What If_, or some other story from earlier in the century, since Moore's is the only story that predates the late 1960s, and most of these were published only in the 1980s or later.
Rating: 4
Summary: An Enjoyable but Inaccurate Collection
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: twisted thoughts
Comment: 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).
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Title: What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley, Stephen E. Ambrose ISBN: 0425176428 Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley ISBN: 042518613X Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group Pub. Date: 01 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Roads Not Taken: Tales of Alternate History by Gardner Dozois, Stanley Schmidt ISBN: 0345421949 Publisher: Del Rey Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Way It Wasn't: Great Science Fiction Stories of Alternate History by Martin Harry Greenberg, Robert Silverberg ISBN: 0806517697 Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Almost America : From the Colonists to Clinton: a "What If" History of the U.S. by Steve Tally ISBN: 0380800918 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 21 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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