Giving Radio to the Romans: Difference between revisions

* The ''Assiti Shards'' milieu by Eric Flint and others. Cast-off shards of transdimensional alien "art" bombard Earth and transpose large chunks of it with other times and places. Several alternate histories are planned in this meta-setting, including ''Time Spike'' (several separate Shard events deposit a modern maximum security prison, the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears, a band of conquistadors, and multiple pre-Columbian Indian settlements into the Cretaceous), ''1776'' (the armies of George Washington and Frederick the Great both find themselves in ancient Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century), and ''By Any Other Name'' (the Assiti themselves make unwilling contact with Elizabethan England), but only two has seen any publishing. The first one has, however, seen a lot:

** ''[[1632]]'' and many, ''many'' sequels. The West Virginia coal-mining town of Grantville is translocated to southern Germany in the middle of the [[Thirty Years' War]], utterly shattering the power structure and world view of Reformation Europe. Once again, this setting deals with language and diseases fairly well. Although in this case, it's the ''uptime'' people of Grantville who have to worry about the risk that the pandemic plagues of the 1600s will devastate their community. On the bright side, they're at a recent enough point in the past that their English is recognizable in England, and their German-speakers are understandable to the Germans around them.

* The ''[[Axis of Time]]'' trilogy by [[John Birmingham]]. ''World War 2.1: Weapons of Choice'', ''World War 2.2: Designated Targets'', and ''World War 2.3: Final Impact''. A multinational naval task force from 2021 is sent back to [[World War II]], where it (literally) impacts with the American fleet steaming for Midway. The consequences are ''extremely'' far-reaching.

** And there's even a nod to ''The Guns Of The South'' in that while the up-time multinationals can easily reproduce the AK-47 and "low-tech" (for the early 21st Century) gear, their more advanced devices can't be duplicated because the composites, chemicals, or specific materials can't be manufactured with 1940s-era equipment.