By Tom AndersonIn the previous article, I noted that while there were a number of proxy conflicts between East and West during the Cold War, these were predominantly land wars with little involvement ...

By Paul Leone.Captain’s LogApril 23, AD 1529It is Saint George’s Day today. Friar Mateo marked the occasion with Mass and a thoughtful lecture on the glorious crown of martyrdom. It was perhaps not a ...

Jared Kavanagh edits a collection of short stories set in different Australias. What if what we call Australia had become largely Dutch? Could Australia have led intervention in unexpected African co...

By Gary Oswald.Haakon IV, ruling 1217 to 1263, was the first King of Norway after a century of civil war. He did much to, briefly, re-establish Norway as a major player in European politics, forming r...

By Tom Anderson As the Second World War ended, the Cold War began. The Soviet Union and the Western Allies had always been uneasy bedfellows, and some even expected that as soon as Nazi Germany was cr...

By Tom AndersonThe name ‘Pacific’ Ocean means ‘Peaceful’; it was so named by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 because he found favourable winds there in his voyage to circumnavigate the world. The name was ...

By Matthew Kresal.In light of how Doctor Who spent the second half of the 1980s, it feels safe to say that Peter Davison’s tenure in the TARDIS was the last period of both popularity and stability tha...

By Tom Anderson World War II has, for understandable reasons, left a long shadow on our cultural memory. Not only the greatest war the world has ever seen, but also the first one regularly captured on...

By Paul Leone.The Tranquilla was, by the ever-rising standards of worldships, a humble vessel. Its design was that of the sea-going caravel, adapted to the great golden ocean of the æther, and it had ...

Beginning in 1933, a group of conservative businessmen in the United States became concerned that the Roosevelt Administration was a harbinger of Socialism. Allegedly, they considered launching a coup...

By Bob Mumby.It's been mentioned before amongst these articles how prevalent micro-fiction, especially in the form of lists of heads of state or government, is in the alternate history community. It’s...

By Tom Anderson World War One was said to be ‘the war to end all wars’. The fact that we now have to append a number to it is testament to how successful, or otherwise, the attempts to ensure it was t...

By Tom AndersonOn June 28th 1914, Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and this triggered a sequence of events whi...

By Duncan Clacher.On the Sea Lion Press Forums, we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly).The theme for the 95th contes...

By Tom AndersonThe last few articles in this series have mostly focused on the idea of a neat progression of frontline naval technology and tactics over time. However, in this article we’re going to take a step to the side, and look at the parallel development of a different kind of naval war machine. A ship, or rather boat, which does not sail the seven seas, but floats beneath them, silent and deadly. The submarine.Descriptions of the history of technology often focus on otherwise intelligent

By Paul Leone.Captain’s LogMarch 17, AD 1529We are now five days out of Port Vitruvius and making steady time through the æther. The mist had a particularly fine and thin quality today, with a rose hu...

British decline in the 20th Century is often seen as something fixed and inevitable. As the United Kingdom's financial strength ebbed, so did its power, prestige and influence in the world. Yet Britai...

YouTube video by WW2TV

Paul Hynes' series of articles on WW2 France goes from the page to the screen today, as Paul will be discussing his research live on the Youtube channel WW2TV! The chat will begin at 11AM BST here but...

By Tom AndersonAs discussed in the previous article in this series, the second half of the 19th century saw rapid advancement in naval technology, with ships often becoming obsolete almost as soon as ...

By Tom AndersonAlthough the details had changed, much of the basic principles of naval warfare had remained quite static for centuries before the mid-nineteenth century: • Oceangoing ships were made ...

By Charles E.P. MurphyAn everyman who can handle himself but has naive romantic ideals goes looking for a missing love on the mean streets, in a dark and dangerous world he's not ready for, and learns...

By Tom AndersonAsk a writer—certainly an Anglophone one—which era they immediately picture when they hear the words ‘naval fiction, and it is very likely they will name the time of the French Revoluti...

By Ryan Fleming.The ground shook violently as the Renaissance continued to follow the man calling himself ‘Arry Bell towards a promised escape from this strange new world. ‘Arry held aloft a bronze di...

When an superpowered alien teenage bat sent a 1990 West German patrol boat back in time, it caused a few ripples, and not only in the North Sea. The Sea Eagle Secret became the biggest story of the ce...