Author's Comment:

I have especially liked fiction which is set in parallel reality or alternative history. This allows an exercise in controlled imagination, which may wander away from our shared reality, but never far enough to substitute it with pure invention. To put it another way, such settings are gradations of improbability - not escape into impossibility! Maybe such settings are like dreams - instinctive variations on reality - not efforts of the will determined to create substitutes!

Writers whom I've admired in this context are John Phinney, Keith Roberts, Robert Harris, and Tom Barnard. They evoke New York City of the late 19th century, an England where the Counter-Reformation triumphed, a Europe where the Nazis triumphed and rule from a ghostly retreat, and a South Africa disintegrating between 1994 and 2004. There are also unknown classics, like the Russian writer Korolenko who toured America in the late 19th century, and wrote a novel which blew a seering whistle on the American Dream.

Philosophically speaking, these alternative scenarios are valid if you agree with thinkers who hint that we live in the past and the future - the present is but a knife-edge from which we lean forwards or backwards according to inner volition. Finally, these scenarios are an excellent device for cajoling, prodding or nudging the reader in a direction that he might otherwise balk at. As is, the exotica of the alternative context will get him to go an extra mile or two - before he realizes that his mind has traveled on... —Nikolai Dejevsky