A stray review by Maynard Welstand

Opuntia 64.1C February 2008
ISSN 1183-2703
By Dale Speirs
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Alberta, Canada T2P 2E7

Dale reviews some cool alternative history books and stories. Some may be hard to track down, so if you run into trouble, PLEASE ask your local public librarian about Interlibrary Loan to get a hold of this stuff. It looks excellent. Where the heck does he find his reading stash? Here are some titles and synopsis to give you the gist of the kind of materials he's into:

Lest Darkness Fall – Dude time travels to 6th century and discovers how easy we have it in the 20th century.

Pasquales Angel – What would happen if Da Vinci's drawings had all actually worked? Read about the possible world we'd live in if the Renaissance had happened 325 years early.

Not by Sea – (this is in the 1966 issue of IF, and you might need a librarian to help track this one down via interlibrary loan) What would have happened if Napoleon had won the battle for Britain?

But wait, there's more! In this issue, Dale reviews 43 zines and also has letters to the editor.

He also has this cool column called “Seen in the literature” where he quotes an article and then provides really insightful commentary. His scope of reading is broad and deep. Golly, to spend an afternoon in this guy's head would be a total trip. Anyhoo, there is this one clip that is creepily foreboding of our current crash, which he predicted 8 long months ago. Here is one citation that I will give you: The hunt for Black October. The American, 1 (6): 46-54, 104-110.