Parallel Universes such a fascinating theory, one that makes this a must to add to the TBR mountain. My thanks to Harvey Simon for the guest post. 
Some physicists believe there are an infinite number of parallel universes. In one of those, the world is exactly as we know it, except your parents never meet and so you aren’t born. Since there are an infinite number of such universes, every possible combination is out there somewhere.
My novel, The Madman Theory, describes another of those worlds. This one is just like our own up to the moment of the 1960 election. In our world, John F. Kennedy, wins the presidential election. In The Madman Theory, he loses.
Why does this matter? Because in our universe, Kennedy literally saved the world from nuclear destruction. Two yeas after he was elected, the U.S. discovered that our enemy, the Soviet Union, was building a secret nuclear missile base in Cuba, just 90 miles from Florida. It was touch and go for a while, but in the end Kennedy managed to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis peacefully.
But what if Kennedy had lost the election, as he very nearly did?
Then Nixon would have been president at the most dangerous moment in the world’s history.
Would Nixon have been able to end the Cuban Missile Crisis peacefully, as Kennedy did?
The Madman Theory is a novel, but it tells a super realistic story about what would have happened during the Missile Crisis, had Kennedy lost in ’60.
Would you be alive? Read The Madman Theory and find out.
It is 1962 and there are children at play in the White House for the first time since the presidency of William Howard Taft.
Richard Nixon, the vigorous 49-year-old president, has been in office less than two years, having won election by a razor-thin margin over Senator John Kennedy.
In Moscow, the wildly unpredictable Nikita Khrushchev is looking forward to visiting his cherished revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro. Just 90 miles from American shores, Khrushchev will announce an audacious and dangerous nuclear stunt to abruptly shift the balance of power—a secretly-built network of missiles across Cuba that put American cities in the atomic crosshairs.
But President Nixon has his own announcement planned. A U.S. spy plane has discovered the missiles being set up in Cuba and Nixon will soon address the nation to announce his response.
Meanwhile, First Lady Pat Nixon is in California to look at a San Clemente house the first couple may purchase. Seeing shoppers crowd around a store-window television, Pat gets her first inkling of trouble. Dick has always insisted she not listen to the news and she is happy, for now, to return to her correspondence.
In the coming days, the confrontation between the U.S. and its nuclear foe will escalate. The president will weigh his determination to overthrow Castro against the risk of all-out war as Pat struggles to reconcile her estrangement from the man who thrust her into a public life she despises with her sense of a wife’s proper role.
Read more about The Madman Theory at http://www.themadmantheory.com/
Nixon looks like a crazy man on that cover with that title! how fun. I love the multiworld idea, ever since Crichton’s Timeline. This book sounds great.
Really like the sound of this. I bet it’s a great read. I love history and it fascinates me how different events could have been were it for one difference.
I once researched for an early novel about disrupting the timelines and found if William the Conqueror had died at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 then the next four centuries at least of English monarchs could never have been for they came from William’s son Henry, born in 1068!
There are so many to point to. If Hitler had died in the First World War, Alexander the Great killed in the early stages of his invasion of Persia, Napoleon victorious at Waterloo as he nearly was etc