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In addition to many of the previous recommendations, I like a category mostly known as Alternate History. In general, books from this category take a real historical setting and tweak it with something else - aliens, a bigger natural disaster, magic, or even just the proverbial one little thing different - and then write about how stuff expands from there.
Three variations on this theme:
1. The ongoing classic is the 1632 series from Baen Books and Eric Flint, et al. Basic premise is an unknown alien process moves a 3 mile radius sphere around a West Virginia town in 2000 to a spot in the year 1631, in a semi-mountainous place is southern Germany (or better, "the Germanies") in the middle of the Thirty Years War. Lots of fun, romance, politics, basic technology, and very intricate thought about the interactions of religion have developed over a buncha books plus an ongoing online magazine.
2. Another dozen book series by Simon Hawke about time travel, but this one takes a literary work as the "historical" background to write a story about. First book is The Ivanhoe Gambit (with source from Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott) next is The Timekeeper Conspiracy (based on The Three Musketeers), and other books in the series go after The Scarlet Pimpernel, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jason and the Argonauts, Gunga Din, etc. Lots of Fun!
3. A single book by Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South. Ak-47s at Fredricksburg (after Gettysburg) in the American Civil War (via time travellers again). This one is complete in one book, but if you like Turtledove, he's got a multi-book sequence that start with Aliens arriving in the middle of World War II.
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