As I’ve written before, I am an absolute sucker for alternate history. Most of it, unfortunately, is not very good, even by the standards of genre fiction’s transparent prose: the attraction here is really the idea, with all its surprising facets, so the best examples are typically the ones where the idea is so good, the unexpected ramifications so startling at the moment (but so obvious in retrospect), that you can forgive the cardboard characters and lackluster prose.| www.thepsmiths.com