Like a lot of children of the 1950s, William Gibson grew up haunted by the specter of the atomic bomb, and enthralled by science fiction stories. His latest project combines his two childhood preoccupations by imagining a very different outcome to World War II—one in which America bombed its allies in the Soviet Union as well as its foes in Japan, and went on to rule the world as its sole nuclear power. And in the 21st century, things gets even darker when a string of nuclear bombs are detonated across the globe, turning the Earth into an irradiated hellscape that can only be escaped through time travel.

This is the universe of the sci-fi legend's comic book Archangel, which comes out in graphic-novel form tomorrow. “My personal experience of nuclear anxiety was very real and lasted for decades, and with Archangel I was drawing on that experience,” says Gibson. The book, illustrated by Butch Guise, opens with a scene that reads like the logical end of that Cold War nuclear anxiety: a nightmarish montage of the world’s largest cities in ruin, iconic landmarks like Big Ben and the Kremlin destroyed. Although the cause of the chain reaction is unclear, democracy has died in the aftermath, leaving a dictatorial President-for-Life in charge of the wasteland.

So how do you save humanity from a slow death on a planet soaked in lethal radiation? If you’re thinking “create a super-advanced machine and send people back in time to 1945 Berlin to change the course of World War II,” then you and Gibson are on the same page. And if you're keeping track: yes, that makes Archangel an alternate-history story wrapped inside an alternate-history story.

The graphic novel originally began as a screenplay co-created by Gibson and actor Michael St. John Smith, and was inspired by the shadowy and even supernatural war stories that intrigued the writer as a child. “I found my way into my own favorite aspects of it, which might be thought of as The Weird War," Gibson says. "The history of [CIA predecessor] the OSS, of various resistance organizations, all the most secretive and/or deeply peculiar military operations, dubious narratives of Nazi occultism and wartime proto-UFOs.”

The influence of Golden Age science fiction permeates the comic as well: A copy of the classic pulp magazine Astounding Science-Fiction is visible in the desk of a British officer, advertising a story by Robert Heinlein; a man wearing a futuristic stealth “creepsuit” appears out of nowhere, prompting comparisons to H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man; a Soviet officer makes a reference to “foo fighters,” aerial phenomena rumored to be Nazi UFOs that showed up in sci-fi novels of their own.

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There’s a long tradition of “what if” stories that pivot on questions about World War II: What if Nazi Germany had won? What if Hitler had never been born? What if aliens had attacked Earth in the midst of a major battle? In Archangel, the mission of the nameless American Marine sent back to 1945 is to stop the evil Vice President of his own timeline from bombing the Soviet town of Arkhangelsk (aka Archangel), and thus create a better future—or at least a different one.

After the Marine teams up with an intrepid British Royal Air force lieutenant named Naomi Givens, she notices an ominous tattoo on his back: the words “REMEMBER BALTIMORE” in Spanish beside a massive mushroom cloud. “What happens in Baltimore?” she asks, nervously. “Baltimore’s where it all started,” says the Marine. The precise details remain hazy, but it’s clear that this was a moment when the world changed irrevocably: it was one way before, and something much worse after.

"I've always thought of time travel and alternate history as unusually pure and demanding forms of sci-fi.” —William Gibson

Like many time-travel tales, Archangel is designed to satisfy our relentless curiosity about how things might have gone differently in the past, and how that might change our present—possibilities we can only access through imagination. “History is actually a speculative discipline,” says Gibson. “We invent and reinvent history, and writing a straight historical novel requires imaginative discipline akin to science fiction. So I've always thought of time travel and alternate history as unusually pure and demanding forms of sci-fi.”

More often, however, science fiction looks to the future—if not the precise shape it will take, then our fears about the changes it will bring. While Gibson’s iconic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer explored cultural anxieties about technology and artificial intelligence during the rise of the digital age, Archangel delves into the apocalyptic terror of nuclear weaponry, which has loomed over humanity for more than 70 years.