The storybundle History with Magic just went live. Curated by yours truly and running till November 19, it unveils eleven riveting works that occupy a vital nexus in the dense, labyrinthine metropolis that is fantasy: the crossroads of alternate history and secondary world fiction. Both are venerable subgenres in speculative fiction. Alternate history has been with us at least since Titus Livius, better known as Livy, contemplated a world in which Alexander the Great survived to turn his energies westward; and humans have invented secondary universes ever since they wove and spun stories around their gatherer-hunter campfires.

Each entry of this spectacular bundle deserves to become a visual spectacle as atmospheric and studded with larger-than-life events and charismatic characters as the serialization of Bernard Cornwell’s Last Kingdom or Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle.

The stories in this bundle range widely over cultures and eras: from Tang imperial China and medieval Samarkand to post-reform czarist Russia and Belle Époque Boston, to Depression-era Mississippi and contemporary Senegal; from god avatars in shifting configurations across parallel universes and twinned conduits who collapse quantum-entangled history lines to plotting faeries in Elizabeth I’s court, ancient souls who act as spies for Napoleon, struggling exiled dissidents in Cultural-Revolution China and dueling magicians in Portland, Oregon.

Beyond their roots in real history, these stories showcase the strength that the human spirit can draw from deep wells of memory and from powerful circles of chosen family. Honor versus glory, power and responsibility, forbidden knowledge, the destinies of nations, the changing of history by a butterfly’s wings. Full of rousing, sweeping derring-do and jeopardies, risky missions and fraught choices, intricate alliances and jarring betrayals, it’s all here—with the layers of real history, and its very concrete consequences, glimmering like fata morganas through the gauze of fiction.