History AlternateHistory / Literature

* In ''Literature/NeverLetMeGo'' by Kazuo Ichiguro, the question asked is "What if human cloning was invented sooner? What if cancer was curable, but only with the use of these clones?"

** ''A Different Flesh'' is a short story collection taking place in a world where ''Homo erectus'' made it to the Americas instead of the predecessors of the native American peoples. Differences include the theory of evolution being discovered by Literature/SamuelPepys (since the "sims" are [[EvolutionaryLevels an obvious link]] between humans and our own great apes), a wider range of North American fauna ([[KillEmAll at least until the Jamestown settlers start cutting through the sabertooth tigers]]) and significant political differences (the [[strike:Founding]] Conscript Fathers hew closer to UsefulNotes/TheRomanRepublic when they establish Alt!USA, while the Spanish colonies in Central and South America grow more slowly without the infrastructure of [[{{Mayincatec}} earlier civilizations]] to build upon). It's yet another story where the Mississippi River expanded into a continental divide in prehistory, rendering eastern North America as a distinct continent which comes to be identified with {{Atlantis}}.

* "The Strange Death Of Captain Candelario", a short story included in Creator/RosarioFerre's ''SweetDiamondDust'', takes place in an alternate version of 1998 where the United States is no longer interested in the territory of Puerto Rico. It ends up becoming an independent republic by the name of San Juan Bautista (the name given to Puerto Rico by Christopher Columbus) under a rather authoritarian regime.

* Cody Franklin's ''Literature/TheAtlantropaArticles'' takes place in a world where Herman Soumlrgel's Atlantropa Project is carried out starting in the 1930's, World War II never happens, and the Third Reich is still in power far into the future.

* The ''Literature/CelestialEmpire'' books by Chris Roberson take place in an alternate history where the Chinese rose to dominance during the Middle Ages. They, alongside their enemies the Aztec, are the dominant cultures in the world in present day. And there are space ships.* In ''Literature/CelestialMatters'' UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat ended up conquering pretty much all of Europe and then went into a thousand year war with the Orient.

* In Larry Correia's ''{{Literature/TheGrimnoirChronicles}}'' [[strike: Mutants]] Actives, people with magic powers start appearing in the mid-19th century. There are also more mundanes departures like Teddy Roosevelt choosing a military rather than political career, becoming a general and dying in The Great War, Hitler being arrested and executed in 1929, Berlin being destroyed by Tesla's "Peace Ray" which ended the war in 1918, the Great Dust Bowl being started early in 1927 by an American weather control experiment GoneHorriblyWrong (in OTL the first serious droughts and windstorms hit in 1933) and the Titanic being saved by an Active from the iceberg.

** It should be noted that TheMovie didn't give politics as large a part in its story as the book. Instead, TheMovie takes place [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture Twenty Seconds Into The Future]].

* The 1992 short story "Literature/{{Snodgrass}}" by Ian R. MacLeod imagines a scenario where Creator/JohnLennon left Music/TheBeatles in 1962, with the remaining band[[note]]Music/PaulMcCartney, Music/GeorgeHarrison, Music/RingoStarr and Stuart Sutcliffe, who's still alive[[/note]] only finding modest success in this alternate timeline. John tried to start another band in 1966 called "The Nowhere Men", but it went nowhere and John now lives a regular life. It was adapted in 2013 for the anthology series ''Series/PlayhousePresents''.

** ''A Different Flesh'' is a short story collection taking place in a world where ''Homo erectus'' made it to the Americas instead of the predecessors of the native American peoples. Differences include the theory of evolution being discovered by Literature/SamuelPepys (since the "sims" are [[EvolutionaryLevels an obvious link]] between humans and our own great apes), a wider range of North American fauna ([[KillEmAll at least until the Jamestown settlers start cutting through the sabertooth tigers]]) and significant political differences (the [[strike:Founding]] Conscript Fathers hew closer to UsefulNotes/TheRomanRepublic when they establish Alt!USA, while the Spanish colonies in Central and South America grow more slowly without the infrastructure of [[{{Mayincatec}} earlier civilizations]] to build upon).
** And yet another where the Mississippi River expanded into a continental divide in prehistory, rendering eastern North America as a distinct continent which comes to be identified with {{Atlantis}}.
** Similar to the above is the novella ''Down in the Bottomlands'', in which the Atlantic Ocean never reflooded the Mediterranean Sea, as (according to modern geology) it did about 5.5 million years ago in our timeline, resulting in the vast sunken desert of the title. The story also features a Neanderthal nation occupying much of the Bottomlands, as well as a large chunk of OTL Western Europe.

* Naomi Novik plays with the speculative fiction version of this trope in her ''Literature/{{Temeraire}}'' series, which asks such questions as "What if dragons existed and were used as early aircraft -- early as in becoming necessary weapons of the great powers by the time of the Napoleonic Wars?"

* Though best known as a writer of Hard [=SF=], Creator/KimStanleyRobinson has dabbled in this genre:

* Kim Stanley Robinson's ''Literature/TheYearsOfRiceAndSalt'' takes its starting point with the Black Death killing virtually the entire European population. The story is of China and Islam's domination of the world spread across the next thousand years as seen through the same group of characters who are endlessly reincarnated.

** "The Lucky Strike," a short story by Robinson, takes place in a [=WW2=] wherein the Enola Gay and its crew were lost before the bombing of Hiroshima. The War still ends as OTL [[spoiler: but the decision to drop the Bomb ''away from'' Hiroshima ultimately leads to a premature end of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s. MAD is never conceived.]]
*** But from that point in the 1950s, the timeline splits into three possible futures that Robinson discusses in ''A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions''. One among them is [[spoiler: a crash nuclear arms race after the Suez Crisis blows up into a major war, a nuclear Third World War, and rampant nuclear proliferation in the aftermath]].

* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together until they finally decide to end it amiably in 1975, but with frequent reunions over the decades with Music/EricClapton joining at Music/GeorgeHarrison's insistence on his death bed in 2001. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and George meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it into the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.

** Much of the entertainment value of the books, particularly the first one, is in reading of the culture clashes - occasionally violent -- between the people of 1942 and the visitors from the 21st century.

* The shared universe book ''Exile: Clan of the Claw'', edited and created by Bill Fawcett (with Creator/SMStirling, Creator/HarryTurtledove, Creator/JohnRingo and Jody Lynn Nye among the contributors) takes place in a world where the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs never happened (apparently there are very few asteroids in that solar system according to the introduction) resulting not only in sentient dinosaurs with PsychicPowers but in an intelligent mammalian species descended not from apes but from felines.




* ''Literature/JonathanStrangeAndMrNorrell'' by Susanna Clarke is an Alternate History set in Regency England where magic is real and magician Jonathan Strange uses it to aid his country in the Napoleonic Wars.
* UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill (yes, ''that'' Winston Churchill) penned a short story in 1932 called "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" -- narrated by a historian in an alternate history where the South won the American Civil War after the Confederacy won the titular Battle. North America is wracked with tension between the North and South until 1905, when both merge peacefully with the British Empire to form the "English Speaking Association" -- a new government which supersedes the former three states. This new superpower uses its diplomatic influence to prevent World War I. It's not the most realistic scenario, but the point of the story was to show how absurd the Great War would seem to someone outside our timeline rather than to be a true extrapolation.
* Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/TheManInTheHighCastle'' is a seminal work in the genre. The Axis powers won UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and split America in two, the western side controlled by Japan and the eastern side controlled by Nazi Germany. The story wraps the trope in on itself by featuring a [[ShowWithinAShow novel within the novel]], ''The Grasshopper Lies Heavy'', which is an alternate history imagining that the Axis powers ''lost'' WW2, with the post-war world dominated by a cold war between America and... the British Empire.
* Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel ''Literature/TheIronDream'' purported to be a [[DirectLineToTheAuthor manuscript from an alternate history]] where UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler was a science fiction author.

* Creator/OrsonScottCard's ''Literature/PastwatchTheRedemptionOfChristopherColumbus'' reveals that our timeline is an Alternate History created by time travel. In the previous history, UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus started a new crusade against Constantinople instead of sailing for the new world. This give the Native American Tlaxcalan empire enough time to develop iron-working, take over North America, then successfully invade Europe after gaining the secrets of firearms from captured Portuguese sailors. They eventually sent back a recording to convince Christopher Columbus to discover the new world, so that the Tlaxcalan empire would be stopped, creating our timeline. In ''our'' future, this is discovered and several agents are sent back, creating a ''third'' timeline where the Native Americans unite and visit Europe in peace (trading instead of invading) with no colonialism.
* The starting point for the hero in Creator/RogerZelazny's ''Literature/{{Roadmarks}}'' is that he's trying to ''create'' alternate histories by changing significant events, such as by running guns to the Greeks at the battle of Marathon.
* Creator/ThomasHarlan:
** His ''Oath of Empire'' series is set in the early 7th century, where magic works, Rome never fell, and Christianity never appeared.
** His other series, ''In the Time of the Sixth Sun'' has the Mongols successfully invading Japan. The Japanese flee, to America. They trade horses and steel for food and land on the West Coast. The Mexica then proceed to conquer the planet -- and beyond.


* One of the most extreme examples is the illustrated fictional-science book ''The New Dinosaurs'' by Dougal Dixon, which presents an alternate timeline in which the Cretaceous extinction event never happens, dinosaurs remain the Earth's dominant lifeforms, mammals remain tiny insectivores, and no sapient species ever comes into existence (it's best to read it with a pinch of salt as it contains a lot of [[ArtisticLicenseBiology biological impossibilities]], ScienceMarchesOn, and Zeerust).
** The (regrettably defunct) [[http://specworld-project.com/index.php?title=Main_Page Speculative Dinosaur Project]], aka Specworld, explores a similar scenario and it's much more [[ShownTheirWork up-to-date]].
** [[http://spiritualist.alternatehistory.com/agrarianist.htm This page]] presents a few more alternate evolution ideas, mainly focusing on different ways sapient species could have come about.
* Shelley Jackson's 2006 novel ''Half Life'' takes place in an America that tested nuclear weapons on native soil much longer and more extensively. The result has been a sharp spike in mutation. Specifically, conjoined twins have become a large and proud minority somewhat analogous to LGBT people in our timeline.
* The ''Literature/TheQueensThief'' series of books occur in a world in which Ancient Greek civilization has persisted into what would be the Renaissance in our world. People still worship a version of the Greek pantheon, and there are several rival city-states/kingdoms. However, they have developed many technologies that the Greeks didn't have, like rifles and pocket watches.

* One of the originals is L. Sprague [=DeCamp's=] ''Literature/LestDarknessFall'', about a modern man going back to 6th century Rome and attempting to reestablish civilization, as well as combating Goth and Byzantine armies.
** Also [=DeCamp's=] "The Wheels of If" novelette in which a man from our world is sent into the body of the person he would have been in a world where Pelagius' vision of Christianity beat out Augustine's and compounded by Charles Martel losing the Battle of Tours.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Berezin Fyodor Berezin]] wrote the ''Red Stars'' duology, dealing with strange contacts between our world and a parallel one, where history took a radically different turn because UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler delayed "Operation Barbarossa" by a month, giving Stalin enough time to launch his own (much more successful) offensive. The first book details a lengthy battle between a US carrier battle group from our world and a Soviet carrier battle group from the other world, with both fleets using technology and tactics unheard of by the other (for example, the other world's Soviets do not have stealth or satellite technology, while the US Navy was really surprised to see battleships and ekranoplans in the Soviet arsenal).
** Berezin's ''The Lunar Option'' novel describes a secret space war between the US and the USSR in the midst of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar over the possession of a mysterious artifact found on the moon by the Lunokhod 1 in 1973. Many of the key figures in the war were famous astronauts and cosmonauts, including those who were officially listed as deceased.
* ''Resurrection Day'' by Brendan [=DuBois=] supposes that the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked off a nuclear war. The United States is a virtual third-world country under military dictatorship, dependent on aid from Great Britain and treated by the rest of the world as a rogue state. An alternate history novel is mentioned by the protagonists in which WW3 was averted, though needless to say it doesn't have the Kennedys being assassinated either.
* ''Literature/TheNeanderthalParallax'', a trilogy of novels by Robert J. Sawyer (''Hominids'', ''Humans'', and ''Hybrids''), concerns an alternate Earth in which ''Homo sapiens'' died out, leaving ''Homo neanderthalensis'' as the world's dominant species. (Of course, since [[HumansAreTheRealMonsters Homo Sapiens Are The Real Monsters]], their world is close to a utopia.) The story begins with a neanderthal scientist being pulled into our world and dealing with the considerable culture shock.
* Alan Goldsher's "Paul Is Undead" is what if John Lennon, [=Paul McCartney=] and George Harrison were zombies and Ringo Starr was a ninja.
* ''Pasquale's Angel'' by Paul J. [=McAuley=] is set in a 16th century Florence where, thanks to Creator/LeonardoDaVinci concentrating on technology instead of dividing his attention between science and art, [[ClockPunk the Industrial Revolution came early]] and is centered in Italy rather than Great Britain.

* In Creator/LarryNiven's "The Return of William Proxmire", a time traveler attempts to redirect American history by giving medical assistance to a young naval officer in the 1930s, saving him from having to give up his naval career and become a writer. (The young man is Creator/RobertAHeinlein, whose works the time traveler considers to have been a bad influence.) On his return to his own time, the time traveler learns that he has successfully created an alternate timeline, but one with consequences he didn't anticipate or desire.
* Creator/PoulAnderson's ''Literature/AMidsummerTempest'' happens in a world where Shakespeare's plays are history, not invention. As a result things like mechanical clocks and cannon existed much earlier and England's Civil War occurs at the same time as its Industrial Revolution. Also Faeries and magic exist (thus the title).

* In Creator/ABertramChandler's ''Kelly Country'', Australian outlaw UsefulNotes/NedKelly leads a successful rebellion against the British.
* The short story "Living Space" by Creator/IsaacAsimov plays with this trope: Our Earth (Earth Prime) has an official population of roughly one trillion, but most of those people live in a house on an alternate Earth where life never came into existence -- ''a different alternate Earth for every single family.'' The story picks up where one homeowner complains that there is someone or something else living on their alt-Earth. Turns out [[spoiler: Nazis from another alt-Earth where Hitler won WWII had the same idea, only instead of giving each family its own Earth, they decided to build entire cities. Oddly enough, the protagonist gets the Nazis to leave pretty easily -- they agree that since his Earth built on this alt-Earth first, it properly belongs to his Earth. However, the story ends with a report of aliens appearing on another alt-Earth, and it's implied that this may be bad news for Earth Prime.]]
* Cyril M Kornbluth's novel ''Not This August'' was written as being TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, but could be read as an alternate history in which China and the Soviet Union take over the United States.
* Creator/RobertSilverberg wrote a number of stories in a universe in which Rome never fell, taking place over the course of several thousand years, and collected in a book called ''Roma Eterna''.

* Creator/RobertAHeinlein's ''Literature/JobAComedyOfJustice'' takes its protagonist through several alternate worlds but starts in one where William Jennings Bryan became president, leading to a fundamentalist Christian dominated United States.
* The novel ''Literature/{{Leviathan}}'' by Scott Westerfeld shows what might have happened if Darwin had discovered Genetic engineering and tanks had been invented in the Industrial Revolution using mechanical legs instead of treads, showing the start of UsefulNotes/WorldWarI between OrganicTechnology using 'Darwinists' (the Entente Powers) and SteamPunk 'Clankers' (The Central Powers). There are other differences too: the 1906 revolution in the Ottoman Empire that turned the Empire into a democracy with the Sultan as a puppet figure failed, so the monarchy is still in place by 1914, [[spoiler:leading to a second (successful) revolution being launched. With the Empire in turmoil, they never enter the war]]. Also, UsefulNotes/NikolaTesla invented a superweapon that manipulates Earth's magnetic field (the Tunguska Event was actually a test firing), which he plans to use to end the war. [[spoiler:The device doesn't actually work, but the Germans think it does, so they launch a secret attack on Tesla's lab in New Jersey. The Americans find out and enter the war 3 years early, ending the war within a year]].
* ''Literature/PrideAndPrejudiceAndZombies'' is an alternate version of Jane Austen's ''Literature/PrideAndPrejudice'' in which the undead roam Britain.
* Sophia [=McDougall=]'s book ''Literature/{{Romanitas}}'' is set in the modern day in a world where the Roman Empire never fell. It now spans most of the globe, with many countries having different names and borders based on Latin names. There are still slaves, crucifixion and worship of the old gods, but they also have televisions and telephones (called longscreens and longdictors, respectively).
* Perhaps the ur-example is Creator/MurrayLeinster's 1934 novella ''Sidewise in Time'', in which an unknown phenomenon switches random chunks of the Earth's surface with pieces from alternate histories, leading to Vikings and Roman legions appearing in different American cities, Native Americans who have never seen a European, and a region where the South won the American Civil War.
* In Kit Whitfield's ''In Great Waters'' Venice makes an alliance with merfolk which leads to a brief empire that spans Eurasia in the 9th Century. After it falls apart the main difference is that just about all the royalty of Europe are [[HalfHumanHybrid part merfolk]].
* L. Neil Smith's ''The Probability Broach'' features a "North American Confederacy" which diverged from our timeline when Albert Gallatin, rather than brokering a peace to end the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion]] leads an army against Washington and overthrows the U.S. government. The result is a government requiring the "unanimous consent" of the governed, relegating the state to only a few sparse actions taken in defense of the NAC throughout its history. Essentially the point of divergence it the declaration of Independence, where the [[ForWantOfANail unanimous consent]] is stipulated, which Gallatin also applies to the whiskey taxation.
* In Tim Doyle's ''Literature/GoMutants'', a parody that melds TeenWangst 50s movies and 50s sci-fi movies, aliens and humans went to war in the 50s resulting in four US states and France being wiped out. Among other things UsefulNotes/RichardNixon won in 1960 and was a three-termer and UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan is Vice-President in '72 (when the story occurs).
* George Mann's ''Ghosts of Manhattan'' takes place in a 1926 where the United States and the British Empire (which is substantially bigger) had a falling out after WWI and are currently engaged in a cold war.
* Philip Roth's ''Literature/ThePlotAgainstAmerica'' features an alternate history in which an isolationist and anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.
* Creator/PatriciaCWrede's ''Literature/FrontierMagic'' series takes place in an 1800s United States frontier times where western expansion is held back by dragons and other magical creatures. While mostly our world with magic, the alternate politics and nations are sometimes touched upon.
* ''Red Plenty'' by Francis Spufford postulates that the Soviet Union decided to outdo their capitalist rivals by creating an efficient planned economy with the help of computers and linear programming. Subverted however in that we never see the bountiful communist society of TheEighties; after Premier Khrushchev is forced into retirement his successors are more interested in maintaining the status quo than carrying out risky economic reforms, and therefore history proceeds similar to our own.

* In ''Literature/NeverLetMeGo'' by Kazuo Ichiguro, the question asked is "What if human cloning was invented sooner? What if cancer was curable, but only with the use of these clones?"
* ''Killing Ground'', by Bruce Powe, is about what could have happened had the volatile situation with Quebec separatists in the 1960's exploded into full-blown civil war.
* In a real life-ish example, one of the essays in ''James Bond in the 21st Century'' has sci-fi author Mark W. Tiedemann [[http://books.google.com/books?id=zpI5RbRwnd4C&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false imagining a world]] where Creator/SeanConnery wasn't Bond in ''Film/DrNo''.
* The Kingsley Amis novella ''The Alteration'' is set in a world where two events change the course of history: Martin Luther never sparked the Protestant Reformation and instead was reconciled with the Catholic Church (and is even elected Pope), and in England [[UsefulNotes/TheHouseOfTudor Prince Arthur Tudor]] lives long enough to produce an heir with Catherine of Aragon. The result is that most of western Europe is still under the influence of the Catholic Church and [[UsefulNotes/ThePope the Papacy]], with [[UsefulNotes/TheUnitedStates the Republic of New England]] one of the few parts of the world where Protestantism has taken root.
* The lurid and explicit dystopias peddled by the Creator/NewEnglishLibrary as hideous warnings of where Britain might end up are usually set TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture and so count as a sort of alternate history. A typically ludicrous example is [[FootballHooligans Striker]], where under the pressure of soccer riots, civil order has broken down to the extent where football hooligans run their own patchwork of anarchic states in what was formerly Great Britain...
* In Kathleen Anne Goonan's ''In War Times'' a group of time travelers extend FDR's life long enough for him to have a fifth term and prevent JFK's assassination in order to create a MarySuetopia.
* ''The Map Of Time'' takes place in a Britain where Jack the Ripper was caught. [[spoiler: This is later revealed to be the result of time travel shenanigans. Also a time traveler attempts to create another timeline in which he is known as the author of ''Literature/TheInvisibleMan'', ''Literature/TheTurnOfTheScrew'' and ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' by killing the authors (Creator/HGWells, Creator/HenryJames and Creator/BramStoker respectively) after they're written but before they're published.]]
* In the 1986 novel ''Literature/{{Replay}}'', the main character is stuck in a 25-year GroundhogDayLoop from 1963 to 1988. The timeline is changed only slightly on most replays, except for one where he and another replayer went public, which ended up ''drastically'' changed.
** In ''Literature/TheLongWalk'', the setting [[LikeRealityUnlessNoted appears to be]] America in the 1980s, except for a few blink-and-you'll-miss-it details dropped in the narrative, namely the occurrence of the "German air-blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II", and the existence of April 31st and a 51st state.
* James P. Hogan's ''The Proteus Operation'' begins in a 1975 where the Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan dominate the globe with only North America, Australia and New Zealand remaining free. The title project is an attempt to go back in time and prevent an Axis victory in WWII. [[spoiler: It turns out that the rise of Hitler was engineered by another group of time travelers from an incipient MarySuetopia in 2025 where a milder, shorter Great Depression left the Weimar Republic standing and Hitler and the Nazi Party were relegated to an obscure historical footnote. The interference of the 1970s time travelers results in our world coming to be.)]]

* The short story "The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka takes place in a world where intelligent design beat out evolution as the prevailing biological theory. It has been expanded into a novel, ''Prophet of Bones''.

* ''The Island of Crimea'' by Creator/VasilyAksyonov postulates WhatIf the Crimean peninsular was an island in the Black Sea. This results in the Russian Civil War taking a different turn in 1917, when the last forces of the Whites (i.e. the Tsarists) retreat across the icy Black Sea to the island, preparing for a last stand against the rapidly approaching Reds (Communists). However, a British ship present in the area ends up opening fire on the Reds, cracking the ice and forcing their retreat. By the time the Reds are prepared to attack again, the Whites have built up considerable defenses, turning the island into a fortress. This, effectively, creates an independent Russian nation separate from Soviet Russia. Additionally, the author hypothesizes that this new nation would remain neutral during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and become more pro-Western during the UsefulNotes/ColdWar period, having the best resorts in Europe, with the culture of Crimea being a strange blend of Russian, Soviet, and Western cultures, adding the local Tatars into the mix. It should be noted that the author's aim was to write a political satire, not a science fiction novel. Which is why the novel was never published in the USSR.
* Mikhail Pervukhin was one of the first Russian authors to write in this genre. His story ''Napoleon's Second Life'' (1917) involves Napoleon escaping St. Helena to Africa and creating a new empire. The novel ''Pugachev the Victor'' (1924) involves the Cossack leader Yemelyan Pugachev, who attempted to take the Russian throne in the 18th century, succeeding in his task and becoming the next Russian Emperor.
* Creator/MattRuff's ''Mirage'' takes place in a United Arab States that occupies most of the Middle East, having successfully split from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century, that has to deal with attacks from extremist Christian terrorists. There is an Israel but it's in northern Germany with southern Germany having been occupied since the 1967 Six Days War.
* Creator/TerryPratchett's and Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Literature/TheLongEarth'' takes place in a world where, in 2015, humanity is introduced to a simple, cheap way of entering other Earths, on which alternate history scenarios play out on a geological and evolutionary time scale.
* An OlderThanFeudalism example: Livy pondered what might have happened had Alexander gone West and conquered Europe rather than Asia. As a patriotic Roman, he (rather implausibly) suggested that the Romans would have fought him off.
* In ''The Nanking War'' by Ryan [=McCall=], an incident during the Nanking Massacre and a slightly different Panay Incident provokes a war between Japan and the USA, Britain and Germany.
* Creator/JohnWyndham's short story "Random Quest" concerns a man being accidentally and temporarily shifted into the body of his alternate self in a timeline where Hitler never rose to power and thus World War II never happened; he's unable to pin down the exact moment of divergence beyond "sometime in the late 1920's" before snapping back home.

* ''Literature/MakingHistory'' presents a world in which UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler was never conceived. This does not turn out to help humanity. [[spoiler: The protagonist arrives to discover a world in which the Nazis dominate Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and which America is less socially progressive without the influence of civil rights movements in Europe during the 1950s and 60s.]]

* ''Literature/OneNationUnderJupiter'', in which the premature death of Constantine in 312 leads to Christianity fading into obscurity while the Roman gods are still worshipped in the present.



* Done very subtly in ''Literature/{{Newshound}}''. The main character's narration occasionally references background events, like the accession of Yugoslavia to the EU, that make it clear that history unfolded very differently in her world.
* ''If Israel Lost The War'' explores a scenario were [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Israel loses the Six-day war.]] In a mirror image from our world, the Arab nations are the ones to launch a surprise attack on Israeli military bases. Since the United States is busy fighting the Vietnam war and nobody else (save for a small battalion from the Netherlands) takes action, the nation is crushed and [[BalkanizeMe the land divided by the victors.]] The Israeli people are subject to horrific treatment, including [[RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil mass rape]] and [[HistoryRepeats former Nazis serving as]] SecretPolice. Meanwhile the Palestinians aren't in any better shape, still without a state of their own and exiled from their pre-1948 homes. As a consequence, Sirhan Sirhan returns home to Jordan, thus Robert F Kennedy is never assassinated and is elected president in 1968.

* The ''Literature/TheInquisitorCycle'' series by Jacek Piekara shows an alternate timeline where Jesus Christ was a warlord who conquered the Roman Empire and slaughtered almost every Jew in Jerusalem with the survivors fleeing to either Persia or China. Following this event, Jesus became known as "The Butcher of Nazareth", departed from this world and left Saint Peter in charge of his empire. Islam also doesn't exist in this world due to Muhammad being killed by a Christian knight patrol when he tried to spread his faith in the Levant, which in turn left the Middle-East [[BalkanizeMe highly fragmented]] under its several tribes and religions.


* In the short story "Literature/RandomQuest" by Creator/JohnWyndham, the AlternateUniverse to which Colin Trafford diverged from ours in late 1926 or early 1927. Colin is unable to identify the exact PointOfDivergence but he does determine that it had the effect of either preventing the Wall Street Crash or significantly lessening its impact. As a result, Hitler never rose to power and World War II never happened. From reading ''The Times'', Colin learns some of the consequences of this: India is still a British colony in 1954 and nuclear fission is nothing more than a theoretical possibility but the international scientific community considers the nuclear experiments being conducted in Germany to be reckless and wants the League of Nations (which was never dissolved in this universe) to intervene and assume control.
* In the short story "Literature/ImpossibleDreams" by Tim Pratt, Pete discovers a video store from an AlternateUniverse called Impossible Dreams Video. By examining the [[DifferentWorldDifferentMovies different films that exist in that universe]], he surmises that the [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki atom bomb was never dropped on Hiroshima]] as he finds a Creator/JohnWayne UsefulNotes/WorldWarII film about the invasion of the [[UsefulNotes/{{Japan}} Japanese Home Islands]] which is described as "riveting historical drama" and he notices that ''Film/DoctorStrangelove'' was never made. Furthermore, UsefulNotes/FranklinDRoosevelt never became President as the store clerk Ally fails to recognize his portrait on one of Pete's dimes.
* ''Machines Like Me'' takes place in an alternate 1980s London which is way more technologically advanced than in reality, due to Alan Turing living past World War II. Because of this, personal computers, the internet, cell phones, self driving cars, and most importantly artificial intelligence have already been developed by the '80s, and the main plot is that the protagonist buys a functional android (and eventually meets Alan Turing himself). Homosexuality appears not to be taboo, as Turing is openly gay and nobody seems to care. Additionally, in this universe, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were never bombed and the UK loses the Falklands War, thus leading Margaret Thatcher to leave office in 1982. American politics are also touched on, with John F. Kennedy still being alive and Jimmy Carter having defeated Ronald Reagan to win a second term.

* Creator/MaryRobinetteKowal's ''Literature/LadyAstronaut'' series deals with humanity's response to a meteorite hitting the Cheapaseake Bay, destroying Washington D.C. and much of the United States' eastern seaboard in 1952. Although the meteorite initially results in an [[EndlessWinter impact winter]] for about five years, potent enough to dissolve the Soviet Union, scientists quickly work out that the huge amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere will eventually result in a [[GlobalWarming runaway greenhouse effect]] that will render Earth uninhabitable after about fifty years. The only option is to greatly accelerate humanity's efforts to colonize space. And so the International Aerospace Coalition is born.
* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together until they finally decide to end it amiably in 1975, but with frequent reunions over the decades with Music/EricClapton joining at Music/GeorgeHarrison's insistence on his death bed in 2001. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and George meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it into the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.
* Creator/ChinaMieville's ''The Last Days of New Paris'' takes place in 1950 in a Paris that is a battleground between Nazi occupiers and a Surrealist resistance. The reason for it being cordoned off is that various surrealist artworks have come to life, attacking all sides. While not much information comes in from the outside it seems that WWII is still going on in the outside world at least partly due to the Nazis summoning demons to help them.

* The ''Literature/ThursdayNext'' series. Winston Churchill was never born, Wales is an independent socialist state, the Crimean War lasted 135 years, cheese is a controllled substance and [[MostWritersAreWriters reading is the national pastime]], occupying the cultural space of television, sport and religion in our world. While they have heard of Creator/WilliamShakespeare, literature is such SeriousBusiness that the real-life conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's authorship are taken much more seriously - your preference for Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe or whoever else is like their equivalent of your favourite football team.

* The ''Literature/CelestialEmpire'' books by Chris Roberson take place in an alternate history where the Chinese rose to dominance during the Middle Ages. They, alongside their enemies the Aztec, are the dominant cultures in the world in present day. And there are space ships.

* ''Literature/JonathanStrangeAndMrNorrell'' by Susanna Clarke is an Alternate History set in Regency England where magic is real and magician Jonathan Strange uses it to aid his country in the Napoleonic Wars.
* UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill (yes, ''that'' Winston Churchill) penned a short story in 1932 called "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" -- narrated by a historian in an alternate history where the South won the American Civil War after the Confederacy won the titular Battle. North America is wracked with tension between the North and South until 1905, when both merge peacefully with the British Empire to form the "English Speaking Association" -- a new government which supersedes the former three states. This new superpower uses its diplomatic influence to prevent World War I. It's not the most realistic scenario, but the point of the story was to show how absurd the Great War would seem to someone outside our timeline rather than to be a true extrapolation.
* Creator/RayBradbury's "Literature/ASoundOfThunder" is another example of alternate history by time-travel; [[ButterflyOfDoom stepping on a butterfly]] millions of years in the past alters the outcome of a presidential election (along with other details, though [[InSpiteOfANail not as many as you'd think]].)
* Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/TheManInTheHighCastle'' is a seminal work in the genre. The Axis powers won UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and split America in two, the western side controlled by Japan and the eastern side controlled by Nazi Germany. The story wraps the trope in on itself by featuring a [[ShowWithinAShow novel within the novel]], ''The Grasshopper Lies Heavy'', which is an alternate history imagining that the Axis powers ''lost'' WW2, with the post-war world dominated by a cold war between America and... the British Empire.
* ''Literature/ForWantOfANail'' by Robert Sobel. Burgoyne wins at Saratoga, the American Revolution fizzles out, and the American colonies eventually evolve into a sort of uber-Canada. The rebels who weren't hanged migrate to [[DoomedMoralVictor Jefferson]] (our Texas) and meld into a Spanglish Mexico, which gives rise to [[NGOSuperpower an ur-state global corporation]] in Kramer Associates. Sobel (a professor of business history) wrote it in the form of an undergraduate-level textbook, complete with realistic footnotes and a dismissive review by an academic peer in the final chapter.
* Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel ''Literature/TheIronDream'' purported to be a [[DirectLineToTheAuthor manuscript from an alternate history]] where UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler was a science fiction author.

* Creator/HarryHarrison:
** An earlier take on America remaining in the Empire is ''A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!'' The point of divergence is actually found much earlier than the American Revolution (or Rebellion, as it's known in this reality), with the Moors winning the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and, thus, not allowing Spain to be unified in time for Columbus's expedition. John Cabot discovered America in this timeline. Beyond that, it's unclear how this could have contributed to the failure of the Revolution.
** The ''Stars & Stripes'' series envisions the Trent incident from the American Civil War blowing up into a full-scale war between the United States and the British Empire. A navigational error brings the Confederacy in on the ''Union'' side, ending the civil war, and resulting in the British getting their asses handed to them by Generals Lee, Grant, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson.
** In the ''Literature/WestOfEden'' trilogy, the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hits, which allows an intelligent reptilian species to evolve. Mammals are only present in large numbers in the Americas, and mankind evolved in the Canadian tundra rather than the African savannah.
** ''Literature/TheHammerAndTheCross'' trilogy has a more organized and benevolent form of the Norse religion coming into conflict both with the more traditional Norse religion and Christianity.

* ''Lion's Blood'' and ''Zulu Heart'' by Steven Barnes are two alternate history novels in which Alexander the Great builds his empire not in Eurasia but in Africa. Thousands of years later, Africa is the seat of the world's most powerful nations and has colonized North America, using captives from the tribes of [[DarkestAfrica Darkest Europe]] as slave labor.
* Creator/OrsonScottCard's ''Literature/PastwatchTheRedemptionOfChristopherColumbus'' reveals that our timeline is an Alternate History created by time travel. In the previous history, UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus started a new crusade against Constantinople instead of sailing for the new world. This give the Native American Tlaxcalan empire enough time to develop iron-working, take over North America, then successfully invade Europe after gaining the secrets of firearms from captured Portuguese sailors. They eventually sent back a recording to convince Christopher Columbus to discover the new world, so that the Tlaxcalan empire would be stopped, creating our timeline. In ''our'' future, this is discovered and several agents are sent back, creating a ''third'' timeline where the Native Americans unite and visit Europe in peace (trading instead of invading) with no colonialism.
* The starting point for the hero in Creator/RogerZelazny's ''Literature/{{Roadmarks}}'' is that he's trying to ''create'' alternate histories by changing significant events, such as by running guns to the Greeks at the battle of Marathon.
* Creator/ThomasHarlan:
** His ''Oath of Empire'' series is set in the early 7th century, where magic works, Rome never fell, and Christianity never appeared.
** His other series, ''In the Time of the Sixth Sun'' has the Mongols successfully invading Japan. The Japanese flee, to America. They trade horses and steel for food and land on the West Coast. The Mexica then proceed to conquer the planet -- and beyond.
* John Birmingham's ''Literature/AxisOfTime'' series combines this with TimeTravel by exploring the consequences of a modern carrier group (including Prince Harry as the commander of its SAS detachment) being transported from TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture to the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII Battle of Midway]].
** Notably features the supercarrier ''USS Hillary Clinton'', whose "murdered namesake" was the "most stalwart wartime President in American history".
** Much of the entertainment value of the books, particularly the first one, is in reading of the culture clashes - occasionally violent -- between the people of 1942 and the visitors from the 21st century.
** In his ''Without Warning'' an energy field of unknown type and origin descends on North America wiping out all life in most of the continental US (Seattle is the only major city to survive), about half of Canada (the more populated eastern half), 90% of Mexico and about three-quarters of Cuba including Havana just before the Iraq War is due to kick off in 2003. This leads to, among other things, a rather different Iraq War since Saddam proclaims this a sign from Allah and goes on the offensive and is later joined by Iran [[spoiler: leading to Israel nuking most of the Middle East]].

* One of the most extreme examples is the illustrated fictional-science book ''The New Dinosaurs'' by Dougal Dixon, which presents an alternate timeline in which the Cretaceous extinction event never happens, dinosaurs remain the Earth's dominant lifeforms, mammals remain tiny insectivores, and no sapient species ever comes into existence (it's best to read it with a pinch of salt as it contains a lot of [[ArtisticLicenseBiology biological impossibilities]], ScienceMarchesOn, and Zeerust).
** The (regrettably defunct) [[http://specworld-project.com/index.php?title=Main_Page Speculative Dinosaur Project]], aka Specworld, explores a similar scenario and it's much more [[ShownTheirWork up-to-date]].
** [[http://spiritualist.alternatehistory.com/agrarianist.htm This page]] presents a few more alternate evolution ideas, mainly focusing on different ways sapient species could have come about.
* Len Deighton's ''SS-GB'' is set in a Nazi-occupied Britain. America remained isolationist, [[spoiler: but sends a crew to destroy an experimental nuclear reactor. For deniability, they've been transferred to the Canadian Army.]]
* Shelley Jackson's 2006 novel ''Half Life'' takes place in an America that tested nuclear weapons on native soil much longer and more extensively. The result has been a sharp spike in mutation. Specifically, conjoined twins have become a large and proud minority somewhat analogous to LGBT people in our timeline.

* Creator/NeilGaiman's short story ''Literature/AStudyInEmerald'' is a re-imagining of ''[[Literature/SherlockHolmes A Study in Scarlet]]'' in an alternate Earth where Creator/HPLovecraft's [[Franchise/CthulhuMythos famous]] [[EldritchAbomination monsters]] took over centuries ago and now constitute the ruling caste.
* Creator/DianaWynneJones's ''Literature/WitchWeek'' takes place in a world where Guy Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. It doesn't achieve his aims (he got the timing wrong), but nonetheless, it has quite a knock-on effect...
* Creator/JohnScalzi's humorous short story "[[http://www.subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/winter2007/fiction-missives-from-possible-futures-1-alternate-history-search-results-by-john-scalzi/ Alternate History Search Results]]" explores the different outcomes of not just ''when'' Hitler is killed, but ''how''.
* Kim Stanley Robinson's ''Literature/TheYearsOfRiceAndSalt'' takes its starting point with the Black Death killing virtually the entire European population. The story is of China and Islam's domination of the world spread across the next thousand years as seen through the same group of characters who are endlessly reincarnated.
** In ''Galileo's Dream'' a group of KnightTemplar time travelers try to arrange for Galileo Galilei to be burnt at the stake believing this would lead to the complete discrediting of religion and the triumph of science.
** "The Lucky Strike," a short story by Robinson, takes place in a [=WW2=] wherein the Enola Gay and its crew were lost before the bombing of Hiroshima. The War still ends as OTL [[spoiler: but the decision to drop the Bomb ''away from'' Hiroshima ultimately leads to a premature end of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s. MAD is never conceived.]]
*** But from that point in the 1950s, the timeline splits into three possible futures that Robinson discusses in ''A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions''. One among them is [[spoiler: a crash nuclear arms race after the Suez Crisis blows up into a major war, a nuclear Third World War, and rampant nuclear proliferation in the aftermath]].
* In Creator/JoWalton's ''Literature/SmallChange'' novels, ''Farthing'', ''Ha'Penny'', and ''Half a Crown'', Britain made peace with Hitler in 1941. The first two books are set in 1949. The Reich still exists and controls all of continental Europe, though they're still fighting the Russians. A political cadre called the Farthing Set takes over the British government and starts heading down the slippery slope to totalitarianism, justifying [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything the restriction of civil liberties]] by claiming the country is in danger from Jewish and communist terrorists. The US isn't a major player at all, having never recovered from TheGreatDepression, but there are occasional mentions of "President Lindbergh".
** Her novel ''My Real Children'' features not one but two alternates, both splitting off from OTL in 1956.
*** In one Britain is one of the founding members of the EEC which leads to a more unified Europe that pursues its own course during the Cold War separate from either the Soviet Union or the United States, also while JFK isn't assassinated he doesn't pursue a second term after the Cuban Missile Crisis goes south and Miami and Kiev are nuked in a tit-for-tat exchange resulting in a President Rockefeller. Russia and Europe both beat the US to the Moon and build bases there.
*** In the other the Hungarian revolutionaries adopt Gandhian tactics and international pressure pushes the Soviet Union to back off and grant a measure of democratic reform not only to Hungary but other Warsaw Pact nations as well. JFK is assassinated in Dallas, probably by Cuban terrorists (The Bay of Pigs invasion worked and Castro was overthrown) but by a bomb which also kills Jackie and Governor Connelly. Rumors about his collusion prevent Johnson from running in '64 so Bobby Kennedy does and wins. The US wins the race to the Moon and builds a base there.
* Most of Creator/SMStirling's output.
** ''Literature/TheDraka'' series (aka ''The Domination'') is about a brutal, expansionist, enslaving empire of depraved but ruthless {{Straw Nihilist}}s conquering the Earth.
** The ''Literature/{{Emberverse}}'' series, where in 1998 "the Change" strikes worldwide, sending Nantucket Island into the past, and causing electricity, gunpowder and steam engines to stop working.
** Related is the ''Literature/IslandInTheSeaOfTime'' series, featuring the Nantucket Island which vanished from the ''Emberverse'' making its way in the Bronze Age. Technology works just fine there.
** He's also written a couple of one-offs:
*** ''Literature/ThePeshawarLancers'' is set in a world where an asteroid hits the earth during the Victorian era and the struggle to survive [[SteamPunk locks the dominant culture technologically and culturally in the 19th century]].
*** In ''Conquistador'', shortly after WWII a group of veterans discover and exploit a portal into a world where Europe never discovered the New World. [[spoiler: The ending results in the portal between the worlds shifting yet again and instead of our world one is opened to a world where it looks like the First Nations never came over either.]]
** In ''Literature/TheLordsOfCreation'' series, [[spoiler: thanks to {{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s]] Mars and Venus are habitable and in fact inhabited by offshoots of humanity.
** In ''The Black Chamber'' and its sequel Taft dies just before the Republican convention in 1912 resulting in Theodore Roosevelt becoming the Republican nominee and then President. This paves the way for America becoming an incipient MarySuetopia and Roosevelt planning for an earlier than our timeline entry into WWI which then takes a turn into DieselPunk. The Germans develop a [[StupidJetPackHitler super variety of poison gas]] wiping out Paris, London and Savannah, Georgia. France collapses and millions of refugees flood French Africa where a government-in-exile is set up. Also instead of sending Lenin into Russia to destabilize the country because Russia has already surrendered and become a puppet of theirs they set him up for an ambush in which he is killed. Trotsky is also killed in a separate incident [[spoiler: by the series heroine]]
* From Creator/EricFlint's works:
** In the ''Literature/SixteenThirtyTwo'' series, the modern day US town of Grantville is back to the year 1632, right in the middle of the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar in Germany. See the tropes page on this series for details on all the changes; suffice it to say that the course of the war takes some very dramatic turns, including [[spoiler:the establishment of a more-or-less unified German nation some two hundred and fifty years ahead of our own timeline, the possible early start of the English Civil War, the takeover of England's North American colonies by France as part of a diplomatic deal, the union of Sweden and Denmark, the establishment of a "United Kingdom of the Netherlands" under the former Spanish archduke Don Fernando comprising the territory of Belgium and Holland, and a major schism in the Catholic Church involving the attempted overthrow of the Pope by a Borgia cardinal with close political ties to Spain.]]
** In another Flint Series, ''Literature/TrailOfGlory'', the [=PoD=] is much more subtle than dropping a city in the past with AppliedPhlebotinum. In 1812, during [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Horseshoe_Bend the Battle of Horseshoe Bend]], Sam Houston leads an attack against the Indian stronghold. Instead of [[GroinAttack taking an arrow between the goalposts]], as he did in the original history, he slips when stepping over a rise, and gets nicked on his outer thigh by the arrow instead. [[spoiler:The changes from this event ultimately result in blacks and American Indians establishing an independent nation in the area occupied, in our history, by the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma. More subtly, the course of the Battle of New Orleans is somewhat different; General Pakenham isn't killed in action at New Orleans, but goes on to fall in the Hundred Days campaign several months later when Napoleon attempts to reestablish his empire. American political history is becoming dramatically different in the second book; after a five-candidate election gets thrown into the House of Representatives in 1824, Henry Clay is elected President, and Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, bitter opponents in our history, become allies against Clay and end up becoming friends as well.]]
** In the same Ring of Fire universe as ''1632'' is ''Time Spike'' by Flint and Mary Kosmatka which sends a modern maximum security prison [[spoiler: along with 19th century American settlers, Spanish conquistadors and various groups of Indians]] into the Cretaceous. While Flint hasn't written any sequels Garrett Vance has, ''Time Spike: Mysterious Mesa''
** Another spinoff from the Ring of Fire verse is ''The Alexander Inheritance'' is which a modern cruise ship and its passengers get dropped into the Mediterranean shortly after Alexander the Great's death.
** In the Literature/BelisariusSeries, which he co-wrote with Creator/DavidDrake, 6th century AD history is turned on its head by the arrival of two time travelers from the far future. One of the arrivals is a sentient crystal sent to aid the titular Roman general against a future traveler engaging in a genocidal campaign on the Indian subcontinent bent on world domination, seeking to generate a "pure" race, instead of the energy beings that mankind had evolved into in the crystal's time.
* The ''[[Literature/TheQueensThief Attolia]]'' series of books occur in a world in which Ancient Greek civilization has persisted into what would be the Renaissance in our world. People still worship a version of the Greek pantheon, and there are several rival city-states/kingdoms. However, they have developed many technologies that the Greeks didn't have, like rifles and pocket watches.

* The novel ''Synco'' takes place in a universe where the Chilean coup d'etat of 1973 was unsuccessful and Chile has become a successful communist state and the project synco has provided instant communication amongst the citizens. Synco was actually a real project in the '70s, abandoned after the coup. The novel includes many fictional versions of real-world characters.
* Creator/BaenBooks publishes a series of anthologies titled "Alternate Generals", which are collections of short stories with various departures from the reader's timeline, from ancient Roman times to modern history.
* The parallel world in Mary Hoffman's ''Literature/{{Stravaganza}}'' books diverged from our world when Remus defeated Romulus, instead of vice versa.
** A second, minor divergence. The connection is between modern Britain and 1500s Talia (Italy). So when one of the main characters from our world learns that Britain is still Catholic, he asks why. Apparently all three of Henry VIII's children were born to Katherine of Aragon, so he didn't need to start the Anglican Church in order to remarry.

* Creator/MichaelChabon's "Literature/TheYiddishPolicemensUnion," which is set in an alternate history where the Israeli war of independence was lost and the Jewish people were settled in the Alaskan panhandle rather than in Palestine after World War Two.

* Creator/OrsonScottCard's ''Literature/TheTalesOfAlvinMaker'' series takes place in an alternate North America where magic works (in different ways among the races - Whites have inherent powers called "knacks", Native Americans have a mystic connection with the land and Africans work their magic through artifacts), Great Britain is run by the Protectorship founded by Oliver Cromwell, New England is a semi-independent colony of same, the Stuart descendants of Charles I run the southern coastal states from Charleston (called Camelot), and Napoleon rules most of Continental Europe due to never having invaded Russia and declaring a unilateral peace with Britain.

* Taylor Anderson's ''Literature/{{Destroyermen}}'' series involves two WWII destroyer crews (although their ships are really old, dating back to the WWI era) slipping through to a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and humans never evolved. Instead they encounter the [[ReptilesAreAbhorrent Grik]], who evolved from raptors, and the "cat-monkey" Lemurians. In later books, it's revealed that other alternate worlds exist, which also occasionally feature the NegativeSpaceWedgie that sends people to the world of the Grik and the Lemurians. For example, the crew of the SMS ''Amerika'' comes from a world where the US never got involved in UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. Additionally, none of the RealLife ships described in the novels actually fought in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, which means that the destroyermen's original world is not ours to begin with (an intentional departure by the author, an ex-sailor).
** Later books have introduced the League of Tripoli, an alliance of fascist states from a WWII where the sides are different. One side is the aforementioned fascist alliance of France, Spain and Italy with Germany and Japan in very junior roles and the other is Britain, the United States, the Russian Empire (either the Russian Revolution failed or never happened but there was a civil war in Germany between the Nazis and the Communists which is what set off their WWII) and China
* Creator/FrederikPohl's ''The Coming of the Quantum Cats'' features a whole plethora of alternates. The one we see the most of has a United States that is culturally dominated by the Arabs and in which Ronald Reagan is a liberal activist (more likely than you might think).

* The ''Literature/ThursdayNext'' series. Winston Churchill was never born, Wales is an independent socialist state, the Crimean War lasted 135 years, cheese is a controllled substance and [[MostWritersAreWriters reading is the national pastime]], occupying the cultural space of television, sport and religion in our world. While they have heard of Creator/WilliamShakespeare, literature is such SeriousBusiness that the real-life conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's authorship are taken much more seriously - your preference for Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe or whoever else is like their equivalent of your favourite football team.
** In-universe, Thursday [[spoiler: creates an Alternate Book when she changes the ending of ''Jane Eyre'' to the one we currently know]]
** In his book ''Early Riser'' the Ice Age never ended. However society, while different, most of the population hibernates because the winter temperatures go as low as -20C, and Mammoths, wooly rhinos and glyptodonts still exist, is more similar than you might expect from such a distant [=PoD=]. Wales and England still exist for instance as does the Ottoman empire. And Snickers bars.

* One of Creator/TerryPratchett's earlier works, ''Literature/{{Strata}}'', has a few divergences, [[spoiler:Remus wins instead of Romulus, hence the Reman empire]], [[spoiler:the Vikings stayed in America, calling it Valhalla and conquering Europe in the 1300s]] and controversially [[spoiler:the Earth was created old, with fossils and everything]]. Also Venus has a moon which is clearly visible to the naked eye, so [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentrism the Geocentric model]] never takes off. The plot involves finding a flat copy of Earth [[spoiler:which has Rome not Reme, no America (hence no Valhallan empire) and a moonless Venus. Since the Flat Earth is breaking down the protagonists end up [[EarthAllAlong moving the population to a regular copy of Earth]].]]
** In [[Literature/{{Discworld}} ''TheScience of Discworld 2 and 3]] the wizards of Unseen University have to fix history gone wrong. In Book 2 it's the non-existence of Shakespeare's works. In Book 3 it's the matter of Darwin having written ''Natural Theology'' instead of ''The Origin of Species''.

* Creator/NewtGingrich and Creator/WilliamRForstchen have written several alternate history novels together. ''1945'' (Not to be confused with the Robert Conroy book above) has Hitler not declaring war on the US after Pearl harbor which results in a much quicker Pacific War with Japan but also results in the United States staying out of the European war and Germany winning with a Cold War on the verge of heating up between the United States and Germany in the title year. They have also written a trilogy about a Battle of Gettysburg that ends differently and thus rings several changes in the Civil War.
* Lance Parkin's ''[[Literature/FactionParadox Warlords of Utopia]]'' features a universe where Rome never fell creating alliances with other similar universes (including one that was Amazonian and another where the Dinosaurs never became extinct) going to war against multiple universes where the Nazis won and created an interuniversal Axis empire. The Romans won because the Nazis forgot the importance of training their soldiers to fight someone with a sword and a (kevlar lined) shield. Throw in some steampunk and you've a very fun story.

* Creator/SergeyLukyanenko's ''Literature/SeekersOfTheSky'' duology takes place in a world where UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} Christ was killed as a baby during the Massacre of the Innocents. Despite Jesus pleading God to allow him to return to Earth, God instead leaves another baby on Mary's doorstep. This child becomes God's Stepson, known to the people as the Redeemer, and God also grants him the Word, a divine power to put any number of objects into another dimension known as the Cold. Using this power, the Redeemer becomes the next Roman Emperor but eventually grows disillusioned with humanity upon the realization that humans will never give up on war. He then orders his disciples to tie him to a pole (as opposed to a cross), which he takes into the Cold along with himself and most of the world's iron (in attempt to prevent future wars). The novels take place 2000 years later in a world where iron is treated as gold, firearms are a rarity afforded to the nobility, only a select few know the Word, and the World Wars never happened.
** The author even attempts to make the novels seem contemporary (despite taking place in an AlternateUniverse) by adding several characters who could be considered duplicates of real-life people, including Creator/ArnoldSchwarzenegger (a trigger-happy, square-jawed officer of the Guard), [[Literature/TheLittlePrince Antoine de Saint Exupery]] (a nobleman, a retired pilot, and an amateur poet), and Creator/GerardDepardieu (thief-turned-bishop, miracle worker).
** Most of the duology takes place in the State, a successor nation to the Roman Empire, which had never fallen in this world, remains in control over most of Europe, and has colonies in Africa and the Americas (frequently feuding with the still-existing Aztec Empire). Most cities retain their Roman names (e.g. [[IstanbulNotConstantinople Lutetia instead of Paris, Aquincum instead of Budapest]]). The State's main rival is the Russian Khanate, which represents a mix of Russian and Mongolian cultures (Russia having never thrown off the Mongol yoke here). The technologically-advanced Chinese Empire is mentioned occasionally but doesn't figure in the novels due to being so far away. The weak Ottoman Empire still rules most of the same lands, but it does so at the sufferance of the State and the Khanate.

* In ''Literature/CelestialMatters'' UsefulNotes/AlexanderTheGreat ended up conquering pretty much all of Europe and then went into a thousand year war with the Orient.

* Joanna Russ's ''The Female Man'' takes place over several alternate worlds, one in which Hitler was assassinated in 1936, World War II never happened and the Depression never ended, one in which there is a literal "war of the sexes" going on in which men and women live in different nations and one in which all men were killed in a plague and women reproduce parthenogenetically. The last one is presented as a MarySuetopia. [[spoiler:Or perhaps a CrapsaccharineWorld as it's hinted that the disease was not natural but a deliberate murder of the men.]]
* ''Literature/CountAndCountess'' by Rose Christo presents an alternate history wherein Elizabeth Bathory served as Princess Regnant of Hungary. Most of the alternate history in the novel is a result of its plot device, though, wherein a very young Vlad Dracula and Elizabeth Bathory begin writing letters to one another despite the 100+ years standing between them.

* The shared universe book ''Exile: Clan of the Claw'', edited and created by Bill Fawcett (with Creator/SMStirling, Creator/HarryTurtledove, Creator/JohnRingo and Jody Lynn Nye among the contributors) takes place in a world where the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs never happened (apparently there are very few asteroids in that solar system according to the introduction) resulting not only in sentient dinosaurs with PsychicPowers but in an intelligent mammalian species descended not from apes but from felines.

* John Barnes' ''Finity'', set in 2062, has lots of them arranged in "braids" gathered around a major difference but with minor differences between them. The two main braids dealt with are "The Reichs" where Nazi Germany won World War II and by the mid 21st century is a commonwealth of twelve semi-independent Reichs (The Dutch, French, English, American etc) that dominate the world with Japan and Italy controlling East Asia and Africa respectively and a handful of minor democracies and "Diego Garcia" where the last remnant of the US in a Soviet dominated world is a trio of small islands in the Indian Ocean. A offshoot of the Diego Garcia braid is the "Puritan Party" one where the United States remains independent but at the cost of becoming a fundamentalist Protestant theocratic republic.
** His ''Kaleidoscope Century'' is the narrative of an alternate future where the pivotal event was Yeltsin getting his brains splattered over the tank he was standing on and the coup against Gorbachev succeeding resulting in renewed and accelerated hostilities between NATO and the Soviet Union, ending in the Eurowar and eventually leading to the Meme Wars.

* In Larry Correia's ''{{Literature/TheGrimnoirChronicles}}'' [[strike: Mutants]] Actives, people with magic powers start appearing in the mid-19th century. There are also more mundanes departures like Teddy Roosevelt choosing a military rather than political career, becoming a general and dying in The Great War, Hitler being arrested and executed in 1929, Berlin being destroyed by Tesla's "Peace Ray" which ended the war in 1918, the Great Dust Bowl being started early in 1927 by an American weather control experiment GoneHorriblyWrong (in OTL the first serious droughts and windstorms hit in 1933) and the Titanic being saved by an Active from the iceberg.
* In Daniel Gonzalez's short-story ''Sofia'' Gnosticism and not Christianity becames the world's main religion. Christians are a small Jewish sect much like our world's Samaritans and Iranian Mandeans, Science is much more advance and eco-friendly, and people with psychic powers are like saints. Problem? [[spoiler:Human sacrifices are still going on.]]
** In ''[[https://www.cuevadelobo.com/la-paradoja-palestina/ La paradoja palestina]]'' (The Palestinian Paradox) a Palestinian time traveler goes back in time to kill then child Theodore Herzl and thus avoid the existence of Zionism and the creation of Israel in Palestine, just to be almost stopped by a time traveler Masaai assassin from a timeline where the Jewish State was created in Uganda, and then murdered by an Argentinean female secret agent from a timeline where it was created in Argentina (both Uganda and Argentina were considered for the creation of a Jewish State in real life) as both Argentineans and Massai want the Jewish State to be created in Palestine and not their lands. But the Palestinians send more agents and the cycle continues.
* A story by Creator/PhilipJoseFarmer takes place in a world where Roger Bacon sparked an early scientific revolution under the control of the Catholic Church. The story is told from the perspective of the ''Santa Maria''[='=]s crystal radio operator who is also a monk. Unfortunately the expedition's steam engines are unable to resist the flow of the ocean's waters over the edge of the world, dooming it.

* ''Faultline 49'' by David Danson. The World Trade Center in Edmonton, Canada, is destroyed on September 11, 2001, propagating a criminal war across the country. The US attempted a military intervention and occupied most of Western Canada, leading to a full-blown war between American occupiers and Canadian insurgents. Civilians are gunned down, towns are turned into detention centers, and guerrilla warfare is common across the Rockies.


* Downplayed in ''Literature/{{Fallocaust}}''. [[spoiler:The Second World War stretched into the fifties, and Silas, Sky, and Perish caused the Fallocaust to end a world war in the early 21st century.]]

* ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfGlenscar'' by Creator/AnneBWalsh
** ''[[Literature/AWidowInWaiting A Widow In Waiting]]''
** ''Literature/PlayingWithFire''

* Jack Womack's ''Going, Going Gone'' takes place in a 1968 where Henry Cabot Lodge Jr is President, the Kennedys belong to TheIrishMob, President Nixon was killed in New Orleans by Lee Harvey Oswald, there's no television, slavery didn't end until 1907 because of a compromise that averted the Civil War and some not specified Holocaust-like event wiped out blacks in the US.

* Cody Franklin's ''Literature/TheAtlantropaArticles'' takes place in a world where Herman Soumlrgel's Atlantropa Project is carried out starting in the 1930's, World War II never happens, and the Third Reich is still in power far into the future.
* Creator/FritzLeiber's ''Literature/ChangeWar'' series features a time travel war between two factions trying to reshape history to their own ends, so many of the characters come from or travel to versions of history different from the one familiar to the reader.
* Cherie Priest's ''Literature/ClockworkCentury'' novels are set in a SteamPunk UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar that went on much longer than ours did, leading to ZeppelinsFromAnotherWorld, a walled-off Seattle, DieselPunk mecha, and zombies.
* Even if the trope itself is OlderThanYouThink, writers apparently weren't expecting readers to understand what it meant as late as 1967, when an alternate reality story in ''Literature/DangerousVisions'' spent ten pages explaining what an alternate reality story is to TheWatson.
* The universe in ''Literature/TheDreamsideRoad'' shares most elements with the real world, despite the presence of [[FunctionalMagic magic]], [[FantasyKitchenSink superpowers]], space-age gadgetry, and actual UFO technology.
* ''Literature/JonathanStrangeAndMrNorrell'' by Susanna Clarke is an Alternate History set in Regency England where magic is real and magician Jonathan Strange uses it to aid his country in the Napoleonic Wars.
* UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill (yes, ''that'' Winston Churchill) penned a short story in 1932 called "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg" -- narrated by a historian in an alternate history where the South won the American Civil War after the Confederacy won the titular Battle. North America is wracked with tension between the North and South until 1905, when both merge peacefully with the British Empire to form the "English Speaking Association"--a new government which supersedes the former three states. This new superpower uses its diplomatic influence to prevent World War I. It's not the most realistic scenario, but the point of the story was to show how absurd the Great War would seem to someone outside our timeline rather than to be a true extrapolation.

* Creator/RayBradbury's "Literature/ASoundOfThunder" is another example of alternate history by time-travel; [[ButterflyOfDoom stepping on a butterfly]] millions of years in the past alters the outcome of a presidential election (along with other details, though [[InSpiteOfANail not as many as you'd think]].)
* Creator/PhilipKDick's ''Literature/TheManInTheHighCastle'' is a seminal work in the genre. The Axis powers won UsefulNotes/WorldWarII and split America in two, the western side controlled by Japan and the eastern side controlled by Nazi Germany. The story wraps the trope in on itself by featuring a [[ShowWithinAShow novel within the novel]], ''The Grasshopper Lies Heavy'', which is an alternate history imagining that the Axis powers ''lost'' WW2, with the post-war world dominated by a cold war between America and... the British Empire.
* ''Literature/ForWantOfANail'' by Robert Sobel. Burgoyne wins at Saratoga, the American Revolution fizzles out, and the American colonies eventually evolve into a sort of uber-Canada. The rebels who weren't hanged migrate to [[DoomedMoralVictor Jefferson]] (our Texas) and meld into a Spanglish Mexico, which gives rise to [[NGOSuperpower an ur-state global corporation]] in Kramer Associates. Sobel (a professor of business history) wrote it in the form of an undergraduate-level textbook, complete with realistic footnotes and a dismissive review by an academic peer in the final chapter.
* Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel ''Literature/TheIronDream'' purported to be a [[DirectLineToTheAuthor manuscript from an alternate history]] where UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler was a science fiction author.
* Creator/HarryTurtledove has written dozens of alternate history novels.
** The "Literature/{{Timeline 191}}" (or ''How Few Remain'') series begins with the South winning the American Civil War in 1862, and follows this timeline through World War II and beyond.
** In The "Literature/{{Worldwar}}" series World War II is interrupted by an alien invasion by an empire of reptilians who have never before encountered mammals, and whose technology progresses so slowly that they're shocked to find that humans aren't using the same technology as their probe showed them using 1,000 years ago.
** ''Agent of Byzantium'' involved a Byzantine Imperial Agent in the 1300s, in a world where Muhammad converted to Christianity instead of founding Islam.
** In ''Literature/AWorldOfDifference'', Mars (called Minerva in the book) is a habitable (and inhabited) world. Also, Gorbachev's ''perestroika'' and ''glasnost'' campaigns fizzled out, he was replaced and the Cold War continues.
** ''Literature/TheCaseOfTheToxicSpellDump'' is set in a world in which magic actually works (but [[InSpiteOfANail Los Angeles is much the same]]).
** In ''Literature/TheGunsOfTheSouth'', South African white supremacists have stolen a time machine and, looking for a future ally, supply the American Confederacy with thousands of [=AK47s=], [[TimelineAlteringMacGuffin superior tactical knowledge about the Union's deployments]] and nitroglycerin pills for General Lee's heart condition.
** ''Literature/TheTwoGeorges'' (co-written with the actor Richard Dreyfuss) has a US that never left the British Empire. Gun crime is unheard of, Los Angeles is "New Liverpool", [[ZeppelinsFromAnotherWorld airships]] are the fastest civilian transport, and Sir Martin Luther King is the Governor-General of the North American Union.
** ''Literature/RuledBritannia'' has the Spanish Armada succeeding in conquering England, though they are overthrown by a revolt inspired by Creator/WilliamShakespeare.
** ''Literature/TheManWithTheIronHeart'' has Reinhard Heydrich surviving his 1942 assassination attempt and living to form a guerilla resistance movement after Germany's defeat.
** ''In the Presence of Mine Enemies'' posits a world in which the U.S. remained isolationist throughout WWII, and Germany defeated all the major European powers. World War III ends with the [[NoKillLikeOverkill nuclear pacification of the US]]. Set in the year [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture 2009]], the book follows a sect of hidden Jews as they struggle to survive during a time of political upheaval. Scenery includes: a Japanese empire, the radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell in a German Museum, and a Nazi version of "Film/TheProducers" that involves a horrible play about Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. Notable for its realistic presentation of these, alternative-universe, modern Nazis as being good people with a bad upbringing. And the ending [[spoiler: bears no resemblance at all to the fall of the Soviet Union. Really, honest. Well, maybe a little]].
** In yet another version of UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, ''Hitler's War'' posits what would happen if the Treaty of Munich had fallen through and Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. Long story short, [[spoiler: the Germans expend so much energy invading the well-fortified Czechs that they fail to take Paris once they invade France. Meanwhile Stalin jumps the gun and invades Poland, bringing the Poles firmly onto the side of the Germans. Japan takes this opportunity to attack Siberia, while an unfortunate accident involving a passenger liner starts America thinking about joining the Allies. As of ''The Big Switch'', Churchill has died in a traffic accident, the UK and France have concluded a ''status quo ante bellum'' armistice with Germany and have actually joined the ''Reich'' in its war against the Soviet Union, and Japan has attacked the United States...but in this timeline, the US was actually ready at Pearl Harbor and inflicted severe losses on the attacking Japanese.]]
** ''A Different Flesh'' is a short story collection taking place in a world where ''Homo erectus'' made it to the Americas instead of the predecessors of the native American peoples. Differences include the theory of evolution being discovered by Literature/SamuelPepys (since the "sims" are [[EvolutionaryLevels an obvious link]] between humans and our own great apes), a wider range of North American fauna ([[KillEmAll at least until the Jamestown settlers start cutting through the sabertooth tigers]]) and significant political differences (the [[strike:Founding]] Conscript Fathers hew closer to UsefulNotes/TheRomanRepublic when they establish Alt!USA, while the Spanish colonies in Central and South America grow more slowly without the infrastructure of [[{{Mayincatec}} earlier civilizations]] to build upon).
** And yet another where the Mississippi River expanded into a continental divide in prehistory, rendering eastern North America as a distinct continent which comes to be identified with {{Atlantis}}.
** Similar to the above is the novella ''Down in the Bottomlands'', in which the Atlantic Ocean never reflooded the Mediterranean Sea, as (according to modern geology) it did about 5.5 million years ago in our timeline, resulting in the vast sunken desert of the title. The story also features a Neanderthal nation occupying much of the Bottomlands, as well as a large chunk of OTL Western Europe.
** In ''Literature/JoeSteele'', Stalin's family immigrated to the US, he was born and raised here and becomes President.
** In ''The Hot War'' series Truman decides to use nukes in the Korean War which leads to escalating nuclear strikes between the United States and the Soviet Union.
* Creator/HarryHarrison:
** An earlier take on America remaining in the Empire is ''A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!'' The point of divergence is actually found much earlier than the American Revolution (or Rebellion, as it's known in this reality), with the Moors winning the battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212 and, thus, not allowing Spain to be unified in time for Columbus's expedition. John Cabot discovered America in this timeline. Beyond that, it's unclear how this could have contributed to the failure of the Revolution.
** The ''Stars & Stripes'' series envisions the Trent incident from the American Civil War blowing up into a full-scale war between the United States and the British Empire. A navigational error brings the Confederacy in on the ''Union'' side, ending the civil war, and resulting in the British getting their asses handed to them by Generals Lee, Grant, Sherman, and Stonewall Jackson.
** In the ''Literature/WestOfEden'' trilogy, the dinosaur-killing asteroid never hits, which allows an intelligent reptilian species to evolve. Mammals are only present in large numbers in the Americas, and mankind evolved in the Canadian tundra rather than the African savannah.
** ''Literature/TheHammerAndTheCross'' trilogy has a more organized and benevolent form of the Norse religion coming into conflict both with the more traditional Norse religion and Christianity.
* Robert Harris's ''Literature/{{Fatherland}}'' takes place in a Nazi-controlled Europe in the days leading up to Hitler's 75th birthday, where Berlin is built to [[BiggerIsBetter Speer's designs]] and the main character is trying to uncover the [[EmpireWithADarkSecret big hushed up project regarding the Jews]]. The book is one of the [[DystopiaIsHard more realistic visions]] of a Nazi victory world.

** His other series, ''In the Time of the Sixth Sun'' has the Mongols successfully invading Japan. The Japanese flee, to America. They trade horses and steel for food and land on the West Coast. The Mexica then proceed to conquer the planet - and beyond.

** Much of the entertainment value of the books, particularly the first one, is in reading of the culture clashes - occasionally violent - between the people of 1942 and the visitors from the 21st century.

* The ''Literature/WildCards'' setting deviates from history around 1946, when the titular alien virus falls on UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, killing many and giving some humans superpowers. Juan and Eva Peron are deposed by an American Ace fighting force which also saves Gandhi from being assassinated, a superpowered Islamic militant unites the Arabic countries under a caliphate, Fidel Castro pursues baseball as a career rather than revolution, and Buddy Holly never takes the fateful flight with the Big Bopper and ends up a washed-up has-been [[spoiler: who manages to literally tear himself to pieces and then re-build himself on-stage during one story, becoming a modern-day shamanic figure]]. Perhaps the strangest alternate life is Frank Zappa becoming a general in the US Army although Mick Jaggert as a werewolf comes close.

* Naomi Novik plays with the speculative fiction version of this trope in her ''Literature/{{Temeraire}}'' series, which asks such questions as "What if dragons existed and were used as early aircraft -- early as in becoming necessary weapons of the great powers by the time of the Napoleonic Wars?"
** One consequence of her scenario is that [[spoiler:Napoleon is actually able to pull off his planned invasion of England in the series' fifth book, though his forces ultimately are driven out by the British commanded by Wellington.]]
** Also European imperialism does not fare as well as in our universe due to various native peoples having their own dragons. China is much stronger vis-a-vie Europe, The African slave trade has been seriously disrupted, The Incan Empire still exists and several native nations won themselves a seat at the Constitutional Convention and statehood.

* Two books edited by Robert Cowley speculate on certain military events taking a different turn: ''What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been'' 1 and 2.
** These books were collected, along with other non-military essays, in ''The Collected What If?''. The book has essays by such great historians as Caleb Carr, John Lukacs, John Keegan, James Bradley and [[Series/BandOfBrothers Stephen Ambrose]].

* Creator/JamesHerbert's ''48'' is set in a London which is almost uninhabited due to a plague released by the Germans in the last stages of WWII which proved more effective than they anticipated and killed most humans except for those with AB type blood.

* In the world of ''Literaure/TheBigOne'' and its sequels by Stuart Slade a legal, bloodless coup by Lord Halifax against Churchill leads to Britain opting out of WWII in 1940 leading to, among other things, its lasting until 1947 and ending with the United States nuking Germany.
* Creator/SergeyLukyanenko's ''Literature/SeekersOfTheSky'' duology takes place in a world where UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} Christ was killed as a baby during the Massacre of the Innocents. Despite Jesus pleading God to allow him to return to Earth, God instead leaves another baby on Mary's doorstep. This child becomes God's Stepson, known to the people as the Redeemer, and God also grants him the Word, a divine power to put any number of objects into another dimention known as the Cold. Using this power, the Redeemer becomes the next Roman Emperor but eventually grows disillusioned with humanity upon the realization that humans will never give up on war. He then orders his disciples to tie him to a pole (as opposed to a cross), which he takes into the Cold along with himself and most of the world's iron (in attempt to prevent future wars). The novels take place 2000 years later in a world where iron is treated as gold, firearms are a rarity afforded to the nobility, only a select few know the Word, and the World Wars never happened.

* The ''Literature/BurtonAndSwinburneSeries'' uses this to explain the {{Steampunk}} setting it features; in this world a time-traveler, attempting to prevent his ancestor from attempting to kill UsefulNotes/QueenVictoria, instead causes the death of Victoria just three years into her rule. That and some leaked knowledge of future technology changes the world into a world with genetically modified animals, geothermic power, helicopters and more, all in 1861.

* In the first Literature/TheEdge novel, [[AlternateUniverse the Weird's]] history is significantly different from the Broken's. For one thing, their version of North America has multiple kingdoms the size of a few states, like the Republic of Texas.
* In Creator/KeithLaumer's ''Worlds of the Imperium'' series, the protagonist goes from our Earth to one where WWI and the Russian Revolution never happened, one where Neanderthals ruled, one where Napoleon beat the British, and finally one where rats became the dominant sentient species.
* Creator/MaryGentle's ''Literature/AshASecretHistory'' presents an alternate late-medieval Europe where things are rather different in countless ways; unlike most alternate history, there is no obvious past point of divergence, [[spoiler:although one, more a point of ''convergence'', occurs at the end of the book]].
** Her "Black Opera" takes place in a 19th century where MusicMagic works and where Napoleon ekes out a Pyrrhic victory at Waterloo leading to an armistice where he still rules France.
* ''Literature/TheAffinityBridge'' by George Mann takes place in Victorian London. Nothing notable except for the SteamPunk...and zombies... and airships.
* In Creator/LeoFrankowski's ''The Cross Time Engineer'' series, a 20th Century engineer is sent back to 13th Century Poland where, using his technical knowhow and with covert help from the future that sent him there he prevents the Mongol invasion, jump starts the Industrial Revolution and turns Poland into ''the'' major European power.
* Literature/NineteenFortyEtSiLaFranceAvaitContinueLaGuerre a.k.a. France Fights On is about an alternate [=WW2=] in which France evacuates its army to North Africa rather than sign an armistice with Germany in June 1940.

* Creator/DaleBrown books have touches of this. For example, the mess with Libya in ''Wings of Fire'' started when apparent BigBad Zuwayy carried out a coup against the RealLife ruler UsefulNotes/MuammarGaddafi in the backstory, written well before Gaddafi was deposed IRL.

* The ''Literature/CelestialEmpire'' books by Chris Roberson take place in an alternate history where the Chinese rose to dominance during the Middle Ages. They, alongside their enemies the Aztec, are the dominant cultures in the world in present day. And there are space ships.
* ''Time and Again'' by Jack Finney plays with this. There is evidence, in his universe, of alternate histories: a newspaper from 1916 with no evidence that [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI the world is in the midst of war]]; a man who has a campaign button for JFK's second term; an old man who swears he saw the ''Titanic'' pull into New York harbor when he was 12 years old. There are a select few people who, with special training, can travel back in time. They attempt first to avert the war, and then to stop the ''Titanic'' from sinking, and fail in both attempts. In fact, their slight alteration of the ''Titanic's'' course is what caused the ship to hit the iceberg. Oops.
* In the ''Vampire Empire'' series, vampires rise up in 1870 and drive humans out of much of the northern hemisphere.
* Otto Basil's ''The Twilight Men'' is set in a rather bleak version of the Europe in 1960's. The Third Reich won the World War II and rules a large part of the Continental Europe, facing war with its former ally, Imperial Japan. National Socialism mutated into National Materialism (described as nihilistic dictatorship) while sprouting an underground, mystical cult worshiping Hitler as an Odin-like figure. The Führer himself dies of natural causes at the onset of the plot.
* While it's non-fiction, the book ''Why the West Rules, For Now'' by Ian Morris includes a couple of vignettes, one positing a world where China discovered the New World and went on to dominate the globe and another, possibly in the same universe, where Prince Albert is sent to Peking as a hostage after the British fleet is destroyed by the Chinese.

* ''Literature/TheDifferenceEngine'' by Creator/WilliamGibson and Creator/BruceSterling, shows a world in which Charles Babbage succeeded in developing his Difference Engine, and later developed an Analytical Engine(i.e. a functioning computer) during the late 1800s. As a result, the Computer Revolution took place at the same time as the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain is now one of the most powerful nations on Earth. One of the first books ever to be called {{Steampunk}}.
** Sterling's novella ''Pirate Utopia'''s divergences are mentioned almost offhand. Mussolini is incapacitated and Hitler killed, both in 1920 so fascism, at least as we know it, never develops neing replaced by something called "industrial syndicalism".
* In the ''Age of Unreason'' series by Gregory Keyes, Sir Isaac Newton discovered the fundamental laws of alchemy instead of physics, resulting in a world where transmutation weapons tilt the balance of the Revolutionary War.
* Creator/StephenBaxter's ''Time's Tapestry'' series is essentially one of different alternate histories, all tied to one character.

* ''Literature/BitterSeeds'' by Ian Tregillis tells of an alternate WWII where the Nazis have psychic child soldiers and the British have [[BloodMagic sorcery]].
* In Creator/MikeResnick's ''The Buntline Special'' the western border of the United States in 1881 is the Mississippi due to Indian magic.

* Creator/StephenKing's ''Literature/ElevenTwentyTwoSixtyThree'' follows a man who finds a way to time-travel back to 1958 and plans to live in the past up to the titular date and stop JFK's assassination. [[spoiler: He succeeds in preventing the assassination, but when he travels back to 2011 he finds that the world's become a nuclear winter-scarred, bleak landscape, which is explained as due to a combination of nuclear war, domestic terrorism, constant earthquakes, and general lawlessness.]]

* The ''Alaska Royals'' series by [=MaryJanice=] Davidson takes place in a world where the Seward Purchase of Alaska never took place and it became an independent kingdom ruled by the Baranov family. Subverted in that except for Alaska being an independent monarchy everything else seems to be exactly the same.
** In the Literature/BetsyTheVampireQueen series the title character creates a timeline where Christian Louboutain was never born. A tiny difference to most people but to the shoe obsessed Betsy it's worse than if the Nazis had won.

* In Creator/PoulAnderson's ''Literature/TimePatrol'' series, the creation of an alternate history where Carthage won the Punic Wars throws the Patrol into frantic efforts to revert time. In another story a rogue agent attempts to stop the protagonist from preventing the Mongol Empire from discovering America.
* Sergey Anisimov explores two alternate histories in his ''The "Bis" Variant'' series. The first book shows what might have happened had the Nazis joined the Allies in UsefulNotes/WorldWarII against the USSR in 1944 (thanks to the Soviets being far better prepared for war than in RealLife and nearly crushing Germany). The second novel, titled ''The Year of the Dead Snake'' describes an alternate UsefulNotes/KoreanWar, possibly resulting from the first novel.

* Creator/AlekseyVolkov has written several novels that take place in the past with fairly simple {{What If}}s, sometimes as a result of TimeTravel:
** ''Bayonet and Faith'': The Russian Revolution has unintended consequences and results in conflicts and desires for freedom throughout the world. It doesn't help that people suddenly start developing strange (possibly magical) abilities which only serves to fuel the fire.
** ''Commodore'': A group of passengers board an ocean cruise liner not expecting to end up in the days of UsefulNotes/PeterTheGreat. Several of them decide to use their knowledge and cunning to elevate Imperial Russia above its neighbors.
** ''The Russian Frontier'': WhatIf Spain sold Mexico to the Russian Empire following Napoleon's defeat?

* ''Literature/TheAztecCentury'' is a British novel from 1993 and has the Aztecs go on world-conquering.

* Creator/TerryPratchett's and Creator/StephenBaxter's Literature/TheLongEarth takes place in a world where, in 2015, humanity is introduced to a simple, cheap way of entering other Earths, on which alternate history scenarios play out on a geological and evolutionary time scale.
* In ''The Boy'' by Creator/RobertReed, UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} was a woman, which caused Christianity to become a matriarchal religion rather than patriarchal. When UsefulNotes/{{Islam}} popped up in the 7th century - with a male prophet - the current Pope immediately launched UsefulNotes/TheCrusades, effectively eliminating Islam as a major force. By the time the story takes place (sometime in the 20th or 21st century), men are still essentially considered second-class citizens in the western world. Asia has no major powers, and is instead broken up into hundreds of [[BalkanizeMe feuding city-states and small nations]].

* In ''Literature/DoubleIdentity'', human cloning was possible by the late 1990s.

* Samantha Shannon's ''Literature/TheBoneSeason'' is a rare example of an alternate history set in the future, in this case 2059. The [=PoD=] is 1859 when mysterious lights over Oxford England are followed by it being destroyed in a massive fire then quarantined off. Later in 1905 Edward VII is discovered to have been Jack the Ripper and to have conducted Black Magic rites that opened a portal to dark forces and the Monarchy is done away and replaced by the British Republic. [[spoiler: This is all government propaganda. The lights over Oxford were caused by a race of [[OurVampiresAreDifferent extradimensional vampires from the Netherworld]] called the Rephaim who colluded with elements of the British government to set up a dictatorship under the guise of a Republic. Whether Edward was actually UsefulNotes/JackTheRipper or not is uncertain. While the government claims that Voyants, people with psychic powers only sprang into existence after Edward's supposed magic rites a Rephaim reveals that it was an upsurge in the number of Voyants that attracted their attention in the first place.]]
* ''Literature/WarOfTheWorldsGlobalDispatches'' contains multiple examples of how the Martian invasion from ''Literature/WarOfTheWorlds'' affected history. For example: both China and India manage to shake of colonial tutlelage and become independent 50 years earlier than in real life. China also remains a monarchy. Russia becomes a stable Constitutional Monarchy and UsefulNotes/JosephStalin, who never rises to power in this reality, remains an obscure revolutionary. Pulitzer is killed by Martians before having had a chance to endow the Pulitzer Prize. And in this universe, it is Henry James who wrote “The War of the Worlds”.
* ''Atlantic Monthly'' magazine had a feature in one of its issues in which it asked various people on how things would have been different if 9/11 hadn't happened including a lengthy feature by Andrew Sullivan which featured changes such as Al Gore running for President and winning in 2004 and, after escalating tensions with the Taliban and nuclear terrorist attacks on four major cities (New York, Moscow, London and Los Angeles) first Afghanistan and then Pakistan get invaded.
* ''The Execution Channel'' by Ken [=McLeod=] takes place TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture in a world where Al Gore was elected in 2000, 9/11 happened anyway (but in Boston and Philadelphia, not New York and Washington DC) and America wound up invading not only Iraq, but Iran as well.

* The 2059 of ''Ack Ack Macaque'' by Gareth L. Powell is one in which France and Britain are preparing to celebrate the centenary of their union, which occurred three years after their successful war with Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. Said union later grew to include Ireland and Norway and led to a more powerful and centralized Commonwealth which also includes former French colonies as well as British. [[MakesSenseInContext And there are talking monkeys]]
* ''Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!'' by Richard Lebow postulates not one, but ''three'' alternate histories that might occur if the [[AvoidingTheGreatWar titular Archduke isn't assassinated]] (and points out how [[FreakierThanFiction incredibly unlikely]] it was that he ''was'' killed). Notable for the effort made to avoid AlternateHistoryWank in each scenario, good and bad (and worse).

* In Wolfgang Jeschke's ''The Cusanus Game'' most attempts to alter history fail (for instance the United States persistent attempts to prevent 9/11) except for minor tweaking. One that apparently succeeds, accidentally, is one where Nicholas Cusanus founds an institution of learning that jumpstarts the Industrial Revolution.
* E2 in Alastair Reynolds ''Century Rain'' is an artificial world identical to Earth in 1959 except that the Germans offensive through the Ardennes bogged down, the invasion of France failed, the Nazi party fell apart through infighting and were overthrown in a coup by von Stauffenburg and Rommel. Hitler is still alive but crippled and broken due to an assassination attempt and living in exile, ironically, in Paris. Also due to WWII being aborted the world is socially and technologically behind where our world was at the time. No computers, nuclear weapons or rockets, Television is about where it was in the late forties and there is no rock and roll although bebop is replacing swing jazz as the most popular form of music..
* C. J. Sansom's novel ''Dominion'' is set in Britain an alternate 1952 after a German victory in World War II. [[spoiler: The PoD here is that Germany triumphed at Dunkirk and Britain and France sued for peace. Although independent, Britain is very much under the Reich's influence (and it is made clear that all of Europe not directly annexed by Germany is much the same, or even worse). Oswald Mosley is Home Secretary, and there is no Opposition in Parliament. Germany remains in an unwinnable war with the Soviet Union after eleven years, and Hitler is dying. In the end, without Hitler to hold the Nazi state together, it disintegrates within a year. Unusually for a lot of "Nazis win World War II" settings, Germany has yet to develop a nuclear weapon.]]
* Guy Saville's ''The Afrika Reich'' and ''The Madagaskar Plan'' are the first two entries in a planned trilogy that take place predominantly in a Nazi-dominated Africa in the early-1950s. [[spoiler: Here the [=PoD=] is the annihilation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The war ended in Germany's favour and vast areas of Africa were transferred to German control. There is no Holocaust in this alternate reality, all the Jews of Europe having been sent to die of disease, hunger and overwork on Madagascar. By 1952 German military power is strained and a new war with Britain threatens.]]

* In Jonathon Green's ''Ulysses Quicksilver'' series the main character is a SteamPunk {{Expy}} of James Bond serving a British Empire that is still going strong in the 1990s and has colonized the Moon and Mars. Also the Russian Revolution failed due to British intervention with the Russian Empire being a client state of Britain, the survivors of the failed revolution having fled to the United States which was dealing with an early version of the Great Depression enabling them to overthrow Woodrow Wilson and found the United Soviet States of America. Also, while Germany lost both world wars the Nazis survive as that universe's equivalent of Al Qaeda
* The how-to-draw book ''Dracopedia'', along with teaching folks how to make art, creates a fascinating alternate history that basically boils down to "what if dragons were not only real, but a common and vital part of the world's ecosystem?" The answer is quite interesting, as the dragons are treated not as mythical monsters that are [[TheDreaded feared]] by a now much decreased human population, but instead as (somewhat) normal animals that coexist relatively peacefully with humans (and when not, it's just as often the ''dragons'' who are harmed as it is the humans). In particular, we have:
** American deserts with street signs that warn of hidden Basilisks.
** [[FeatheredSerpent Coatyls]] being hunted to near extinction for their vibrantly-colored feathers.
** Soldiers in World War I being trained to [[DragonRider ride small domesticated dragons]] and use {{Shoulder Sized Dragon}}s to [[InstantMessengerPigeon carry messages]].
** Garden clubs and boy scout troops learning to build little birdhouses for tiny insectoid dragons.
** Flightless gargoyle-like dragons being used as attack dogs.
** Giant [[SeaMonster sea dragons]] living in the Bermuda Triangle, presumably responsible for the disappearances there.
* In ''Literature/TheDragonWaiting'', Christianity died out in the third century, with Europe returning to a variety of pagan religions. The novel is set in the 15th century, when a still-thriving Byzantine Empire threatens to conquer western Europe. Also, many of the most powerful rulers on the continent are vampires (the cause-and-effect relationship there is not made clear).
* In ''Literature/ChristianNation'' [=McCain=] beats Obama in '08 and dies shortly thereafter leaving Palin as President which leads to the US becoming a fundamentalist Christian dystopia.

* ''Literature/ThirdReichVictorious'' by Peter G. Tsouras. A collection of ten self-contained scenarios depicting alternate decisions that affect the outcome of World War II, such as Hitler joining the navy in World War I or the Soviet Union attacking first.
* The illustrated novel ''Literature/{{Baltimore}}'' by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden shows World War I being interrupted by a vampire epidemic that is spreading all over the world. As a result, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union never came to be and by 1925, a new superpower emerged known as [[TheNecrocracy "the Red Kingdom"]] composed of vampires, warlocks and hideous monsters and lead by a VampireMonarch that aims to conquer the whole world and is at war with the Allies, who are hopeless outmatched against this supernatural threat.

* ''Blades of Winter'' has Germany successfully invade Britain in 1941, blockading American support from reaching Europe. Hitler's plan for Operation Barbarossa is turned down and he is assassinated in 1942, leaving a power vacuum over control of the Third Reich. The empire is taken over by less radical politicians, who instead lead a German invasion of the Middle East to claim their oil supplies. Rather than [[FinalSolution exterminating the Jewish population of Europe]], they convert them into a SlaveRace. Meanwhile, America invades Japan and World War II ends by 1943. This leaves America, the Third Reich, Russia, and China- known as the "Big Four"- as the main powers of the world. The Korean War still happens, but it's during this war that the first nuclear weapon is dropped on a military base near Pyongyang. This drives the Big Four to begin pursuing warfare and espionage via methods of cybernetic augmentation.
* Creator/IraTabankin writes a variety of disaster books, most taking place TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture and thus many technically qualify already. However, ''Literature/TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeMightHaveKnownIt'' is explicitly written as this, with a point of departure in the Cuban Missile Crisis that leads to outright nuclear war.
** Also ''Literature/TheImpeachmentOfBarackObama''.

* In ''The Whenabouts of Burr'' by Creator/MichaelKurland, somebody steals the Declaration of Independence and replaces it with its counterpart from an AlternateHistory; the protagonists go in search of that alternate history in order to find answers and get their own Declaration back. The title comes from the fact that the alternate Declaration was signed by Aaron Burr instead of Alexander Hamilton -- which incidentally makes the protagonists' world an alternate history as well, because in our history Hamilton didn't sign it either.

* Jack Womack's ''Going,Going Gone'' takes place in a 1968 where Henry Cabot Lodge Jr is President, the Kennedys belong to TheIrishMob, President Nixon was killed in New Orleans by Lee Harvey Oswald, there's no television, slavery didn't end until 1907 because of a compromise that averted the Civil War and some not specified Holocaust-like event wiped out blacks in the US.
* ''Literature/TheTowerAndTheFox'' takes place in a version of 19th century New England that is still a colony of England, thanks to the empire's sorcerers, and hosts a population of {{Beast M|an}}en created by sorcerers as donors for BloodMagic.

* ''Literature/WWWTrilogy'': The series appears to take place in around 2011-12, given that the President is heavily implied to be the actual UsefulNotes/BarackObama, and he's mentioned to be a Democrat campaigning for reelection beginning in the second novel (though his opponent remains fictional, as the books were released before it, from 2009-2011, but she may be based on Sarah Palin).

* Creator/GregoryBenford's ''Timescape'', written in 1980 has both honorarey and traditional Alternate Histories. It takes place in a 1998 where civilization is slowly crumbling and beset by algal blooms that mutate and spread into the clouds and then the land. Attempts to prevent this by communicating with the past via tachyons inadvertently result in JFK surviving the assassination attempt having two terms and being succeded by his brother who however loses to Gov.William Scranton in 1972 due to a Watergate-like scandal. Richard Nixon is Scranton's Secretary of Health Education and Welfare.

* Thomas Diana's ''Literature/AtTheEdgeOfTheAbyss'' deals with Isoroku Yamamoto realizing that Japan will lose the war and together with other figures, try their best to end the war early.

** In ''Literature/TheLordsOfCreation'' series, [[spoiler: thanks to SufficientlyAdvanced aliens]] Mars and Venus are habitable and in fact inhabited by offshoots of humanity.

* Creator/MaryRobinetteKowal's ''Literature/LadyAstronaut'' series deals with humanity's response to a meteorite hitting the Cheapaseake Bay, destroying Washington D.C. and much of the United States' eastern seaboard in 1952. Although the meteorite initially results in an [[EndlessWinter impact winter]] for about five years, potent enough to dissolve the Soviet Union, scientists quickly work out that the huge amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere will eventually result in a [[ClimateChange runaway greenhouse effect]] that will render Earth uninhabitable after about fifty years. The only option is to greatly accelerate humanity's efforts to colonize space. And so the International Aerospace Coalition is born.

* Creator/MaryRobinetteKowal's ''Literature/LadyAstronaut'' series deals with humanity's response to a meteorite hitting the Cheapaseake Bay, destroying Washington D.C. and much of the United States' eastern seaboard in 1952. Although the meteorite initially results in an [[EndlessWinter impact winter]] for about five years, potent enough to dissolve the Soviet Union, scientists quickly work out that the huge amounts of water vapor in the atmosphere will eventually result in a [[GlobalWarming runaway greenhouse effect]] that will render Earth uninhabitable after about fifty years. The only option is to greatly accelerate humanity's efforts to colonize space. And so the International Aerospace Coalition is born.

* ''Literature/AffinityBridge'' by George Mann takes place in Victorian London. Nothing notable except for the SteamPunk...and zombies... and airships.

* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together until they finally decide to end it amiably in 1947, but with frequent reunions over the decades with Music/EricClapton joining at Music/GeorgeHarrison's insistence on his death bed in 2001. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and George meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it into the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.

* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together until they finally decide to end it amiably in 1947, but with frequent reunions over the decades with Creator/EricClapton taking over at Music/GeorgeHarrison's insistence on his death bed. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and George meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it into the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.

* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and Music/GeorgeHarrison meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it into the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.

* Bryce Zabel's ''Once There Was a Way'' postulates what kind of history could have happened if Music/TheBeatles stayed together. The divergent point is when Creator/JohnnyCarson decided to host the ''Series/TheTonightShow'' episode with the Music/PaulMccartney and Music/JohnLennon in 1968 after all in an episode that goes so well that an after-show drinking session has Carson and Ed [=McMahn=] convince them of the need to show up for their commitments. As such, the band compromises with their manager situation with Lord Richard Beeching coming on board Apple Corp, who mediates Allen Klein for the most of the Beatles and The Eastmans for [=McCartney=]. As such a "Grand Bargain" is reached with the Beatles able to pursue their individual careers as long as they produce a Beatles album each year. The arrangement works well enough with successful films and albums to keep the band together. In addition, John is kidnapped by Weathermen terrorists and Music/GeorgeHarrison meets Creator/SteveJobs in India who creates a networking plan to find him for his rescuers. As such, Jobs is appointed the head of Apple's electronics division and he makes it in the mega-corporation we know, making the Beatles all billionaires along the way.