What if?
That is the question that lurks behind every work of alternate history. What if the Black Plague wiped out almost the entire population of Europe, but left the rest of the world untouched? What if the Spanish Armada had succeeded in its effort to invade and conquer England? What if the survivors of the holocaust went to Alaska rather than what is now Israel? What if the South had won the Civil War? These are all "What if" questions that have inspired recent, and not so recent, alternate histories. This book, like those books, demands a leap of faith. It demands that you recognize that if certain events had occurred differently, history might have been radically different.
This book is a novel. In many respects, it resembles a historical novel. It has characters that you will recognize, as well as many you will not recognize. All of the geographic features mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. are real, but because the history is different, these features often have different names. What we know as Walker Lake is Lago del Desierto. What we know as the Carson River is Rio de los Osos. Likewise, many of the cities have names you are familiar with. San Francisco is San Francisco, and Monterey is Monterey, but the city we know as Stockton is Puerto San Joaquin and Sacramento is Sutter City.
Read on. You will figure it out.