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Least favorite alt-history story?

Anyway, being the guy who is kinda largely responsible the President Bundy Trope (as on AH.com I wrote Made a Good Lawyer, the timeline that popularised Bundy as a politician by fleshing him out), I would agree that Bundy is a lazy pick at this point. He may have been a phresh pick in 2015, but by now he's overused and ultimately cliche, with timelines that use him failing to justify his political standing, why he's where he is, and ultimately how he is changed by his decision to go into politics. Indeed because a lot of TLs, such as NDCR, focus solely on election-to-election because of their flawed wikipedia infobox, you might as well put the words "Evil Charisma Bad Man" into the name slot and there's no change.

In regards to Good Lawyer, I like to think that I at least made the concept interesting- it's not the first President Bundy TL, indeed it actually isn't a President Bundy TL (and we never actually get to the Presidency, it ended while still at the 1996 election, where the majority of updates took place), but I do like to think that it was the first that actually tried to ground it in a sense of plausibility. It is, however by my reckoning, not a good alternative history, relying too much on convergence and Bundy's personality not being changed, as well as being too... well, the bit where he pivots to being apologetic towards his anti-gay speech doesn't make sense with the rest of his characterisation, even if at the time I was justifying it with "he doesn't believe what he's saying, he's just saying it to look good". The actual sequence of events- in which he ultimately chooses to stay in Law School after winning the woman who became in in-universe wife back, resulting in him becoming a King County Prosecutor, resulting in him getting a high profile off the back of high-profile cases, and ultiemtly running for US Senate- makes sense, but at the end of the day, keeping him an active serial killer (even if its never explicit within the 'present' of the timeline that he has killed anyone) was a mistake.

Anyhow, one of the reasons I ultimately ended it was because I was unable to reconcile Bundy being a politician and Bundy being a killer, due to there being a tension to that which is ultiemtly destructive to the timeline. In hindsight I should have probably written about this in the actual thread- at the very least so the grifters wouldn't pick through the remains and copy without understanding what made Made a Good Lawyer an ultimately a failed alternative history.
 
Mixed bag actually. They usually confess in the end but theres a world of difference between say, Eddie "Bumblebutt" Kemper who literally made the officers driving him to the station ill because he wouldn't shut up and Kenneth Bianchi one of the Hillside Stranglers.

I should probably stop talking about all of this before someone says this is part of my brand.
Yeah, I've researched some things for my published true crime articles that would make anyone who looked at my computer think i was a serial killer at least.
 
I've always wondered why Bundy and not Gacy gets mentioned as the serial killer politician, since Gacy was more active in local politics and established in society than Bundy ever was.

Bundy was pretty active in the GOP and I’ve read accounts that some considered him as a potential future Governor for a time, although those may have been exaggerated after he became infamous. This was my rationale for “Robert Cowell” in Down The Road, which I fear may have inadvertently started this meme.
 
Bundy was pretty active in the GOP and I’ve read accounts that some considered him as a potential future Governor for a time, although those may have been exaggerated after he became infamous. This was my rationale for “Robert Cowell” in Down The Road, which I fear may have inadvertently started this meme.

Thanks for the nostalgia blast
 
Bundy was pretty active in the GOP and I’ve read accounts that some considered him as a potential future Governor for a time, although those may have been exaggerated after he became infamous. This was my rationale for “Robert Cowell” in Down The Road, which I fear may have inadvertently started this meme.
It's definitely a lot of exaggeration. He was a Volunteer for a few campaigns and probaly could have made it to mid level staffer but he also couldn't finish getting his law degree so...

But to be fair he was better then hiding it than anyone else. John Wayne Gacy had a police record, Jeffery Dahmer was a wreck who was never capable of hiding it, Jim Jones only avoided being charged for cruising because of his political connections that he'd forged before he seems to have started losing his mind, and Charlie Manson spent half his life in prison before the killings and it only took as long as it did for the family to get caught because there were a hundred other freak acid cults in LA at the time. But Bundy worked in a suicide hotline with Ann Rule and walked her to her car every night, while he was committing murders and while she was covering the murders.
 
I've got a new read for me to add to this incidentally, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Without World War I by Richard Ned Lebow

The book contains two separate Timelines, the "Best Possible World" where inevitably the British Empire never ends, Segregation in the US comes to an end much slower, Mussolini possibly becomes leader of Italy, China is probaly cut up but Peace reigns. Churchill also tries to murder lots of Indians.

The "Worst Possible World" sees European Empires Fray and a Portuguese-Spanish-Italian-Austro-Hungarian-German and Sometimes Russian Bloc of Authoritarian Regimes unite against the West, and they and the British Empire having a nuclear war in the 1970s. Also Churchill joins the Labour Party.

Its not very good.
 
Turtle doves series where humans just give up large chunks of earth to aliens we were beating because they aren’t white.

We were winning the war, but we gave up Latin America, Australia, Africa, Poland and the Middle East to Aliens along with all their inhabitants because... uhh...

Humans start winning the fight against the aliens, with the development of nuclear weapons. (Where Germany develops them first or second despite being a Nazi regime under Hitler).

So aliens try to make peace, in which because Britain and Japan supposedly didn’t fight as well as the Germans or Americans meant that all of mainland Asia, Africa, Poland, Australia and Latin America became alien territory. Including all the people in those regions.

It’s almost everything I hate about alternate history:

That stereotypical American attitude about WW2, aka AMERICA VS GERMANY NO ONE ELSE WAS IN THE WAR.

Doomsday Nazi phenomenon, where there’s this idea that Germany could’ve actually won the war somehow or taken over the entire world.

‘Hidden’ Racism for anyone not European or North American.

A general focus on WW2 military history and hardware rather than anything else.
 
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Turtledoves series where humans just give up large chunks of earth to aliens we were beating because they aren’t white.

We were winning the war, but we gave up Latin America, Australia, Africa, Poland and the Middle East to Aliens along with all their inhabitants because... uhh...
From what I remember of Worldwar, by the time of peace, Latin America and Africa had been under Race occupation for three years, having been the initial invasion points (due to, IIRC, misconceptions of geopolitics by The Race, who assumed "this big continents are who control the world" and because they are the most 'we can live there' places on earth for them, along with the Middle East and the arid regions of Asia), Australia had been overrun after all the major metropolitan centres got Hiroshimafied, and humanity wasn't winning the war- taking Cairo would have been a bit blow to the Race, but humanity would have had to fight through two continents before they won, and any victory could easily conclude with the Race glassing the planet from orbit. The reason why Nazi Germany, the USSR, Great Britain, the US, and Japan are able to broker this peace is explained in detail within the novels themselves, and why those large swaths of the world are under Race control.

Now, of course, we can criticise Turtledove for the choices he made as a writer, in particular in relation to his edgy 'colonialism but its aliens' theming. But you can't act like it's not explained and justified within the novels when you consider how much Turtledove goes into excruciating detail (perhaps his biggest flaw as a writer, beside his older books having a habit of really not ageing well in terms of how he writes about race and women).

The characters of the novels gave up Latin America, Australia, Africa, Poland, the Middle East, and a big part of China to the Race along with all their inhabitants because those places were under occupation by an enemy force that yes, we have beaten in battle, but an enemy force that still controlled those areas and weren't going to give up without fighting tooth and claw, and, well, humanity simply wasn't going to win that war unless they sat down and brokered a peace so they could have time to build from exhaustion. Why Turtledove chose those parts of the planet is of course another discussion, and indeed the question I find more pressing is "why the majority of the human PoV's white"?
 
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Not to derail this back to 'the serial killer political career thread' again (he says, doing just that), but Harold Shipman was part of his local Conservative club. Him becoming an MP seems far-fetched though, but maybe a councillor.
 
From what I remember of Worldwar, by the time of peace, Latin America and Africa had been under Race occupation for three years, having been the initial invasion points (due to, IIRC, misconceptions of geopolitics by The Race, who assumed "this big continents are who control the world" and because they are the most 'we can live there' places on earth for them, along with the Middle East and the arid regions of Asia), Australia had been overrun after all the major metropolitan centres got Hiroshimafied, and humanity wasn't winning the war- taking Cairo would have been a bit blow to the Race, but humanity would have had to fight through two continents before they won, and any victory could easily conclude with the Race glassing the planet from orbit. The reason why Nazi Germany, the USSR, Great Britain, the US, and Japan are able to broker this peace is explained in detail within the novels themselves, and why those large swaths of the world are under Race control.

Now, of course, we can criticise Turtledove for the choices he made as a writer, in particular in relation to his edgy 'colonialism but its aliens' theming. But you can't act like it's not explained and justified within the novels when you consider how much Turtledove goes into excruciating detail (perhaps his biggest flaw as a writer, beside his older books having a habit of really not ageing well in terms of how he writes about race and women).

The characters of the novels gave up Latin America, Australia, Africa, Poland, the Middle East, and a big part of China to the Race along with all their inhabitants because those places were under occupation by an enemy force that yes, we have beaten in battle, but an enemy force that still controlled those areas and weren't going to give up without fighting tooth and claw, and, well, humanity simply wasn't going to win that war unless they sat down and brokered a peace so they could have time to build from exhaustion. Why Turtledove chose those parts of the planet is of course another discussion, and indeed the question I find more pressing is "why the majority of the human PoV's white"?

It to me feels strange that the vast majority of the population under their rule is decided to be not white by the writer with Poland and Australia being the only exception, and these are often the groups that white nationalists see as ‘undesirables’.

Not to mention the previously mentioned Nazi Germany somehow getting nuclear weapons through its own program.
 
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Not to mention the previously mentioned Nazi Germany somehow getting nuclear weapons through its own program.

They received a decent amount of plutonium from the crashed Race starship, if not as much as the Soviets, which in itself was a boost to the program as the Nazis never discovered plutonium IOTL. Still implausible of course but not as much of a stretch as aliens invading earth in the first place.
 
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It to me feels strange that the vast majority of the population under their rule is decided to be not white by the writer with Poland and Australia being the only exception, and these are often the groups that white nationalists see as ‘undesirables’.

Not to mention the previously mentioned Nazi Germany somehow getting nuclear weapons through its own program.
Point blank: have you read the Worldwar series, or any of the books?
 
You got me. Watched several videos on it, but never actually had the chance to read it.

I'll just shut up now.
Right- I don’t want to be funny, because I’ve only read the first and last book of Worldwar, but while there is an interesting thread here about how much of a white male American writer 90s Turtledove was/is, and issues within that of his prejudices and how they manifest, and how much of it is deliberate and how much is subconscious, especially when he does write non-white characters, when you make a charge about both writer and text that it as serious as white supremacy, it does feel disingenuous that you’ve only read and heard about the text second hand and made a very severe judgement, rather than having read the text and come to that conclusion or find that what you’ve read supports it.
 
Right- I don’t want to be funny, because I’ve only read the first and last book of Worldwar, but while there is an interesting thread here about how much of a white male American writer 90s Turtledove was/is, and issues within that of his prejudices and how they manifest, and how much of it is deliberate and how much is subconscious, especially when he does write non-white characters, when you make a charge about both writer and text that it as serious as white supremacy, it does feel disingenuous that you’ve only read and heard about the text second hand and made a very severe judgement, rather than having read the text and come to that conclusion or find that what you’ve read supports it.

Yeah, I'm currently dying internally after this. Sorry for wasting your time.
 
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