Summary: Four unrelated alternate-history novellas.

In “The daimon” (Turtledove), Socrates joins the Athenian expedition to Sicily (415 B.C.) as a foot soldier; his conversations with Alcibiades prompt the latter to resist the Athenian's attempt to recall him from the expedition, which in the alternate history is a grand victory. Alcibiades returns to Athens in triumph, forms an alliance with the defeated Spartan king, and establishes a tyranny, killing his principal political opponents and their families (notably including Socrates, Plato, and Critias).

“Shikari in Galveston” (Stirling) is a frontier-adventure story. The alternate-history premise is that a series of asteroid collisions took out most of American and European civilization in the middle of Victorian era; a hundred and fifty years later, British India is the principal technological power and has re-established something like a nineteeth-century level of global exploration and communication, while in America the people have recovered only local, narrow forms of social organization. The story recounts a hunting expedition in the wilds of West Texas.

“The logistics of Carthage” (Gentle) is set in a world in which a Visigoth invasion of North Africa in 416 A.D. succeeds (instead of being destroyed in a storm), with radically different consequences for all subsequent history. The premise of the story is that the Visigoth rulers of Carthage eventually convert to a form of Christianity and manage to continue their rule until the fifteenth century, when the Turks, having seized Byzantium, decide to conquer Carthage next. The story deals with a minor event preceding this attack -- minor to history, but a matter of life and death to the principal character, a woman soldier in a group of European mercenaries hired by the Turks. The soldier is brilliantly characterized, but embedded in an extremely obscure and confusing plot.

“The last ride of German Freddie” (Williams) is an elaborate joke on which the author has taken enormous pains to ensure the absolute, exact historical accuracy and plausibility of all personages and events, except for the basic premise: Friedrich Nietzsche, told by his physician to recuperate in the healthiest possible climate, emigrates to America, becomes a gambler in Tombstone, Arizona, and participates in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.