Englund

In Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, the novelist imagines a world hundreds of years in the future where humanity has regressed to a mediaeval standard of living, population and way of thinking. Towards the end of the book we learn what might have caused this calamity: not a pandemic, meteorite strike or nuclear war but a complete collapse in the digital economy. From payment systems to just-in-time supply chains and the wealth of machinery that supports our lifestyles, the modern economy is almost wholly dependent on digital instruction. If everything went down all at the same time, a state of anarchy would rapidly establish itself. In the ensuing chaos, it would be every man for himself with likely devastating consequences for lives and civilisation more widely. It is admittedly hard to imagine what combination of circumstances might completely and lastingly disable the digital economy – nonetheless, cyber threats are very much a real, present and fast increasing danger. Once that de...

What if Hitler had won and Hillary Rodham had broken up with Bill Clinton? They man not have the cachet of the Pulitzer or the Booker, but the Sidewise Awards for Alternate History deserve respect.  The what-if genre of fiction is growing fast, with work of startling quality and originality. We recommended five novels that imagine a dictatorship in America, some of which revise the past.  https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2024/05/15/five-novels-that-imagine-dictatorship-in-america In 2017 we warned that the what-if-the-Nazis-had-won genre may distract from more credible threats to democracy.  https://www.economist.com/prospero/2017/03/14/the-allure-of-dystopian-alternative-histories Our series “The World If” has speculated about the future and invented history. https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-nuclear-power-had-taken-off-in-the-1970s The Economist 15 November 2024 https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2024/11/15/books-that-imag...

Historian Niall Ferguson says Britain could have lived with German victory and should have stayed out of war Guardian 3 0 January 2014 https://internetional.se/bookskontrafaktisk.htm Britain fighting in the First World War was 'the biggest error in modern history'  Britain fighting in the First World War was 'the biggest error in modern history' according to leading historian | Daily Mail Online Gray Tide in the East is the best-selling counterfactual history of the First World War, if the Germans had not invaded Belgium in 1914 and thereby brought Great Britain and, eventually, the United States into the war.  August 1, 1914, Berlin: Kaiser Wilhelm II cancels the German invasion of Belgium over the objections of his generals, sending his armies East against Russia instead of West to France, and sets off a chain of events that will radically change the course of modern history. https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Tide-East-alternate-history-ebook/dp/B077G9LCNZ/ref=sr_1_4?dchild...