- Location
- Visiting BWBs.
My broader point though is that once again I was reflecting on how uncomfortable I'm becoming with Nazi victory timelines. I know that we brush all manner of implied atrocities under the map in this game- slavery in the ancient world for one, and I like to think I've made my position on whitewashing imperialism in alternate history pretty clear.
But again and again we return to the Third Reich victorious, in scenario after scenario. And we think about who would be the next Fuhrer, or what the Panzers of the 1960s would look like, or if the environment would be even more fucked up than up timeline by stupid mega engineering projects.
I don't blame you. It's easy (and usually lazy) to get caught up in the superficial nuts and bolts of a Victorious Reich - tanks and Welthauptstadt Germania and Breitspurbahn. As someone who's written a few works in that kind of timeline, I tried to dig deeper and explore the uglier aspects of those worlds. (Admittedly, I was probably too tame by drawing on late-era Soviet Union as my template).
I think part of the problem - and it unquestionably is a problem (maybe it always was) - is simply that a depressingly high proportion (for my taste, anyway) of AH simply ignores the human aspect of the history.
There is a large proportion of AH that focuses on the worldbuilding to the point where the inhabitants of that world are simply part of the background. We get to see the big decisions, and the nuts and bolts and the cool kit and the clever in-jokes (there was a period where I lost track of how many times Richard Nixon appeared as a used car salesman) and so on, but there is not a single character present.
We'll get to see, for example, Rommel casting aside the constraints of logistics with a large dose of handwavium, and conquers Egypt and the Middle East and etc. In such timelines, we never get to see what sweeping flanking moves in the desert means for those doing it.
I must declare an interest (as Parliamentarians might say). I'm firmly in the Narrative camp of AH. Without a Plot and Characters, worldbuilding is essentially wanking away building the equivalent of a Lego model. Worse, because a lot of the Lego figures have more personality than many AH characters.
In my opinion, 1984 is a great example of how it should be done. One gets to see the world through the eyes of a character. We see the individuals that make up the world. It's not just moving blocks about on a map.
That emotion, that willingness to tackle head-on the awfulness about which we write, is something we need all the more.
Of course, this starts to move into the issue of why we are writing and reading. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I'm writing and reading (especially reading), I am doing so principally to entertain or be entertained. Which can include serious unpleasantness. Perhaps it is my life experiences speaking here, but I don't particularly need detailed descriptions of atrocities. I've seen them for real, the attempted genocide of Bangladesh Independence, the insanity that was the Lebanese Civil War, the game of Prod-a-Prod played by the IRA in Belfast. I'm not going to describe details of these, and I certainly don't need to read imagined descriptions of these by someone who hasn't a clue what is involved.
But, evoking an emotional response is at the heart of writing. If a writer can't get a strong emotional response from the reader, one has to question whether the book was worth writing.
It's complicated. You show me someone who says there is an easy answer to the issue, and I'll show you someone who hasn't grasped the issue in the first place.
I was reflecting on how uncomfortable I'm becoming with Nazi victory timelines.
Returning to this. I'm uncomfortable with Nazi victory timelines simply because, in many cases, the author seems to be not too far from presenting the unspoken view: "And it would have been a good thing." There was one egregious example I recently proofread. I'm obviously not in a position to discuss the details of the work (the proofreader's requirement to keep schtum about the work they've proofread), but there was a strong sense of Wehraboo about the work.
It feeds back to the commonplace casual acceptance of the pernicious myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht".
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but there is a tendency to dehumanise AH in favour of History, in the same way that a lot of 1960s and 1970s SF dehumanised the SF works in favour of Science, and a lot of Fantasy dehumanises that genre (if one can dehumanise elves and orcs and dwarves and so on) in favour of Mythology.
God knows, my own work is meaningless drivel, but at least I will stick by my principles of having them filled with people.
Even if the people are Ravens or Snowmen.
(And that was my proudest moment as a writer - when I got people crying over the death of a snowman. The Snowman, eat your heart out.)