Showing results by author "Philip James" in All Categories

It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the 19th century.

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. 

DOOMSDAY BLUES is the fifth book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series. It is February 1962. John Glenn, the first American has finally contrived to orbit the Earth. In Laurel Canyon and Beverley Hills one journey pauses and another ends. In England Peter Christopher guiltily reflects on his prospective marriage to a woman he does not love and the likely end of his long-distance, relationship with Maria Calleja, as he goes about his work on board HMS Talavera at Chatham. In Washington and Moscow, the spy game continues, wheels within wheels until it is unclear who exactly, is playing whom… The ...

There is a theory that the way the ‘time’ works, is that the past, literally, never goes away. Might what we call ‘ghosts’ simply be the faint echoes of moments from the past. We are here now, possibly, our ancestors are still where they were, in their own time, as real as you or I, except separated from us by…time itself. Have you ever felt the whisper of ancestral voices, a tingling of the spine, or just an ‘odd’ feeling standing, or walking through a ruined castle, or across a ritual landscape so ancient as to be alien? When we claim a spiritual, or an ethnological, ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 year after the generals finally turned on their Nazis masters the Thousand Year Reich survives, albeit stumbling from one crisis to the next in the absence of the guiding hand of a ‘strong man’ whose whims and psychoses have wrought so much misery since 1933. Thousands of people died in the putsch, the home SS was purged by the Wehrmacht and ruthlessly bombed by the Luftwaffe, brutally excising the SS, the Gestapo and much of the infrastructure of National Socialist rule from the fabric of the Fatherland Reich. Now the SS is a shadow of its former vainglory, an adjunct to the Armed ...

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.

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....

WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN is the fifteenth book in the core MAIN SERIES OF TIMELINE 10/27/62. Readers: please be aware that this book was originally published as a much longer novel, which as of November 2025 was split into two parts, the second part being published separately as BEAR IN THE SKY. ________ It is February 1968 in a world in which the swinging sixties never happened because the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962 went catastrophically wrong. Since the cataclysm struck, obliterating great and historic cities, laying waste to great swathes of the northern hemisphere, the threat...

INDEPENDENCE DAY is the twenty-third book in the core MAIN SERIES OF TIMELINE 10/27/62. It is October 1972 and the tenth anniversary of the October War approaches. For Marija and Peter, the President-designate and future First Man of Malta, Independence Day is almost upon them. The world is a very different place than it was in October 1962; whether its leaders have learned anything from the folly of their predecessors is of course, quite another matter. Much as it might seem as if a new, saner world order is beginning to assert itself not everything is what it seems to be and old enmities ...

THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES is the tenth book of the COUNTDOWN TO WAR series. It is July 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 head into a huge, clandestine thermonuclear gamble. Historians are frequently astonished by the thought processes – or the lack of the same – of so-called ‘great men’. The capacity of leaders to believe their own rhetoric in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary is, it ...

The American Revolution failed; the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island in 1776 and ever since, New England has been the great engine and on occasions, arsenal of the British Empire. The question is: is the Empire on which, literally, the Sun never sets which rules rather more than a quarter of the globe and well over a billion people, beginning to creak at the seams? The Forces of the Triple Alliance led by the wily Felipe Santa Anna have conquered tens of thousands of square miles of the South West, and driven the supposedly invincible Royal Navy out of the Gulf of...

Tom Paine's Bones is the fourteenth 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 North America in the latter half of the 20th Century is still part of the British Empire.... In the war in the Pacific the Royal Navy has turned the tide and now Imperial forces have begun the long, bloody island-hopping advance upon the Japanese Home Islands. Back in New England the wars with the Mexicans and the Japanese have spurred a massive industrial ...

CHANGING OF THE GUARD is the TWENTY-SECOND book in the core MAIN SERIES OF TIMELINE 10/27/62. It is June 1970 and the reverberations of the war in the South Atlantic are rippling around the world but nowhere are the aftershocks so profound as in the United Kingdom and the Argentine. For both countries the political landscape has altered forever. It is not just the price in lives lost, human grief and the crippling damage both sides have inflicted on each other and themselves. The world has changed and an era is coming to an end. Nothing will ever be the same for the survivors, heroes and ...