- Location
- New Amsterdam
It's almost undeniable that For All Time is one of the most influential pieces of alternate history ever to be posted online. It pioneered the modern dystopia timeline, almost everyone with a real interest in online alternate history has read it at least once, and most can recall specific aspects of the timeline well enough to discuss and compare them with other AH tropes.
And discuss it we do: at least once every week or two, someone brings up For All Time in some context on AH.com. It's been mentioned on the SLP forums many times in their relatively brief history, and many of the posters here have voiced detailed opinions on the timeline. Someone has already posted a thread here for Gordon Banks, another classic work of online AH, so I figured it'd be good idea to post a thread where SLP users can voice the aforementioned opinions in conversation with each other.
I'll start us out by reproducing some messages that have been posted on SLP about For All Time:
I think that the inventiveness and originality of the work is amplified by the fact that it was written way back in online AH's early days, before most of the AH tropes we know today became entrenched. I didn't even notice a lot of the subtle but very interesting complexities of the work, like the way it almost completely flips postwar diplomacy on its head, until the third or fourth time I read it through. I think it's cool how the author was able to hide them so subtly—after all, in a world where there is no clear, hard postwar dichotomy between East and West, it's not like people would go around mentioning that because they wouldn't think to do so.
I think that makes it ironic that For All Time is one of the few pieces of AH fiction I know of in which Goldwater becomes President. I guess because he lost so terribly, it's seen as such a stretch that not many people have bothered. (How long till Yes comes out with "Goldwatering", I wonder?)
I actually had never considered how Goldwater's presidency being an afterthought is probably because of how unremarkable his views would have been in an FaT world. Every time I think about For All Time, I discover (or someone else discovers for me!) a new little tidbit that make the world all the more complex and adds a new angle from which to view the story.
My question is this: would you guys recommend For All Time as a first read to someone who's interested in history but hasn't yet gotten into alternate history? It was basically my first big AH read, and it spurred me to write AH myself, but to other people its grimness might be off-putting. What do you guys think?
And discuss it we do: at least once every week or two, someone brings up For All Time in some context on AH.com. It's been mentioned on the SLP forums many times in their relatively brief history, and many of the posters here have voiced detailed opinions on the timeline. Someone has already posted a thread here for Gordon Banks, another classic work of online AH, so I figured it'd be good idea to post a thread where SLP users can voice the aforementioned opinions in conversation with each other.
I'll start us out by reproducing some messages that have been posted on SLP about For All Time:
I wouldn't call it the worst on its own, but I've considered "For All Time" to be one of the most negatively influential TLs in terms of inspiring pointless mega-dystopias.
That's exactly my feeling. Everything bad in contemporary AH is a sloppy attempt at FaTing. For All Time is interesting because it addresses just how much had to be done to create the orderly and prosperous postwar world, but most people miss the theme in favor of the atrocity porn. Things like the mass cannibalism and nuclear weapons being used constantly aren't really the highlight, they're the payoff for a whole series of plausibly unpleasant events.
I don't really see how For All Time can be considered complicit in AH's problem with grimdark, at least not any more than Eric Blair can be blamed for dreadful reality TV shows. A TL writer whose stated aim was to make everything go as badly as possible would definitely raise more suspicion today than it would back in the days of Usenet but it's a genuinely inventive and original work at the same time, especially for one that started out as a TL about the Second World War.
No, I agree. It was a great idea and there's some real gems in there. It's laziness and failure to think ideas through that are to blame for its crappy derivatives.
I think that the inventiveness and originality of the work is amplified by the fact that it was written way back in online AH's early days, before most of the AH tropes we know today became entrenched. I didn't even notice a lot of the subtle but very interesting complexities of the work, like the way it almost completely flips postwar diplomacy on its head, until the third or fourth time I read it through. I think it's cool how the author was able to hide them so subtly—after all, in a world where there is no clear, hard postwar dichotomy between East and West, it's not like people would go around mentioning that because they wouldn't think to do so.
Even in For All Time [Barry Goldwater's] presidency was kind of an afterthought. (In that case that was probably the point, though, to show how figures like Goldwater and their cavalier thoughts on Atom Bomb Usage became mainstream in that world)
I think that makes it ironic that For All Time is one of the few pieces of AH fiction I know of in which Goldwater becomes President. I guess because he lost so terribly, it's seen as such a stretch that not many people have bothered. (How long till Yes comes out with "Goldwatering", I wonder?)
I actually had never considered how Goldwater's presidency being an afterthought is probably because of how unremarkable his views would have been in an FaT world. Every time I think about For All Time, I discover (or someone else discovers for me!) a new little tidbit that make the world all the more complex and adds a new angle from which to view the story.
My question is this: would you guys recommend For All Time as a first read to someone who's interested in history but hasn't yet gotten into alternate history? It was basically my first big AH read, and it spurred me to write AH myself, but to other people its grimness might be off-putting. What do you guys think?