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.

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 the author of the best-selling Contagion comes a new novel in the Living Dead series. When deadly earthquakes devastate the Caribbean, an ancient disease of almost unimaginable destructive force engulfs the globe. As the earth continues to convulse and the seas encroach, the dead rise with an appetite for human flesh. Survivors must learn to navigate a world in which they are now the hunted.

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.

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.

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.

Ridley has just completed the greatest challenge of her life: the Vancouver Endurance Race. However, despite her success and newfound fame, she is consumed by one pressing concern—finding her missing father. Unbeknownst to her, his life is in grave danger. Meanwhile, Seth is held captive in the Tower, a brutal community ruled by a ruthless tyrant. After enduring months of torture, Seth and his fellow prisoners make a daring escape into the treacherous primordial jungle. Determined to find his way home, he will do whatever it takes to survive.

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.

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.

Following a year and a half of international tensions and demands from the aggressive Fuhrer of the German Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, Poland is invaded by the German Third Reich, triggering the start of the Second World War. German armies advance over the border and smash Polish forces with their Panzer forces and their powerful Luftwaffe, while the Soviet Union watches with glee, eventually joining into the spil by launching an invasion of its own.

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind Healer Anja regularly drinks poison. Not to die, but to save—seeking cures for those...

Temeraire * Book 2 When Britain intercepted a French ship and its precious cargo–an unhatched dragon’s egg–Capt. Will Laurence of HMS Reliant unexpectedly became master and commander of the noble dragon he named Temeraire. As new recruits in Britain’s Aerial Corps, man and dragon soon...

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.

A sequel to the H.G. Wells classic THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, brilliantly realized by award-winning SF author and Wells expert Stephen Baxter It has been fourteen years since the Martian invasion. Humanity has moved on, always watching the skies but confident that we know how to defeat the alien...

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....

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.

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?

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.

Alternating between nineteenth-century Europe and present-day New England, this tale follows the great British painter J. M. W. Turner - and his scene of artists, intellectuals, and lovers - and Henry, a middle-aged family man whose otherwise mundane existence is disrupted by the discovery of The Center of the World, Turner’s controversial painting of Helen of Troy that had been thought lost forever.