Harry Turtledove is "the standard-bearer for alternate history," according to Tom Squitieri writing in USA Today. A sub-genre of science fiction, alternate history has fast become one of the hottest new genres of the 1990s, and Turtledove is, as Russell Letson noted in Locus, the "best practitioner of the classic alternate-history story since L. Sprague de Camp domesticated it for American SF over a half-century ago." Letson went on to list Turtledove's virtues as an alternate history guru: "meticulous research and thorough knowledge of his period, an understated but firm way with storytelling, and a sense of the exotic appeal of the past combined with a recognition of the ordinariness of ordinary life."

Turtledove has served up fantasy versions of the Roman Empire and Byzantium in his fictions, reworked the Civil War so that the South wins, allied Nazis and Jews against an unearthly power, constructed trench warfare...