Dale Cozort's Alternate History Newsletter

What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.

What Is This? It didn’t start out that way, but this issue acquired a very definite “Islands” theme somewhere along the way. The issue features a review of the third book in Steve Stirling’s “Island in the Sea of Time” series, followed by a short essay called But What About the Prime Directive, where I discuss the moral and practical issues of Nantucket's fictional interventions in more primitive societies. It also has a brainstorming essay where I play with the concept of moving islands, cities, armies and ships around in time and space, trying the concept out to see how useful it is as a potential device to understand history or to write fiction in (POD members only). I also continue my Drake’s Land scenario, where Sir Francis Drake discovers the island which in our time-line became the bottom half of Baja California. Also following the Island theme are essays on island life and alternate history and a brainstorming scenario where all of the main West Indies islands are closer together, and become one large island during ice ages.

Not everything in this issue fits the theme. The Operation Torch scenario gets another installment, hopefully the next to the last for that scenario. I also review a new World War II alternate history story called Fox on the Rhine. Like my Operation Torch scenario, this book involves a confrontation between Patton and Rommel. The conditions under which they fight are very different than the one in my scenario. There are actually quite a few parallels between the book and the latest installment in the Torch scenario, but also quite a number of differences, mainly due to the different point of divergence. Finally, there is a brief brainstorming piece on the fighting between Japan and Nationalist China that eventually blended into World War II.

Also this issue, POD people get to a look at some new fiction:

The Wings Fall Off (Fragment) Another short fragment that may become part of a story.
Songbird (Fragment) What’s a nice girl like Sarah doing with genes like that?

They also get to see the first part of a fiction piece called Winston. This is not a new story, but I’ve been reluctant to put it in POD because it really isn’t alternate history. It is sort of alternate biology, which several people have covered in POD, but I like to keep the focus of my material in POD on alternate time-lines as much as possible. On the other hand, I suspect that about 90 percent of the current POD membership would enjoy the story and hopefully be in a position to give informed criticism on it. POD members, if you don’t want to see any more of Winston, let me know, and I won’t put the last half in.

POD member will also see the usual commentary on last issue.