Tom Anderson

My day job is science, but I have always had an interest in writing fiction and in history, and it’s probably not surprising that those all end up crossing over. Alternate history is a genre devoted to exploring the ‘what ifs’ of history, a recent high-profile example being the Amazon adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s seminal “The Man in the High Castle”. However, much of the interest to me comes in areas rather more obscure and subtle than the now-overdone ‘the Nazis win WW2’ type scenarios, and in exploring how different the world can become from a tiny change, as in the ‘For Want Of A Nail’ poem. My longest AH scenario, “Look to the West”, is about a king tripping on his coronation carpet, which ultimately leads to America staying British, industrialised Maori New Zealand and a steam-driven French Revolution, for instance. Straightforward science fiction and fantasy also remains a major love of mine and an area I am increasingly writing more in. Most of my works have been published by Sea Lion Press (please like their page as well!). In 2018 my co-writer Bruno Lombardi and myself were nominated for the prestigious Sidewise Award for Alternate History for our short story “N’Oublions Jamais”, about a very different First World War, which was published in the Martinus anthology “Altered Europa”.