I am something of an alternate history buff.  For those of you that aren’t already familiar with this subgenre of science fiction, let me provide some background.  Alternate history is essentially a “what if” game of history.  Basically, alternate history would ideally take one event in history—the United States’ civil war, World War Two, the Great Depression, or something similar—and change one critical portion of it.  Perhaps Germany wins World War Two, for example. Think how shockingly different the world would be if that had happened.  Or if the Confederate States of America had actually emerged from the United States’ civil war as a full-fledged nation—how different would the world be if the United States were only about half its current size?

That’s exactly the kind of question that Turning Point: Fall of Liberty will ask and attempt to answer.  Specifically, what if Winston Churchill had died, unexpectedly, in 1931?  Double bonus irony points–Churchill was an alternate history author himself, having written an essay for Sir John Squire’s “If It Had Happened Otherwise”.

The extrapolation from that point says that, without Churchill, no one was willing to stand up to Adolf Hitler’s steadily expansionist war machine, and as Hitler goes on his epic-scale land-grab, Great Britain surrenders in 1940.  This gives the Nazis the perfect staging ground for an assault on the United States, and so, they launch.

Stop and think about that for a minute—in 1940.  America didn’t actually get involved in World War Two until nearly 1942.  Before then, there had been lend-lease activities in which the United States supplied other countries with arms and munitions, and that didn’t even start until 1941.  That means that America’s industrial might is probably still trying to shake off the Great Depression, without the impetus of nearly seven hundred billion dollars (at 2007 prices) of goods being produced for use worldwide.  That means, chances are, we’re armed in World War One style while the Germans are coming over in fresh off the line gunboat zeppelins with the entire industrial might of Europe.

Oh, and the Japanese are also taking potshots at California.
READ ON »