In the spring of 1917, Vladimir Lenin was taken from his exile in Switzerland, loaded onto a sealed train, and taken to the Russian capital of Petrograd – a city where all manner of revolutionary ideas were in the air. Sent by the German government to add his radical voice to the chaos of the post-Tsarist regime, few would have expected that Lenin would soon preside over the establishment of the world's first communist state and inexorably change the course of human history.

But what if he had never arrived?

In The Limpid Stream Jack Tindale postulates a world where Lenin's assassination on his arrival at Finland Station leads to a divergent Russian Revolution. With the Bolshevik cause robbed of its most charismatic leader, a nation quite removed from our universe's Soviet Union emerges. From the bumbling actions of Alexander Kerensky, to the autocratic modernisation of Pyotr Wrangel, to the staunch liberalism of a very different Ayn Rand, The Limpid Stream shows a vision of a highly divergent 20th Century.