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mcguffin's review
4.0
Very long, but an interesting read. Some of its stories I'd disagree with at times, but its fun if your like alternate histories.
js_warren's review
4.0
I enjoyed the hell out of this book, although it wasn't precisely what I envisioned. Not giving it much thought, I'd expected each counterfactual tale to take a tweaked moment in time (say, Alexander the Great dying early) and spin a yarn about the aftermath.
This wasn't entirely inaccurate; some of the essays did more or less adhere to that format. However, most of the essays spent far more time describing the events as they actually happened. Which, duh, is pretty darn important. I love history, but my knowledge can be spotty, so setting up much-needed context for the ensuing "what ifs?" was, in retrospect, the obvious route to take. Heck, in many of these essays the actual counterfactual speculation was more of a perfunctory endnote than it was the focus.
While that might seem like a weakness, I actually found it to be a strength. It turned what I thought was a bunch of historically-based speculative fiction into 800+ pages of history lessons. That might sound daunting, but the format--a collection of essays stretching from 701 BCE to the 20th century--means that you can bite off as much as you want at any given time. This book collects two separate volumes, and I ended up reading the first one, taking a break for a while and reading something else, and then came back to tackle the second.
My only "gripe": this sucker's massive, and reading it can get a little awkward. But that's a small price to pay for a wealth of historical information with some fascinating ruminations on how things might have turned out if they'd gone just a little differently.
This wasn't entirely inaccurate; some of the essays did more or less adhere to that format. However, most of the essays spent far more time describing the events as they actually happened. Which, duh, is pretty darn important. I love history, but my knowledge can be spotty, so setting up much-needed context for the ensuing "what ifs?" was, in retrospect, the obvious route to take. Heck, in many of these essays the actual counterfactual speculation was more of a perfunctory endnote than it was the focus.
While that might seem like a weakness, I actually found it to be a strength. It turned what I thought was a bunch of historically-based speculative fiction into 800+ pages of history lessons. That might sound daunting, but the format--a collection of essays stretching from 701 BCE to the 20th century--means that you can bite off as much as you want at any given time. This book collects two separate volumes, and I ended up reading the first one, taking a break for a while and reading something else, and then came back to tackle the second.
My only "gripe": this sucker's massive, and reading it can get a little awkward. But that's a small price to pay for a wealth of historical information with some fascinating ruminations on how things might have turned out if they'd gone just a little differently.
cjroberts2010's review
4.0
I read the book piece by piece over a couple months. Very interesting to see how one moment can change the course of history.
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