Two words — Harry Turtledove (Yeah, yeah, I know — either love his work or hate it!)
Another alt.history novel I liked was Christopher Evans’
Aztec Century (Cortez was seduced by the Aztecs and “defected”). Then there is Kim Stanley Robinson’s
The Years of Rice and Salt (instead of wiping out 30% of Europe’s population, the Black Death of the 1340s wipes out 90%+ — world history is quite different, yet, in some ways, eerily similar).
A series you might like, Killfacer (provided you can tune out the ultra-reactionary Yankee rah-rah), is William R Forstchen’s
Lost Regiment series.
The premise is that a Union regiment (loosely based on the 20th Maine of Gettysburg fame) embarks on a homebound troopship during the siege of Petersburg in the US civil war. The ship is drawn through a hole in space/time to an alien world. This world is inhabited by other humans, transported from different eras of earth’s history, but is ruled by the Horde — bands of eight-foot tall cannibalistic humanoids (based on the Mongols), who circle the planet endlessly, “harvesting” the humans. The regiment sets out to “free” the humans and bring their societies to C19 US level.
But my absolute favourite works of science-fiction/fantasy are the Tekumelyáni novels of MAR Barker. The novels themselves are set in the world of Tékumel, about which much has been written and much more could be (see
www.tekumel.com). Barker began creating this world more than 60 years ago — it is as rich as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but, instead of being based on the European Dark Ages, it is an eclectic mix of Mughal India, Imperial China, Byzantium and pre-Columbian Meso-America, with languages based not on Germanic, Celtic and Finnish, but on the languages of South Asia and Native America.
So far it sounds like straight fantasy, but Barker’s world has a “scientific” backstory. World War III depopulated most of the earth in 2012. The remnant of humanity that survived was from Central America, South Asia and North Africa. After many millennia these humans made it into space, met other “races,” and settled a planet they called Tékumel. They and their interplanetary allies terraformed it into a resort world. But then “something happened” and the planet was plunged into barbarism. More millennia passed as the societies struggled to regain an early-Renaissance level of technology. However the machines of the “Great Ancients” still keep the planet’s gravity at earth-normal, their tubeway cars still run underground (though no-one knows how to make them go whey they want them to go) and there are often vast stores of such “magical” items still extant — and some of them actually still work!
The novels are not great literature, but they — and the RPG that exists alongside them — are amazing examples of world-creation (a definitely non-Marxist world, but a coherent world of great depth and complexity nevertheless).
