Rating: 
Summary: Excellent! A Keeeper
Review: Like most readers, this reviewer finds it incredible that the "Best Stories ... of the Twentieth Century" still has genres to cultivate. The latest anthology centers on alternate history and like the other collections includes a wonderful spread of tales covering a what if scenario on a wide range of eras and events written by mostly famous authors. All fourteen stories attain a high quality including those from lesser-known writers. Each contribution provides as Mr. Turtledove describes a "funhouse mirror that lets us look at reality in ways we cannot get from any other type of story". Sub-genre fans will not want to miss the short stories that allow THE BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY STORIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY to live up to its title.Harriet Klausner
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Sorry, but I was expecting something better. Some of these stories are very good; in particular, "The Winterberry" by Nicholas DiChario, "The Undiscovered" by William Sanders, "The Lucky Strike" by Kim Stanley Robinson all deserved to be included. "Bring the Jubilee" by Ward Moore I personally disliked, but it was definitely one of the most famous alternate history works of the century so I suppose Turtledove almost had to include it. However it is more a short novel than a story, and takes up almost a quarter of the book, so if you have already read it then this is pretty annoying. "Moon of Ice" by Brad Linaweaver is just awful, the one really badly written story in the book. Otherwise the quality of writing is good to excellent throughout. On the other hand quite a few of these stories are not what I would call alternate history. Certainly not "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele, a fine story by a fine writer but straight space-travel science fiction without any alternate history to it at all. "Mozart In Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner seems to me more of a time travel story than alternate history. As a general science fiction anthology this is not bad at all. As a collection of stories having to do with alternate realities it's also okay. The best alternate history stories of the twentieth century? I don't think so.
Rating:
Summary: Some Representative Stories About History
Review: The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century has fourteen stories and an introduction by Harry Turtledove. The introduction is an excellent review of the genre and the stories themselves are gems that have long been buried in moldy magazines or ancient -- to the younger fans -- anthologies. I have encountered several of the stories, but others were entirely new to me. Robinson's The Lucky Strike has the Enola Gay crash on takeoff. DiChario's The Winterberry has JFK live through the shooting in Dallas. Turtledove's Islands in the Sea has Constantinople fall to the Muslims in the 8th century. Shwartz's Suppose They Gave a Peace has McGovern winning the presidency. Niven's All The Myriad Ways has humanity facing the realization of a probability multiverse where all uncertainities are resolved in each and every way. Bear's Through Road No Whither has the Nazis winning World War II...temporarily. Benford's Manassas, Again isn't really alternate history so much as cyclic history, with robots instead of Negroes. Chalker's Dance Band On the Titantic has an intercontinual ferry boat. Moore's Bring the Jubilee has a historian accidently disrupting the timeline so that the Union wins the Civil War. Anderson's Eutopia has a universe in which Greece never declined. Sanders' The Undiscovered has Shakespeare captured by American Indians. Sterling and Shiner's Mozart in Mirrorshades has 18th century Europe invaded by contemporary American culture. Steele's The Death of Captain Future is not so much an alternate history as the story of the birth of a folk myth. Linaweaver's Moon of Ice has another story of the Nazis winning WWII, but with a future much more different than they imagine. Some prior reviewers have pointed out that not all of these stories are alternate history. I must agree with this in two cases (see above) but the time travel stories do impact subsequent events to produce an alternate history and the intercontinual travel stories are tours of other histories. These stories could be classified differently but history is a prominent theme in ALL of them. This volume could have been titled "Some Representative Stories About History From a 20th Century Perspective", but you couldn't get all that on the spine in any reasonable size type. The publisher probably had something to do with the "Best" part of the title. These stories are not history per se, but they demonstrate some truths about history. They make you think about the consequences of accident and error, suggest that we can't ever know all about the past, and question whether we are any good at predicting the future. This volumes, and others like it, remind us that the past is unchangeable, but is also the source of today and tomorrow. Do we really know what our options are? Read and consider.
Rating:
Summary: Some Representative Stories About History
Review: The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century has fourteen stories and an introduction by Harry Turtledove. The introduction is an excellent review of the genre and the stories themselves are gems that have long been buried in moldy magazines or ancient -- to the younger fans -- anthologies. I have encountered several of the stories, but others were entirely new to me. Robinson's The Lucky Strike has the Enola Gay crash on takeoff. DiChario's The Winterberry has JFK live through the shooting in Dallas. Turtledove's Islands in the Sea has Constantinople fall to the Muslims in the 8th century. Shwartz's Suppose They Gave a Peace has McGovern winning the presidency. Niven's All The Myriad Ways has humanity facing the realization of a probability multiverse where all uncertainities are resolved in each and every way. Bear's Through Road No Whither has the Nazis winning World War II...temporarily. Benford's Manassas, Again isn't really alternate history so much as cyclic history, with robots instead of Negroes. Chalker's Dance Band On the Titantic has an intercontinual ferry boat. Moore's Bring the Jubilee has a historian accidently disrupting the timeline so that the Union wins the Civil War. Anderson's Eutopia has a universe in which Greece never declined. Sanders' The Undiscovered has Shakespeare captured by American Indians. Sterling and Shiner's Mozart in Mirrorshades has 18th century Europe invaded by contemporary American culture. Steele's The Death of Captain Future is not so much an alternate history as the story of the birth of a folk myth. Linaweaver's Moon of Ice has another story of the Nazis winning WWII, but with a future much more different than they imagine. Some prior reviewers have pointed out that not all of these stories are alternate history. I must agree with this in two cases (see above) but the time travel stories do impact subsequent events to produce an alternate history and the intercontinual travel stories are tours of other histories. These stories could be classified differently but history is a prominent theme in ALL of them. This volume could have been titled "Some Representative Stories About History From a 20th Century Perspective", but you couldn't get all that on the spine in any reasonable size type. The publisher probably had something to do with the "Best" part of the title. These stories are not history per se, but they demonstrate some truths about history. They make you think about the consequences of accident and error, suggest that we can't ever know all about the past, and question whether we are any good at predicting the future. This volumes, and others like it, remind us that the past is unchangeable, but is also the source of today and tomorrow. Do we really know what our options are? Read and consider.
Rating:
Summary: An inadequate title for the book's disappointing content
Review: The fact that the very famous names of Harry Turtledove and Martin Greenberg are on the cover of this book does not mean that the book's content is on the same level of their previous works/compilations. Only a few of the book's stories deserve to have the title of "The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century". One of these such stories is the first in the book, "The Lucky Strike", by Kim Stanley Robinson. It was a very well thought out and imaginative story about the dropping of the first atomic bomb, but this time the "honor" goes to a different plane crew, and thus history takes a different route. After that story, I thought the stories would only get better, because what respectable editor would put the best story first, instead of saving it for last? Apparently these two would, because it just went downhill from there. Some of the stories are okay, but still sub-par for my expectations, and the talented authors in the book. Turltedove's own story, titled "Islands in the Sea" is okay, but a bit flat in character and background development. It's about the spread of Islam after Constantinople fell to Muslims in the 8th Century. Places, that in our own past were established Christian lands, opted for Islam in this story. This creative idea was not used to its full extent, and the story is somewhat of a letdown. Ward Moore's marathon of a story, "Bring the Jubilee" was a fairly entertaining read, about the South winning the Civil War; with a view at the poverty stricken United States afterward, and a bit of time travel thrown in there. Other stories such as "The Death of Captain Future" and "Manassas, Again" barely even or not at all mention their point of deferment from actual history, and base their story more on current action, which is hard to follow in and of itself. Other stories are so badly written ("Moon of Ice") that you don't know why you keep reading it. Overall, this book was a very big disappointment, with only one or two stories worth reading, and these can quite possibly be found elsewhere, in more rewarding compilations of short stories. I would skip this one if I were you, unless you enjoy reading 300 or so pages of unfulfilling reading to attain the meager good points of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag, but very good overall
Review: This book is a collection of fourteen short stories, all revolving around an alternate history, one where an event changed the world we know. As with all anthologies, this one is something of a mixed bag. Personally, I liked Islands in the Sea by Harry Turtledove for its fascinating grip on how things might have been. Suppose They Gave a Peace by Susan Shwartz is probably my favorite, as it does exercise the mind, showing how a change in history might have made things not necessarily better, but certainly much different. I suppose that it is for that reason that I did not like The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is a look at what might have been had the Enola Gay crashed, leaving its deadly mission to another plane; with this change one man stands against the evil Democrat in the White House, stopping America from sparking the nuclear arms race. The story was gripping, but the ending was clichéd and frightfully predictable. One change gives me the world I want--a mindset that I find irritating in some alternate history stories. The rest, however, fall somewhere in between. I must say that though there was one story that I did not like, they very all very well written. Though my taste may be different than yours, I can definitely say that if you like alternate history, then you will like this anthology!
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable but Inaccurate Collection
Review: This is a mostly enjoyable collection of innovative stories, but the title of the anthology is far from accurate. Of course anyone can argue about what the "best" stories are in a certain category, but the bigger problem here is that this collection is not entirely Alternate History (AH). This is surprising for a collection compiled by Turtledove, who of course is one of the great practitioners of that genre. This appears to be an editorial challenge as the publisher may have requested a collection applied to the "category" of AH, only to reveal that this is a very difficult label to define. Some tales like Jack L. Chalker's "Dance Band on the Titanic," Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," and others are merely time travel stories with the familiar don't-alter-the future theme. "The Death of Captain Future" by Allen Steele is a fun story but an inexplicable addition to this anthology, as it is straight sci-fi without the slightest hint of AH. The stories that really are AH are high quality and make this collection mostly a success, but they only make up a distressingly small percentage of the book. In fact, the story of his own that Turtledove contributes to this book (perhaps suspiciously), "Islands in the Sea," is one of the best and actually sticks most closely to the supposed theme of AH. Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" is surely a classic of straight-up AH, while the most enjoyable story here is William Sanders' "The Undiscovered," a comic tale of Shakespeare trying to put on a production of Hamlet with an adopted tribe of New World Indians. Rest assured that most of the stories here are good and even great, but the title of the anthology is not entirely accurate.
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