Rick Wilber

At the end of Wilber’s first Moe Berg story, Moe himself admits that he doesn’t know what’s going on, and I admit that I’m in the same boat—but I can tell you that that was the first story that I read in the Moe Berg subgenre of time travel stories. In this case, Red Sox catcher Moe Berg travels (as he did in real life) to Zurich with the mission to kill Heisenberg, but this is only one of many Moe Berg lives; in many of those lives he interacts with a beautiful young woman and seeming time-travel agent who only sometimes encourages him to kill Heisenberg. You can also read about Moe in one other of Wilber’s alternate history stories and at least one independently conceived story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

At the outset of World War II, Young Harry Mack is flying a bomber to Europe for the lend-lease program. The plane malfunctions and is heading for a crash-landing on the coast of neutral Ireland when an equally young Niamh calls to her selkie sisters of the sea to save the plane’s occupants. Even at the time, Niamh knows there will be a cost for their aid, but that cost isn’t revealed until the end of a long marriage between the two when Niamh, now suffering from dementia, and an aging Harry, regretful of his philandering life, take a time-travel-infused road trip.

In an alternate history leading up to a 1945 atomic bomb in southern California, young Billie “the Kid” Davis grows up in the mid-20th century, playing shortstop better than any of the boys, flying B-25s with her Dad, and eventually—with Moe Berg and the woman-with-many-names—taking on that bomb. —Michael Main