Fire on the mountain (1988)

John Brown's raid succeeds, opening a very different route out of American slavery. Bisson connects the revolt to a later world with an independent Black nation, socialist Virginia and a space programme, while a scientist seeks her ancestor's story. The short novel's strongest move is to make revolutionary memory part of ordinary life. Read it as a bold political counterfactual about who gets to begin history's changes, with letters and remembered lives giving the sweep a human scale.