Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Berk
2. Can you recommend me some similar books???
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Depends on what you mean by similar. _Lest Darkness Fall_ is part of the overall genre of "alternate history", but that can be sliced further. Alternate history says "What would happen if a particular historical event had a different outcome?".
General examples include Ward Moore's _Bring the Jubilee_, in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War, Keith Robert's lovely _Pavane_, set in an England where the Spanish Armada was victorious, and England is a Spanish possession, or Philip K. Dick's _The Man in the High Castle_, in which the Axis has won WWII, and America is partitioned by the conquerors, with the eastern portion under German control, the western half under the Japanese, and a thin unoccupied zone in the rocky Mountains.
You can slice it finer depending upon
why history took a different turn. In _Lest Darkness Fall_ (and in Twain's _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), things happen differently because someone from our present finds themselves back in time, and uses present day knowledge to accelerate the course of progress, and thus changing history.
H. Beam Piper used a variant of the latter in the "Lord Kalvan" stories, though Kalvan steps sideways in time, not backward.
David Drake and Eric Flint have a nice take on it in the "Belisaurus" series. A far future religious faction calling themselves the New Gods send a cyborg named Link back through time to 6th century India, where it becomes the power behind the throne of the rising Malwa empire, teaches them to make gunpowder and primitive gunpowder weapons, and sets them out to conquer the world and produce a future more to the New Gods' liking.
The Great Ones, far future descendants of mankind, counter by sending back Aide, a sentient crystal life form. Aide falls into the hand of the Roman general Belisarius, who must create a gunpowder and weapons manufacturing capability, and raise an army capable of facing the Malwa on the field, while keeping the paranoid Emperor Justinian from finding out what he is doing, because Justinian wants him to go and conquer the western half of the former Holy Roman Empire, reuniting the eastern and western halves of Christianity.
Drake and Flint make interesting comments about the problems involved in trying to create the necessary industrial infrastructure on a 6th century technical base. (Like Belisarius being unable to make and use the Gatling guns he's
like to have because the required ammunition can't be produced in sufficient quantity. Small numbers of big things like cannon aren't a problem. Large quantities of little things like machined brass cartridges are.)
Eric Flint and co-authors cover analogous ground in the ongoing series beginning with _1632_, in which a small West Virginia mining town gets dumped into Europe in the middle of the Thirty Years War.
The Baen Free Library has both series available, either on the website, or on one of the Free Library CDs available as ISO images, Zip archives, or individual books
here
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Dennis