Most Popular Books by Harry Turtledove

From the master of alternate history comes an epic of the second Civil War. It was an epoch of glory and success, of disaster and despair. . . . 1881: A generation after the South won the Civil War, America writhed once more in the bloody throes of battle. Furious over the annexation of key Mexican territory, the United States declared total war against the Confederate States of America in 1881. But this was a new kind of war, fought on a lawless frontier where the blue and gray battled not only each other but the Apache, the outlaw, the French, and the English. As Confederate General Stonewall Jackson again demonstrated his military expertise, the North struggled to find a leader who could prove his equal. In the Second War Between the States, the times, the stakes, and the battle lines had changed--and so would history. . .

WORLDWAR: BOOK 4 At the bloody height of World War II, the deadliest enemies in all of human history were forced to put aside their hatreds and unite against an even fiercer foe: a seemingly invincible power bent on world domination. With awesome technology, the aggressors swept across the planet, sowing destruction as Tokyo, Berlin, and Washington, D.C., were A-bombed into submission. Russia, Nazi Germany, Japan and the U.S. were not easily cowed, however. With cunning and incredible daring, they pressed every advantage against the invader''s superior strength, and, led by Stalin, began to detonate their own atom bombs in retaliation. City after city explodes in radioactive firestorms, and fears grow as the worldwide resources disappear; will there be any world left for the invaders to conquer, or for the uneasy allies to defend? While Mao Tse-tung wages a desperate guerrilla war and Hitler drives his country toward self-destruction, United States forces frantically try to stop the enemy''s push from coast to coast. Yet in this battle to stave off world domination, unless the once-great military powers take the risk of annihilating the human race, they''ll risk losing the war. The fatal, final deadline arrives in Harry Turtledove''s grand, smashing finale to the Worldwar series, as uneasy allies desperately seek a way out of a no-win, no-survival situation: a way to live free in a world that may soon be bombed into atomic oblivion.

"It is absolutely unique--without question the most fascinating Civil War novel I have ever read." Professor James M. McPherson Pultizer Prize-winning BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM January 1864--General Robert E. Lee faces defeat. The Army of Northern Virginia is ragged and ill-equpped. Gettysburg has broken the back of the Confederacy and decimated its manpower. Then, Andries Rhoodie, a strange man with an unplaceable accent, approaches Lee with an extraordinary offer. Rhoodie demonstrates an amazing rifle: Its rate of fire is incredible, its lethal efficiency breathtaking--and Rhoodie guarantees unlimited quantitites to the Confederates. The name of the weapon is the AK-47.... Selected by the Science Fiction Book Club A Main Selection of the Military Book Club

The twentieth century was awash in war. World powers were pouring men and machines onto the killing fields of Europe. Then, in one dramatic stroke, a divided planet was changed forever. An alien race attacked Earth, and for every nation, every human being, new battle lines were drawn. . HOMEWARD BOUND With his epic novels of alternate history, Harry Turtledove shares a stunning vision of what might have been–and what might still be–if one moment in history were changed. In the WorldWar and Colonization series, an ancient, highly advanced alien species found itself locked in a bitter struggle with a distant, rebellious planet–Earth. For those defending the Earth, this all-out war for survival supercharged human technology, made friends of foes, and turned allies into bitter enemies. For the aliens known as the Race, the conflict has yielded dire consequences. Mankind has developed nuclear technology years ahead of schedule, forcing the invaders to accept an uneasy truce with nations that possess the technology to defend themselves. But it is the Americans, with their primitive inventiveness, who discover a way to launch themselves through distant space–and reach the Race’s home planet itself. Now–in the twenty-first century–a few daring men and women embark upon a journey no human has made before. Warriors, diplomats, traitors, and exiles–the humans who arrive in the place called Home find themselves genuine strangers on a strange world, and at the center of a flash point with terrifying potential. For their arrival on the alien home world may drive the enemy to make the ultimate decision–to annihilate an entire planet, rather than allow the human contagion to spread. It may be that nothing can deter them from this course. With its extraordinary cast of characters–human, nonhuman, and some in between–Homeward Bound is a fascinating contemplation of cultures, armies, and individuals in collision. From the novelist USA Today calls “the leading author of alternate history,” this is a novel of vision, adventure, and constant, astounding surprise.

Suppose Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Hitler, and Hirohito had united to conquer an even greater foe? No one could top their power—not the Germans, not the Japanese, not the Russians, not the United States. From Pearl Harbor to panzers rolling through Paris to the Siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Midway, war seethed across the planet as flames of destruction rose higher and hotter. And then, suddenly, the real enemy came. The invaders seemed unstoppable, their technology far beyond human reach. And never before had men been more divided. For Jew to unite with Nazi, American with Japanese, and Russian with German was unthinkable. But the alternative was even worse. As the fate of the world hung in the balance, slowly, painfully, humankind took up the shocking challenge. . . .

What if V-E Day didn’t end World War II in Europe? What if, instead, the Allies had to face a potent, even fanatical, postwar Nazi resistance? Such a movement, based in the fabled Alpine Redoubt, was in fact a real threat, ultimately neutralized by Germany’s flagging resources and squabbling officials. But had SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious Man with the Iron Heart, not been assassinated in 1942, fate might have taken a different turn. We might likely have seen a German guerrilla war launched against the conquerors, presaging by more than half a century the protracted conflict with an unrelenting enemy that now engulfs the United States and its allies in Iraq. How might today’s clash of troops versus terrorists have played out in 1945? In this imagined world, Nazi forces resort to unconventional warfare, using the quick and dirty tactics of terrorism–booby traps, time bombs, mortar and rocket strikes in the night, assassinations, even kamikaze-style suicide attacks–to overturn what seemed to be a decisive Allied victory. In November 1945, a truck bomb blows up the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where high-ranking Nazi officials are about to stand trial for war crimes. None of the accused are there when the bomb goes off, but their judges, all of them present and accounted for, are annihilated. Worse acts of terrorism follow all over Europe. Suddenly the Allies–especially the United States–must battle an invisible enemy and sacrifice countless lives in a long, seemingly pointless, unwinnable conflict. On the home front, patriotism corrodes, political fortunes are made and lost in the face of an antiwar backlash, and a once-proud country wonders how the righteous fight for freedom overseas has collapsed into a hopeless quagmire. At once a novel of thrilling military suspense, intriguing alternate history, and profound insight into contemporary affairs, The Man with the Iron Heart is a tour de force by a storyteller of exceptional imaginative power.

Two of today''s masters of historical fantasy team up to tell a compelling story of a modern woman fed up with society who is transported to the second-century Roman frontier.

A joint U.S.-Soviet manned mission to the planet Minerva--as well as peace at home--is imperiled when the ship lands in the middle of an alien war that could have profound repercussions when the Americans and Russians find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Reissue.

“ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE SERIES OF ALTERNATIVE HISTORY NOVELS EVER WRITTEN.” –Science Fiction Age World War II has evolved into decades of epic struggles and rebellions targeting the aliens known as the Race. As the 1960s begin, one of Earth’s great powers launches a nuclear strike against the Race’s colonization fleet–and the merciless invaders find themselves confronting a far more complex and challenging species than any they have encountered before. Ultimately, only superior firepower may keep Earth under the Empire’s control–or it may destroy the world. While uprisings and aftershocks of war shake the planet, one nation plots a stunning counterattack . . . “Hugo winner Turtledove lives up to his billing as the grand master of alternative history. . . . This novel is altogether excellent.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In the twenty-first century, Germany''s Third Reich continues to thrive after its victory in World War II-keeping most of Europe and North America under its heel. But within the heart of the Nazi regime, a secret lives. Under a perfect Aryan facade, Jews survive-living their lives, raising their families, and fearing discovery...

From the New York Times–bestselling "standard-bearer for alternate history": A spy takes on the enemies of the Byzantine Empire ( USA Today). In another, very different timeline—one in which Mohammed embraced Christianity and Islam never came to be—the Byzantine Empire still flourishes in the fourteenth century, and wondrous technologies are emerging earlier than they did in our own. Having lost his family to the ravages of smallpox, Basil Argyros has decided to dedicate his life to Byzantium. A stalwart soldier and able secret agent, Basil serves his emperor courageously, going undercover to unearth Persia''s dastardly plots and disrupting the dark machinations of his beautiful archenemy, the Persian spy Mirrane, while defusing dire threats emerging from the Western realm of the Franco-Saxons. But the world Basil so staunchly defends is changing rapidly, and he must remain ever vigilant, for in this great game of empires, the player who controls the most advanced tools and weaponry—tools like gunpowder, printing, vaccines, and telescopes—must certainly emerge victorious. A collection of interlocking stories that showcase the courage, ingenuity, and breathtaking derring-do of superspy Basil Argyros, Agent of Byzantium presents the great Harry Turtledove at his alternate-world-building best. At once intricate, exciting, witty, and wildly inventive, this is a many-faceted gem from a master of the genre.

This novel by the New York Times–bestselling "master of alternate history" explores an America reshaped by a twist in prehistoric evolution ( Publishers Weekly). What if mankind''s "missing link," the apelike Homo erectus, had survived to dominate a North American continent where woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers still prowled, while the more advanced Homo sapiens built their civilizations elsewhere? Now imagine that the Europeans arriving in the New World had chanced on these primitive creatures and seized the opportunity to establish a hierarchy in which the sapiens were masters and the "sims" were their slaves. This is the premise that drives the incomparable Harry Turtledove''s A Different Flesh. The acclaimed Hugo Award winner creates an alternate America that spans three hundred years of invented history. From the Jamestown colonists'' desperate hunt for a human infant kidnapped by a local sim tribe, to a late-eighteenth-century contest between a newfangled steam-engine train and the popular hairy-elephant-pulled model, to the sim-rights activists'' daring 1988 rescue of an unfortunate biped named Matt who''s being used for animal experimentation, Turtledove turns our world inside out in a remarkable science fiction masterwork that explores what it truly means to be human.

FREE THE BLONDES! (America''s Civil War Turned Upside Down) A terrible civil war was tearing apart the kingdom of Detina, a land which could no longer be half serf and half free. When the new ruler, King Avram, announced his intent to liberate the blond serfs upon which the northern provinces depended, Detina was torn in two, and the rebellious north took Avram''s cousin, Grand Duke Geoffrey, as their king. Neither side could expect an easy victory. The south was larger and wealthier, but the north had better soldiers and more powerful wizards. Led by officers riding unicorns, supplied by flying carpets, both sides had been clashing for three years when Count Thraxton, a conceited wizardgeneral whose opinions of his spell-casting ability far outstripped the reality, bungled a spell which backfired disastrously against his own side, giving the Unionists a decisive victory. But the war was far from over: Thraxton the idiot had been relieved of command; which meant that the south faced a far more competent general: Joseph the Gamecock. And Joseph and his troops were determined to hold Peachtree Province against the loyalist troops. They had occupied Rockface Rise, which offered only two narrow places where the Unionists could come at them, and had further fortified it with trenches and catapults. When the southern army attacked, they would face formidable obstacles both natural and manmade, as well as the repeating crossbows of the troops and the deadly sorcerous storm and lightning wielded by the northern wizards. Still, the very survival of Detina as one united realm was at stake, and King Avram''s forces had no choice but to attack, no matter what the odds, no matter how desperate the situation .... At the publisher''s request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

In this first alternate history novel of the sequel series to Harry Turtledove''s acclaimed Worldwar saga, the space race is in its infancy in the 1960s and Earth faces alien colonization. Yet the United States, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany are too locked in conflict to unite against the invaders.

Humans work with and against each other and the Race, a alien species that invaded Earth twenty years before and now hopes to begin colonization.

A collection of thirteen short stories includes tales of an alternate world where the weather is time, a faeries'' challenge to a young prince, and a possible explanation for Jack the Ripper