There are a lot of alternate history novels on the shelves nowadays, where the South won the Civil War, where Dracula wasn’t killed in 1893, and he sired a race of vampires that conquered the world, where Custer won, and where Hitler defeated the Allies—and that’s not even counting the Steampunk genre, which posits a Victorian Age with technological advances based on steam power and clockwork engines, which is a fine combination, and fun, but if I see another paperback cover of a chick in Victorian dress, wearing a jaunty (I hate that word) bowler sized for a Chihuahua, I’m gonna flush the book down the store’s toilet.
Oh, so stylish . . . and so obnoxious.
A fun, new book takes a look at another alternate timetable of the world, this time one in which the creatures and legends of our own popular culture have worked their way through history. I’m especially fond of time-traveling George Washington.
ALTERNATE HISTORIES OF THE WORLD is a creative look at the chapters of World History, if they had been influenced by golems, giant monsters, robots . . . and even a robot monster. Remember when a giant beast attacked Boston Harbor back in the 1700s? Bet that wasn’t in your history books.
Remember the zombie outbreaks of Pittsburgh…
…and how later zombie President Lincoln was elected?
Writer/artist Matthew Buchholz has taken classic art and figures from pop culture and combined them into artifacts of a wondrous other-Earth, where Martian flying saucers aided Washington during the Revolution, where dinosaurs roamed freely through the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and where Teddy Roosevelt was our first Rocketeer.
And throughout our past, one figure has been noted in petroglyphs and in Mayan friezes, lurking in the background of human history: Vilnar the Destroyer.
Some on our world would say the Destroyer looks suspiciously like a guy in a gorilla suit from a 1953 cheesy movie.
I beg to differ. In some other reality, these things happened; and somehow the legend of Vilnar bled between the worlds of the Multiverse and subconsciously influenced our black and white movie makers.
Go! Go to your bookstores now and pick up a copy of ALTERNATE HISTORIES OF THE WORLD. You’ll never have to worry about Gorgox the Eradicator again!
Rus Wornom 