After a narrow Confederate victory at Antietam in 1862, the American Civil War became stalemated, until European recognition - and military action - on behalf of the South finally forced the Union to accept an armistice "on the basis of separation" in April 1865. Among the treaty's terms: A plebiscite to decide the fate of Kansas and Missouri, two bitterly contested states swarming with Unionist and Confederate guerrillas, for whom the war is far from over.Back on the family farm i...

The life of Eric Arthur Blair greatly impacted the work he wrote under the name 'George Orwell'. The Spanish Civil War, wartime Britain, and the rise of totalitarianism all fed into seminal works like Animal Farm and 1984 whose impact is still felt today.But what would Orwell have written had he lived in another timeline? A world where his experiences in Spain were different, and the Second World War broke out over Czechoslovakia, not Poland?Mark Ciccone weaves a tale that'...

What will the end of the world be like?Plague or nuclear fire? Asteroids or floods?Divine wrath or people meddling with what should have been left alone?The apocalypse may come in the future, but what apocalypses might have occurred if history had played out differently? What if nukes had flown during the Cuban Missile Crisis? What if an asteroid had been on a collision course with Earth before the first person could set foot on the Moon? What if humanity destroyed it...

A biography of the second most successful sniper of the German Wehrmacht and one of the few private soldiers to be honored with the Knights Cross award.An Austrian conscript who qualified as a Wehrmacht machine gunner, Josef "Sepp" Allerberger was drafted to the southern sector of the Russian Front in July 1942. Wounded at Voroshilovsk, he experimented with a Russian sniper-rifle while convalescing and so impressed his superiors with his proficiency that he was retu...

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together short stories from award winning authors and ...

A rare, first-hand account from a Swedish Waffen-SS soldier who fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front during World War II.Few new personal accounts by Waffen-SS soldiers appear in English; even fewer originate from the multitude of non-German European volunteers who formed such an important proportion of this service's manpower. Twilight of the Gods was originally written in Swedish, and published in Buenos Aires shortly after the end of WWII. It...

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self-evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection, the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together award-winning authors and masters of the fi...

Presenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics.'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.'A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's...

Of all the days to have a problem, today was the worst. Of all the problems to have on all of the days, this was the worst.3000 years, they'd travelled the stars. 3,000 years of searching and archiving, cataloguing every single planet in the entire Universe. Their journey was now over. The day was here when they could, finally return home.But they'd found another planet.Today was a very bad day.

A stroke of the pen and history is changed. In 1938, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, determined to avoid war, signed the Munich Accord, ceding part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. But the following spring, Hitler snatched the rest of that country, and England, after a fatal act of appeasement, was fighting a war for which it was not prepared. Now, in this thrilling alternate history, another scenario is played out: What if Chamberlain had not signed the accord?In this acti...

The multiple Locus Award-winning annual collection of the year's best science fiction stories.In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self-evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, the very best SF authors explore ideas ...

In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together award winning authors and masters of the fie...