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Least favorite alt-history story?

Japhy said:
I do kind of feel bad that the kid who wrote it eventually got chased off the site. But that running battle in that thread would never have risen up to be what it was if he had just tried to be open to critics and been trying to improve his craft rather then create his personal global political fantasy.

There were always going to be certain people who aren't capable of adult conversations about writing and couldn't just recognize that as bad as it was he was a teenager, but it would have helped. Still would have been pretty gross but it could have been more in the room of acceptable AH.
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I was pretty defensive of the TL to begin with as it felt like the sort of dog piling that happened with “By the way, it is Kennedy” and I’m always wary of people making fun of a badly written first attempt because it can lead to the writer thinking they can’t improve or if they try to they’ll just be picked on again.

However in this case it did become clear that far-right wish fulfilment was going on, to the extent of trying to redeem people like Joachim Peiper and it became unforgivable. I’m honestly surprised a mod on The Other Place didn’t shut it down.
 
Oh he definitely crossed a hell of a lot of lines. Still would have been better to avoid the dogpiling and to have had people pushing him to reevalauate his bullshit and be a better writer. But that does require a two way street and neither he, nor the people who only showed up specifically to try and nail his scalp to a wall were willing to put that effort in.

Whole thing was just a pathetic waste, and probably just made him entrench is very flawed political worldview.
 
Colomb Pacha, in Jour J collection, is a cliché-fest in all its glory.
- Almohad-wank that somehow is slow enough to fight Charles VII's armies, as they pull a reverse reconquista defeating Spanish monarchs in the Siege of Grenanda.
- Columbus selling himself to another power? Check. Bonus point for going straight for Ottoman Empire and getting thoroughly islamized.
- The expedition is about discovering new lands that are apparently already rumored, rather than something sane.
- Viking pagan warriors? Check. Bonus point for natives still having Christian names somehow.
- Religious fanaticism? Check and check. Bonus point for having the only Jew being a textbook secularized believer (he's the only one not abiding to religious language)

In the same vein, you have Luxley, whom history is so ludicrous that it makes Sunset Invasion making sense.
It involves an union of Aztec, Mayas and Incas banding together to invade Europe in the XIIth century. Robin Hood helps the king of France against them (which is unconsequential giving the king dies of horniness-related issues), the pope is a double-scheming no-good and the whole expedition was launched because a shaman had a vision of European colonialism.
 
Japhy said:
Oh he definitely crossed a hell of a lot of lines. Still would have been better to avoid the dogpiling and to have had people pushing him to reevalauate his bullshit and be a better writer. But that does require a two way street and neither he, nor the people who only showed up specifically to try and nail his scalp to a wall were willing to put that effort in.
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There's a couple of factors. I honestly think it was the STOP TROLLING and IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE PLAUSIBLE people as much as or more than the author that got on peoples' nerves.
 
The Falcon Cannot Hear: The Second American Civil War 1937-1944. A timeline with an ASB premise written by someone who clearly didn't understand how politics or military logistics worked but got praised to all hell because people will shill for literally anything if it gets updated frequently enough. And on top of that it turned out large parts of it had been plagiarized!

In terms of published alternate history, I haven't actually read very much of it. But I read the first Worldwar book by Harry Turtledove and immediately lost respect for him because of the creepy/rapey content and the clumsy attempt at having a "good" Nazi character. From what I've heard the series only gets worse too.
 
I liked Worldwar. It did have a tendency, like Guns of the South, though to really reflect the fact that it was 90s Scifi though.

Definitely would agree about Falcon though. I was willing to suspend my disbelief for some of the lead up to get the Civil War going but after that the factions were ridiculous and so was how every group in the US and out of it acted.
 
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d32123 said:
Falcon Cannot Hear: The Second American Civil War 1937-1944. A timeline with an ASB premise written by someone who clearly didn't understand how politics or military logistics worked but got praised to all hell because people will shill for literally anything if it gets updated frequently enough. And on top of that it turned out large parts of it had been plagiarized!
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I rather enjoyed Falcon- though the plagarism was troubling, I agree.
 
Readerships don't care a damn about plausibility, and I'm not just talking about the teenagers, I'm talking about the people who should know better. Particularly if you're pressing their buttons politically. Rumsfeldia is the peak example of that but it happens pretty much all the time.

I'd love to believe that with a spoonful of sugar the kid who wrote Queen Nixon would have grown as an individual and become introspective but nah he absolutely thought he was god's gift and the (justified) criticisms just made him even more prickly.
 
Finally read most NDCR...and wow. I’m underwhelmed at how lazy it is in its use of Wikiboxes, bored at how quickly it became predictable as a fascist-wish fulfillment fantasy vehicle, and not at all surprised by the number of usual Zoo critter suspects who got turnt up for the drivel Congressman pumped out.
 
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It's also highly derivative of other AH.com works, to the point where he would use this fact as a defence; 'well, it happened in X, and I didn't see that get any criticism'. Usually of course X wouldn't exactly have been regarded as a masterpiece by a lot of people but the level of criticism wouldn't have been as great because it wasn't a far-right wish-fulfilment piece and the author had a modicum of sense about criticism.

Between it being a Trumpist wank-piece, the persona of the author and the plagiarism I'm not surprised it got singled-out for criticism. A lot of the people who went hard on him were fairly close in age btw so it's not like it was beardy fifty year-olds raining missiles down on him from orbit.
 
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LSCatilina said:
Colomb Pacha, in Jour J collection, is a cliché-fest in all its glory.
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The pitch was really promising, but it made a lot of stupid mistakes in the delivery, starting with the Vikings showing up out of the blue, and in the process pushing back the POD several centuries. You can do a "Muslim convert Colombus discovers America" TL or a "Norse settlers remain in Vinland" TL, but blending the two without justification is just silly.
 
d32123 said:
The Falcon Cannot Hear: The Second American Civil War 1937-1944. A timeline with an ASB premise written by someone who clearly didn't understand how politics or military logistics worked but got praised to all hell because people will shill for literally anything if it gets updated frequently enough. And on top of that it turned out large parts of it had been plagiarized!
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I don’t think it was just frequent updates, I remember when it first came out and between the TL starting and its closure you could have been forgiven for believing that it had been pinned to the top of AH after 1900. There’s no doubt in my mind that the premise was enticing for a largely American board and the concept had the joint benefit of relative originality and feasibility. I don’t think a Second American Civil War would have been likely without the New Deal but given the impending famine it prevented and the societal collapse that could have ensued it’s a believable premise.

That said I agree there was massive implausibility involved, economics and logistics evaporate into thin air but I don’t mind that so much compared to how artificial it was. The factions that arise do so far too neatly and the course of the story is so contrived as to be jarring. A three way civil war between communists, fascists, and liberals. I wonder who might win?

When Tube Alloys bears fruit just in time to prevent the Soviets reaching the Atlantic the British call the bomb “Deus Ex Machina”. That bit of self awareness did make me smile.

I’d say the contrivance was the TL’s biggest hang-up but obviously that was the plagiarism. The TL came back a couple of months after it was closed and the reception was understandably far more muted after that came to light.
 
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Elektronaut said:
Readerships don't care a damn about plausibility, and I'm not just talking about the teenagers, I'm talking about the people who should know better. Particularly if you're pressing their buttons politically. Rumsfeldia is the peak example of that but it happens pretty much all the time.
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I think it depends. I think "plausibility" is a bit of a totem for some people but even then it's a sliding scale. With NDCR, the usual procedure was:

"This is so plausible!"
"Actually, it's not very plausible."
"It's not meant to be plausible - stop trolling."
 
Heavy said:
I think it depends. I think "plausibility" is a bit of a totem for some people but even then it's a sliding scale. With NDCR, the usual procedure was:

"This is so plausible!"
"Actually, it's not very plausible."
"It's not meant to be plausible - stop trolling."
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Honestly I'd amend what I said above. I'm aware of at least one type of writing where there are endless debates on plausibility, and that's military timelines. But I think that's less a genuine interest in plausibility amongst readers as just tankwankers/Gettysburgers engaging their inherent love of pedantry and stats, and arguing in general. Maybe I'm being unfair though, from what I've seen people keep their criticisms open and honest and mostly informed.

It's electoral timelines where no-one really gives much of a shit, particularly if you're playing up to political prejudice or are really wikibox-heavy. In that sense, NDCR was unusual, refreshingly so tbh, and it's easy to see why some of the non-helicopter meme-posting Wikibox addicts who were regulars there were taken aback by the way it was received by the board generally.
 
That New Deal AH must be a tough-read if people are still talking about it over things like The Federation Party and Enoch Powell's National Front.

Personally, I'm surprised nobody seems to have brought up the Draka.
 
Aznavour said:
That New Deal AH must be a tough-read if people are still talking about it over things like The Federation Party and Enoch Powell's National Front.

Personally, I'm surprised nobody seems to have brought up the Draka.
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I suspect people are talking about NDCR more because it literally just ended, and thus is still fresh in everyone's minds. Whereas The Federation Party and Enoch Powell's National Front ended a while ago. If we're going to compare them, I would say that purely from a writing perspective The Federation Party is the worst of the lot, but in terms of political odiousness EPNF is the worst.
 
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