What if the history you learned in school were only one version of events? In Crossroads of Destiny, H. Beam Piper turns an ordinary conversation about alternate history into something increasingly difficult to dismiss. A group of travelers debate how Columbus, political elections, wars, and accidents could have sent civilization along entirely different paths. It begins as an intellectual game, perfect material for a proposed television series. Then one oddly dressed stranger starts asking questions that make the discussion feel considerably less theoretical.

Piper has great fun letting his characters construct alternate worlds while remaining unaware that one may be sitting beside them. The story builds through conversation rather than spectacle, using small discrepancies to make the familiar world increasingly strange. Even American history refuses to remain fixed. Familiar names occupy unexpected places, famous events occurred differently, and the narrator gradually realizes that his own version of history may look just as bizarre from somewhere else. Crossroads of Destiny is especially satisfying for listeners who enjoy alternate history that changes recognizable details and then follows the effects forward.

H. Beam Piper was born in 1904 and began publishing science fiction with Time and Time Again in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947. His work appeared in Astounding, Amazing Stories, Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantastic Universe, where Crossroads of Destiny appeared in July 1959. His fiction includes Omnilingual, Time Crime, The Edge of the Knife, Little Fuzzy, The Cosmic Computer and Space Viking.

Alternate timelines became one of Piper’s most recognizable fictional territories. His Paratime stories developed parallel histories on a much larger scale, while Crossroads of Destiny compresses the idea into a brief encounter where a few misplaced details are enough to make an entire world feel wrong.