Preface
EVERY MOMENT OF every day, a thousand possible futures die unborn around us, a thousand corners not turned, a thousand roads not taken. We've all wondered, What would have happened if we'd gotten to that party late and so never met the person whom, in this universe, later became our spouse? What if we hadn't driven down that particular street at just the right time to collide with another car going across an intersection? What if we had managed to get to the airport in time to make that flight, the one that crashed?
And what's true of our own personal lives is true of history as well, of course: a thousand corners not turned, a thousand roads not taken. The fate of nations depends on the outcome of battles, which, as Shakespeare has shown us, can depend on whether or not a horse throws a horseshoe, or, in one memorable example from the American Civil War, whether or not a staff officer decided to have a cigar after dinner. What has become increasingly evident, over the past few decades, as we've learned about Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect (that busy, frenetically flailing insect that causes hurricanes in the Gulf by flapping its wings in Peru) and the Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, is how small a change is needed to alter everything. How completely the entire structure of history could change once you tamper with one small brick in the foundation upon which everything else is built—the difference in one course of bricks altering the shape of the next, which alters the next, and so on; a cascade of changes building upon changes, until the structure you get is radically different than the one you would have ended up with, if that first brick hadn't been changed.
In the pages of the anthology that follow, sixteen of science fiction's most expert dreamers will show you what happens when people (often people with only the very best of intentions) deliberately set out to change the world by going back and turning one of those unturned corners, taking one of those roads not taken … actively changing things, so that the Mongols discover the New World instead of the Europeans, or the American Revolution never happens, or ruthless industrialists take over eighteenth-century Salzburg and set up refineries and cracking towers in the town square … exploring what would happen if you woke up one day to find yourself in a different life from the one you remember, or lost among the billion worlds of probability, unable to find your way home … if you had to meddle, with sabotage and murder, to provoke World War I, or if refugees from the future returned to destroy your past and replace it with another … or if someone from another time took over your body in order to kill someone … or if you were forced to hide from ruthless immortals who were implacably chasing you through every second of recorded history … or if the most casual touch of your hand changed everything in the world around you, whether you wanted it to or not …
Changing worlds. Worlds where the stuff of history is so mutable that it melts and reforms like wax under heat and pressure, and the universe you wake up in might not be the one in which you went to sleep—or the one in which you'll wake tomorrow.
Enjoy!