Historian Thomas Cahill argued that it was the Jewish people who invented the very concept of history as we know it. They were the first to perceive time not as an endless circle of life, death and rebirth, but as the flight of an arrow, on a linear path to somewhere from somewhere.
But what if time is not one arrow, but a volley of arrows?
What if there are other timelines, other histories, other Jews? Would they still have a covenant with the one God, or would they know strange gods? Would they have survived banishment, pogrom and Holocaust? What if the Holocaust had not occurred? Or what if it had succeeded beyond Hitler's darkest dreams?
Some of the world's greatest speculative fiction authors explore these roads not taken, and many others, in Other Covenants: Alternate Histories of the Jewish People, the first-ever anthology of Jewish alternate history fiction.
Contributors include Jack Dann, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, Jane Yolen, Lavie Tidhar and Benjamin Rosenbaum, among many others!
About the Author: Mark Shainblum is a well-known writer editor and publisher of comics, science fiction and fantasy. He founded and ran Matrix Comics, an independent comic book publishing house. With Gabriel Morrissette, Mark co-created the cult classic Canadian superhero series Northguard and the bestselling political parody Angloman. For a time Mark wrote comic book adaptations of Michael Moorcock's Corum novels, as well as the newspaper comic strip adventures of the iconic Canadian superhero Captain Canuck. He also co-created and wrote the Canadiana and Haunting of MacGrath webcomics. Mark co-edited the award-winning alternate history anthology Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas (Nuage Editions, 1997) with John Dupuis, and Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (Edge Publishing, 2016) with Claude Lalumière. Mark's shorter comic stories have appeared in outlets like Love Fantasy, Trollords, Gene Day's Black Zeppelin and Panels for Primates, and his short prose fiction has been published in the SF magazines Would That It Were, On Spec, Thousand Faces and the anthology Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic. Along with a number of other Canadian comic book creators, Mark is prominently featured in the 2014 documentary Lost Heroes: The Untold Story of Canadian Superheroes and in the 2016 documentary Heroes Manufactured: Comics Breaking Convention. Mark shared an Aurora Award for Canadian science fiction with his Arrowdreams co-editor John Dupuis in 1999, and in 2016 he was inducted into the Joe Shuster Awards Canadian Comic Book Creator Hall of Fame.
Andrea D. Lobel received her Ph.D. in Religion from Concordia University in 2015, and is an ordained rabbi. She teaches Religion and Humanities at Carleton University and Jewish Studies at The Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary. In addition to her academic teaching and research, she is also an award-winning writer and editor. Rabbi Dr. Lobel's research and publications have focused on religion and science, with an emphasis on Judaism, the history of astronomy in religion, and scientific knowledge transmission between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
