Every so often you come across a book that has such an impact on you that it changes how you think. It might change how you think about the world, life, death, love, politics, or anything else or everything. One such book for me was The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick. I have always been a fan of history and this novel was my first exposure to alternate history and the creative door it opened to me was immense. It inspired me in ways I didn’t even know possible and I’m sure it had a similar impact on many aspiring writers.
Today alternate history is a huge sub-genre of fiction. There are thousands of novels and stories that play with history at their core and I have read quite a lot, but one really stood out to me in a big way this year. That book was United States of Japan, by Peter Tieryas. [Read more…]