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THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE THANDERONS. WE KNOW THAT YOU CAN HEAR US, AH.COMMERS.
(Thinks: maybe I should have opened with a reference that people who haven't seen a 1960s British Supermarionation show will get. Oh well)
It's now been over 4 years since Sea Lion Press was founded by a group of writers who had cut their teeth posting timeline and story content on This Very Forum. The company is run by @Meadow (Meet the New Boss, The People's Flag, co-writer of Agent Lavender and Shuffling the Deck, etc.) and our smashing 1930s-style minimalist covers are done by @Lord Roem (The Limpid Stream, La Isla Blanca, and the other co-writer of those books above). Other founding members include me (Look to the West, The Twilight's Last Gleaming, etc.) @iainbhx (Arose from Out the Azure Main, published in abridged form as the Dislocated to Success series) and @EdT (A Greater Britain, Fight and Be Right). And I would be churlish if I didn't thank @CalBear for letting me do this announcement thread by mentioning his own wildly successful Festung Europa, the published version of The Anglo American-Nazi War.
Since 2015 we have expanded from the original group to take in many other writers who have produced content on AH.com (and now wished to publish enhanced and cleaned-up versions of their drafts). These include @Nick NWO (whose Lancashire Life has been published to critical acclaim as The Boy in the Storm). We have also gained authors from the AH community who did not go through AH.com, such as David Flin (a true veteran of the community, who was married to the late Alison Brooks of SHWI, who coined the phrase 'Alien Space Bats' many years ago), @Nick Sumner of Drake's Drum fame, and @TB3 (Rhys B. Davies) of the excellent Timewreck Titanic (a sample thread was posted on AH.com here)
My sincere apologies to the rest of our authors for not covering them all here, but in my defence, we now publish NINETY-FOUR BOOKS. (See also the Goodreads list kindly put together by RoAwesomeFace).
For a while, due to Events we haven't been updating the announcements thread for new SLP releases in the Books and Media forum. Because of this, you may have missed some of our new releases. Please be assured I have now taken over this thread, so updates will now be forthcoming. I will also be doing rundowns of our old books periodically, because I know there may well be newer AH.com members who don't know about SLP, or our older books, at all. If so, welcome!
If I can make one cheeky request, we always need more reviews on Amazons and Goodreads to try to raise the profile of our books. A lot of the books were first written on AH.com and mention this in their acknowledgements, so they may well boost the profile of this forum too - you scratch our back etc. etc. If you are a writer on this forum with a TL or story, you can also contact us here to discuss the possibility of publication. We do long novels, scrapbook-style stuff like LTTW, short novellas, collections of short stories of vignettes, AH speculation essay collections, all sorts. About the only thing we tend not to publish is stuff that's heavy on the traditional "DATE: STUFF HAPPENS", but even that can appear in appendices.
We also do AH articles on the front page of the SLP site on an (almost) daily basis, so please check those out! https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/
I won't be continuing this thread here, but it's just here to alert you to the main thread in Books and Media. I hope you all enjoy the world of published AH that SLP, with the help of AH.com, has given birth to!
Numbers 1-7 of 94 on Goodreads...so far!
The Inaugural Thandean Sea Lion Press Book Review of Books (Trigger Warning, Includes Books)
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Festung Europa by Jon Kacer (CalBear on AHcom):
What if the Third Reich had managed to defeat the USSR? How would the US and Great Britain have reacted? What would have happened to Europe if Hitler and his evil minions had gotten the change to pursue their mad schemes to Germanize the Continent?
If after an uneasy truce the war had reignited, but with the vastly more powerful weapons of the late 1950s replacing the Me-109s and Spitfires? These are a few of the questions that are examined in this landmark work.
Starting with an overview of the world leading up to the resumption of all-out war between the Allies and Nazi state, we see the all-too possible results of the Nazi Party in control of Europe for an additional decade and longer. This is followed by a detailed examination of the tactics and politics that might well have resulted in a WWII far more destructive than what was experienced in our time.
Written in the style of an actual history of the War done years after its conclusion, Festung Europa approaches one of the great “What Ifs” of alternate history in a unique manner.
Thande's thoughts: This book began as "The Anglo-American/Nazi War", written on this forum by @CalBear . Yes that is meant to be the Nazi flag on Europe, but we want to sell this in Germany, where it was assumed at the time we weren't allowed to depict swastikas (I think this was later clarified). This is one of SLP's most popular releases, though its Amazon review score occasionally takes hits from Nazi fanboys upset that Cal portrays 1960s Nazi Germany as not only evil but laughably incompetent, having long since purged anyone who knows what they're doing. I can't say that's a reader demographic group we particularly want to appeal to.
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I hope you enjoyed this inaugural rundown - please feel free to ask questions here about any of these books!
Yeah, there are some very "special" Amazon reviews out there.Your commentary regarding the negative reviews is pretty much dead on (although the complaints about the early editing were pretty much dead on and entirely my fault). Most of the 1 star reviews are fairly clearly from folks who never read the book or the T/L here since all their bitches are covered, often in some detail, in the text. I do suspect that a couple of the reviews in the single star category are from Banned members who are somewhat unhappy (although at least one of them actually BOUGHT the book before going after it/me, so Fair Play to them).
That is an essay collection by Tim Venning about the Byzantine Empire - so bear in mind it's more in the vein of the "What If" series (AH discussion) rather than a timeline/story. I've not read that one myself yet, but his earlier ones on other subjects were certainly well-informed.What ceaser on the Bophrus about and is it good?(I assume so but just checking)
OK, it’s fairly self-explanatory. AH stories revolving around the Great War.
What follows is a guide rather than fixed rules.
I’m aiming for a total word count of around 50-70K, and around 10 stories. That doesn’t mean stories of around 5-7K; I expect some to be significantly longer, and some significantly shorter. The story should be as long as it needs to be.
I don’t want the Great War theme to become diluted. This is Alternate History, so clearly it will not be OTL, but it needs to be recognisably an Alternate Great War. Early start, delayed start, different line-up, not a problem. Unexpected locales, not a problem. Political level stuff, fine. One might have a Britain that applied the suggestion made by Flashman in Mr American, of not getting involved in the ground fighting in Europe, but using the Navy to “do things”. There are thousands of options.
That’s not to say that something that’s a bit of a stretch to include as a *Great War story won’t be acceptable, but such a story would need to be exceptionally good and the connection to the Great War should be made apparent within the story.
The second guideline is that I envisage the collection being “Hard” AH. By that I mean that it should pass the “It might have been” test. It might be a very unlikely turn of events; it might be something where the likelihood can be debated. It does, however, need to be something that one could plausibly read as a true story in a world where different events happened.
That means that dragons and time-travel and Titanic being used to bridge No-Man’s Land and so on are out. I don’t have a problem with ghost stories here, but I do have a problem with Vampires. The focus is on the Great War.
Now, there is a place for a Supernatural Great War, where there are Forces of Darkness, and so on. But not in this collection. If in doubt, ask me.
The guideline is: “Could the Great War have been like this?”
Home Front, Western Front, War at Sea, war avoided, Revolutions within the War, other Fronts, overview of a Grand Scheme of Things, very low-level face in the crowd, war in the Air, different technologies, whatever feels right for your story. I'll look closely at things like steampunk - it's a matter of keeping the premise of the collection clear and simple. The emphasis is to be on the Great War, and not on the steampunk chrome. Humour, romance, fine if you can manage it.
If I want to summarise it in a nutshell: Hard AH, Great War.
November is a month of serials here at Sea Lion Press, as one popular series continues, an epic saga concludes, and an esteemed online work publishes its first for-sale volume with us.
The Maltese Defence continues Simon Brading’s sparky and exhilarating Misfit Squadron series, in which an alternate Second World War rages around the life and loves of a group of Royal Aviation Corps airmen and women with their unconventional attitudes to tactics, authority, and aircraft design. This fifth volume takes the Misfits to Malta, under siege from both the Prussian and Italian air forces, and of just as much strategic importance as in our timeline. It’s available for pre-order now. Haven’t tried the Misfit Squadron books yet? The first volume in the series, The Battle Over Britain, is on sale now for just 99p or the equivalent local price.
The Longest Road marks the end of an era. George Kearton’s House of Stuart Sequence began with a successful Jacobite rising in The Year of the Prince back in 2016. Now, after eight volumes and two hundred years of radically-altered history, the ninth and concluding part of the story is on its way. Denmark has fallen, the Baltic is a Russian lake, and what lies ahead is uncertain.
To mark the release of The Longest Road, the first volume in the series, The Year of the Prince is now available at half price. Buy it today for only 99p in the UK and equivalent prices elsewhere.
Walking Through Dreams is the first volume of Jared Kavanagh’s Lands of Red and Gold series, an extremely well-regarded work in the online alternate history community. Sea Lion Press is privileged to be bringing Jared’s tale of a different aboriginal Australia to a wider audience. This also represents another small landmark in Sea Lion Press’ history – with our first Australasian-focused title now on its way, the only remaining continent not focused on by one of our books is Antarctica. And we may have a plan for that…
The Maltese Defence is available now for pre-order. Walking Through Dreams and The Longest Road will be available for purchase from Friday 29th November.