What
@SenatorChickpea and
@Kimkatya have said - both insightful comments - got me thinking, and I have some scattered thoughts.
If I could make newbies to AH read anything,
I'd give them this piece by rvbomally on the Alternate History Weekly Update. It's a piercing piece about how so many AH conventions by their nature put an emotional distance between the writer and the immense human suffering they write about second-hand, and how that makes the act of writing AH a less emotionally taxing experience.
The most relevant bit:
Worldbuilding Detaches Authors and Readers
The old chestnut about one death being a tragedy, a million being a statistic, is doubtless true. The human brain has trouble comprehending such large numbers of people, so it thinks of them in inhuman abstractions. The larger the number, the more difficult it is to empathize with a person, because they become part of an amorphous group.
Mitro and SpanishSpy discuss the worldbuilding in 1984 as a feature which attracts alternate historians to the work. I agree, but I will take this thesis a step further: worldbuilding also allows alternate historians to write about dystopian settings with greater emotional ease. As nonsensical as it may be, the story of Winston Smith is far more tragic than the story of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. This is because Winston Smith is a man who we come to know, and who is mercilessly destroyed by the system, body and soul. While we know this is happening to countless people throughout the world of 1984, we are concerned with Winston because we know him. The others may as well be nonexistent, vaporized as the Party intends.
Alternate historians who go straight for the worldbuilding have a much easier time writing a dystopia. They do not have to agonize over the tragedy of the Last Man in Europe, as Orwell did. A paragraph describing nuclear annihilation, or the genocide of an ethnic group, can suffice to give the audience the necessary information without the emotional pathos. Indeed, a simple bullet point can suffice.
While detachment is of little consequence when writing fiction, it becomes a problem in the study of actual history. Good historians understand this, hence the popularity of using works such as Anne Frank's diary in education about historical atrocities. Six million Jews perishing in the Holocaust is just a number, while Anne Frank was a person.
I knew rvbomally for a while, and we talked a fair bit for a period. One of the things we bonded over was that by sheer coincidence we are both Filipinos.
As a child, my Filipino grandparents would tell me stories about the Japanese occupation that they lived through as a child. They told me of spies manning the
halo-halo carts. They told me of a relative who witnessed a bombing raid, and my great-grandfather who was a resistance fighter.
They told me of how, of all the Japanese troops there, the Korean troops were the most ruthless.
They told me of witnessing Japanese soldiers who would grab a baby out of their mother's arms, fling them in the air, and skewer them with a bayonet for target practice.
They told me of a fourteen-year-old girl, a relative, who was married off to a forty-something Filipino man so that she would not be taken and made into a comfort woman. I have several cousins resulting from that union.
There's an attitude towards large-scale suffering in AH that gets more ghoulish the more I think about it; it hits me hard, because half my family is from a country that was ripped apart by war in living (but fading) memory. Wars of conquest do not merely change the colors on a map; nay, they kill. They rape. They burn. They destroy.
What ends up happening is that you get works that come off as being 'edgy' in the way that gratuitous use of rape is 'edgy' - it provides shock value, but demonstrates no interest on the part of the writer to actually reckon with the awful things they write about. They want to provoke a reaction in the reader and then whisk them on to the next plot development. It results in a writing culture of callousness, of detachment. It results in a writing culture in which people are numbers, not people. It is a culture that tells Anne Frank and Solomon Northrup and Malala Yousafzai that their stories are far less important than the caliber of the bullets that shot their loved ones.
There is, however, a room for AH about these subjects, but it is AH that really bothers to reckon with the human cost of war and imperialism. I think Turtledove's
In the Presence of Mine Enemies, for its flaws, does this particularly well, as it focuses on Jews in hiding in a victorious Nazi Germany undergoing civil unrest. Their fears and their anxieties - but also their joys - are very real in the context of the novel.
It is rarer, but more detached writing can do it too; I think Jon Kacer's
Festung Europa got the emotions just right. In this category, though,
the best in my opinion is of all things an SCP article, which remains one of the most potent AH narratives I have ever read.
If you're anything like me, you're tearing up at that ending.
That emotion, that willingness to tackle head-on the awfulness about which we write, is something we need all the more.