Discuss Thande's new article here
Thanks, that's part of what I was going for with this.That's amazing (and unnerving to know how 'unlikely' it all working out is!)
Not heard that one before - the landlord story is told often enough I could probably get away with calling it something stronger than an apocryphal legend, but I wanted to be cautious about it.I'd always heard the name came from a pizzeria; owing a guy named Mario is a new one to me.
Very good. As I implied in the article, there's actually loads of consequences you could draw from this one (plenty of other stuff requires Edgar Wallace, for instance) but I just focused on once.Oh wait...
Lew wrote Ben Hur. Say he dies...
Howard Fast still writes Spartacus in the 1950s.
Ben Hur does not come out in 1959.
Universal does not try to make their own prestige picture in Spartacus in 1960.
Kirk Douglas does not have a script he takes issue with leading him to Dalton Trumbo do to massive rewrites.
Stanley Kubrick and Douglas in turn do not push for Trumbo to get a film credit.
The American Legion in turn does not protest the film in 1960 cause a Blacklisted man is credited on screen.
President JFK does not cross the American Legion line to see the film in effect ending the Blacklist of Hollywood.
Yes, I said that in the article: he was given a cap, moustache and overalls because that was what they could show with the arcade machine's limited capabilities and blocky graphics.Also Mario Segale had no mustache. Mario has a mustache due to a design need to make the character more easy to see on the arcade machine. Namely to break up the head from the body.
I did think of doing it that way, but this felt a bit more 'AH POD-y'.Wallace need not even have to die. One of the essays in What Ifs? of American History posited that if Wallace had received clearer written orders and arrived at the Battle to reinforce Grant earlier his career might not have been so mired in controversy that he resigned from the Army in 1865. His death ensures he would never write Ben-Hur, but continued service in the Army might still butterfly it.
I did think of doing it that way, but this felt a bit more 'AH POD-y'.
Thanks for that, as I may revisit further consequences of the same POD in the future (as I mentioned, there's also a lot of other things that rely on Edgar Wallace).I'm fond of him not going to New Mexico because that also means a very different end for Billy the Kid and all the butterflies that might arise from that in popular culture.
I don't think we could go so far to say William H. Bonney dying of old age in obscurity will completely change the Western, but possibly as a genre the stock character of the outlaw might become very different.
In addition to Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros., did Lew Wallace give us Red Dead Redemption?
Thank you Geordie. I actually think it's more interesting in the shorter works set closer to the present day, because we come psychologically prepared that a work with an earlier POD is going to be quite different, but not that something we take for granted in our everyday life could so easily have been different (and quite possibly with plenty of other things being superficially the same so it sticks out). That's the kernel of where AH speculation begins, of course, the Sliders Blue Bridge scenario where everything is the same as OTL except they're downloading progs to their X-Slates.Fascinating read. And a very good illustration of one of the things that you, @Thande are very good at in your ah writing.
Tracing the consequences of certain actions (as you say, not the butterfly effect; more a ripple effect) can really elevate a TL, and - whether in footnotes or the main body of the text - it's something I really enjoy in LTTW, and even your shorter works like The Curse of Maggie.