Reprint: Alternate History

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A.J.P. Taylor, Bruce Sterling, G.K. Chesterton, G.M. Trevelyan, Harold Nicolson, Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Hilaire Belloc, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, Keith Roberts, Kingsley Amis, L. Sprague De Camp, Len Deighton, Lisa Tuttle, MacKinlay Kantor, Martin Cruz Smith, Philip K. Dick, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Harris, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Moore, William Gibson, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

Someone asked for more of my Cognitive Mapping columns, so here’s another one. In fact, this is the first one I wrote. It appeared in Vector 186 (December 1995). To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term ‘alternate history’, one cannot help feeling that grammatically it ought to be ‘alternative’, but usage means we are stuck with it. As a sub-genre, however, it is one of my favourites.

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Reprint: Jennifer Government

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C.M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Kingsley Amis, Max Barry, Philip Bobbitt

In his groundbreaking study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis devoted much of his attention and praise to what he called the ‘comic inferno’, and in particular to The Space Merchants by C.M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl, who sadly died just the other day. So this time around I’ve picked a book that references the Pohl and Kornbluth classic, even if it doesn’t come close to matching it. This review of Jennifer Government by Max Barry first appeared in Foundation 90, Spring 2004.