All Those Vanished Engines

Paul Park's return to science fiction takes the form of an alternate history, or a set of alternate histories, or nested alternate histories, or perhaps something else entirely. We begin in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War when the Queen of the North has negotiated a two-state settlement with the women of the South. The scene then shifts to an alternate present somewhere in northwestern Massachusetts where we discover a secret World War II weapons project. Finally we move to the near future, when a man tracing his family history discovers evidence of an alien invasion. Why it's on the list: The three parts of the narrative interlock and combine in complex ways, so that characters recur in all three, and the Civil War Battle of the Crater lies at the route of the divergent histories.