Showing results by author "Philip James" in All Categories

It is April 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. In the United States, the overwhelming popular mood is one of "America first". The "victory" of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction, and grief more futile, than it does in the second week of April 1964. Only one thing is certain: The world is about to be turned upside down again.

In 2015, a group of young people sued the federal government for violating their constitutional rights by promoting the climate catastrophe, depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. They Knew offers evidence for their claims, presenting a devastating account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as an expert on climate, documents how administrations from Carter to Trump continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel-based energy system.

It is February 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed, and now, as the world teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the "victors" that their "victory", far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic. In the uneasy half-peace, the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn's first paroxysm of violence?

Twenty-four of the greatest science fiction stories of all time in this fourth sci-fi short story collection, including works by Jerry Dunham, Emmett Dowell, James Causey, Gordon Randall Garrett, James A. Cox, Phyllis Sterling Smith, Richard A. Sternbach, Robert Sheckley, E. G. Von Wald, Keith Laumer, Jerome Bixby, Frederik Pohl, Roger Dee, Arnold Marmore, James H. Schmitz, Lester del Rey, Cordwainer Smith, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick.

Aftermath is book one of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 - USA. The Cuban Missile Crisis went wrong, and now the American people are about to start living with the consequences of the catastrophe. From New England to the Pacific Northwest, from Washington, DC, to San Francisco, Americans confront to their worst nightmare. Nobody wins a nuclear war.

Isaac Fielding knows exactly where he stands: Things were not looking good. Upon that, at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bittersweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would be the manner of my subsequent execution.

The Cuban Missiles Crisis didn't end peacefully and the "swinging sixties" didn't happen. On Saturday October 27th, 1962 American and Soviet geopolitical brinkmanship resulted in the most terrible war in human history. The forever changed world that remained when the thermonuclear fires had burned themselves out is the world of Timeline 10/27/62.

In the aftermath of the October War, Armageddon rumbled on. The war had been fought, won, and lost in less than a day, but regionally and locally, the fighting and the settling of scores went on for years. It was hardly surprising that the fate of three ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy should be, if not forgotten, then allowed to slip under the ‘radar’ of the world. However, no history of the October War is complete without at least a footnote about that "lost fleet". This, insofar as anybody can know at this remove, is its story.

It is January 1965 in a world in which the Cuban Missiles Crisis went horribly wrong and the "swinging sixties" never happened. In the United States, a new president has entered the White House; in Britain, the country will shortly be going to the polls for the first time since the October War. But with the return of "normal" politics, there is no return to the "normality" of the old, now-lost world order.

THE ROAD TO STANLEY is the fifth book in the five-book strand about the FALKLANDS WAR OF 1969-70, and the twenty-first book in the core MAIN SERIES OF TIMELINE 10/27/62. It is December 1969. THE ROAD TO STANLEY was originally published as the second half of CASSANDRA’S SONG and appears in its separate form in the interests of making a very long book more palatable, and hopefully digestible to readers! The Royal Navy has finally established, bloodily, command of the sea and the air; ashore ground forces are braced to break out of the San Carlos bridgehead. To all intents, the Argentine ...

Manifest Destiny is Book 13 of the New England Series. George Washington was cut down by a canon ball fired from the gun of British frigate at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, his Continental Army was destroyed by William Howe’s Hessians, and the rebellion by the Congress of the thirteen colonies of new England was ruthlessly quashed in the winter of 1776-77. It is July 1980 and North America, the Canadian Lands and New England to their south, are jewels in the crown of the British Empire. Once before, over a hundred years ago, it had been the arsenal of the powers resisting the ...

The Empire of the West is the sixteenth book of the New England Series. It August 1981, nearing the end of the third year of the war which has raged across the Western Pacific and at one stage threatened to engulf Australia and even India in a wave of seemingly unstoppable Japanese conquest. Now British bombers are based in the Marianas within range of the Japanese Home Islands and the Divine Wind – the Kamikaze – has become the last hope of the Empire of Japan. Not to win the war but perhaps, to inflict a bloody stalemate before or during the invasion that everybody in the Imperial ...

A decade ago, the challenge was accepted: to send a man to the Moon and to return him safely to the Earth, and now a giant rocket ship designed by Wernher von Braun stands ready on the pad and the clock is counting down. Ten years ago, nobody thought it was possible. But that was then, and this is now. Mankind has chosen to sail the new sea of space, to quest after the knowledge and the dreams of the star-filled abyss, to climb the infinite ladder to the stars.

‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave; when first we practice to deceive…’ As the war rages in the New England South West and the Gulf of Spain, political machinations rock the East Coast colonies and far, far away the law of unintended consequences is about to bite the Empire upon which the Sun never sets with a cruel, and oddly, inevitable vengeance. Trapped in the treacherous currents of the machinations of great men, as the tumultuous year of 1978 draws to a calamitous end, Melody Danson and her friends find themselves at the nexus of the gathering storm, fighting for their freedom as ...

A HARD RAIN is the twelfth and penultimate book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series. It is September 1962. A train of events which has been slowly, menacingly coalescing ever since October 1961 is beginning to play out. The end game is nigh. OPERATION ANADYR is morphing from a reckless whim in Nikita Khrushchev’s fevered imagination to a massive, chaotic clandestine thermonuclear gamble which is weakening the defence of the Soviet motherland. It is the hurricane season in the Caribbean, a thing never taken into account by the 12th Main Directorate of the USSR’s General Staff. The missile ...

ENTERPRISE is the second book in the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series. It is November 1961 and the doomsday clock is ticking. In Berlin the tanks have pulled back from one Cold War flashpoint, Checkpoint Charlie but Thor and Jupiter medium-range ballistic missiles are still sitting on, or will soon be operational in England, Italy and Turkey and Soviet Leader Nikita Khruschev is still liberally declaiming threats to rain Armageddon upon the USSR’s foes. In Washington DC the Kennedy Administration is preoccupied with Cuba, troubles in the deep South, and seemingly falling behind in the space race; ...

A little over 20 months have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. It is a minute before midnight in Philadelphia on July 4, 1964, in a world stumbling inexorably toward a second, even more catastrophic nuclear war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom have stepped to the edge of the thermonuclear abyss; who will blink first? In All Along the Watchtower, the main series and the USA series of Timeline 10/27/72 merge into a single global narrative of the most desperate hours in human history.

Conventional wisdom is that if the Crown Colonies of the Commonwealth of New England ever unite in common purpose; then the Empire might fall. That this might happen at the very moment that century-old post-war settlement of the Treaty of Paris is threatening to fall apart, had been the unimaginable nightmare of generations of European monarchs, politicians, diplomats and generals The unthinkable is happening. Mexican troops are advancing through the South Western borderlands of New England; nothing can stop them. At sea, the supposedly invincible Royal Navy has been driven from the ...

It is April 1964 in a world in which the ‘swinging 60s’ never happened. War is chaos; and chaos is war. The post-October War world is at a bloody crossroads; betrayal and confusion preoccupies and distracts the West to the disasters about to befall newly remade, desperately fragile alliances as long kept secrets surface. The impenetrable fog of war spreads across the Mediterranean. Even while Malta burns and the survivors of the savage naval battle off its coast fight for their lives in the wreckage-strewn iron grey waters....

The Divine Wind is the fifteenth book in the New England Series set in an alternative timeline in which George Washington’s Continental Army was wiped out at the Battle of Long Island in 1776, the American Revolution failed and New England in the latter half of the 20th Century is still part of the British Empire.... In the Pacific the Royal Navy has turned the tide but the bloody battle for the Marianas rages unabated. In Japan, confronted by the might of the global British Empire mobilising for total war, the Emperor and his military men begin to consider the unthinkable. In New England...