Least favorite alt-history story?

[Creekmench]

One of the major PoV characters is a human woman who was kidnapped by the race as a baby and has subsequently been brought up as an experiment to see if humans could become loyal subjects. Her plot largely revolves around her getting urges that are obviously alien to her handlers and as such they offer her various humans which she turns down in favour of Sam Yeager's son, who agrees to go along with it only for the Race-German war to break out just before they get down to it, which leads to them both joking about getting it over with before they get blown up by Nazis. As if this wasn't already the AH version of Barbarella. There are a lot of "self-help" sessions as well that are just incredibly unsettling to read.

What's with Turtledove and sex scenes is he trying to broaden his base or something?

 

[The Red]

What's with Turtledove and sex scenes is he trying to broaden his base or something?

I remember seeing a satirical cartoon a while back that implied the publishers were pressuring him into putting lots of sex scenes in but I can’t imagine it going on to that extent. I think he just likes writing them.

 

[Thande]

I still remember that 'Turtledove's notebook' parody off some humour site which, though it wasn't actually that accurate as far as going for most of its tropes, did include the sublime line "Genghis Khan has sex with a spider on a blimp?"

 

[OwenM]

I mean, the only way I can keep my eyes from glazing over reading sex scenes is by trying to work out the physical logistics of what's going on, so his are generally much better than usual at keeping my attention, it's just I don't particularly want them to have it.

 

[Resurgam]

It was by Zack Parsons on something awful

Is it wrong I want to read these stories out of the sheer craptastic factor?

 

[Coiler]

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.

 

[The Red]

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.

 

[joea64]

Trust me when I say that the author, as the years went by, got kinda weird with regard to his politics. As in, he was always right-wing, but he went kinda from sensible albeit someone I disagreed with to full on Obama Derangement Syndrome.

And his writing suffered for it, I think.

Coming in late, but as someone who used to be quite active on the author's forums a decade to 15 years or more ago, I can confirm. Back in the early 2000's, the overarching political tone was conservative/right-wing, but sensible, and bear in mind that in those days I broadly agreed with them. My views haven't really changed that much, in fact; it's just that, over the past decade, I've gotten pretty thoroughly turned off by the nutball-Tea Party-Trumpist fringe that's taken over; I think it started when I voted for Obama in 2008 and got deeply irked by the Obama Derangement Syndrome you mentioned*. Anyway!!!

I think SD.net never has really recovered from the Salvation War fiasco. When it all came crashing down (the author reneged on putting up the third book because he claimed he'd been hacked by someone in Ukraine who stole the first two books and put them up in another online archive before he could officially publish them, and it snowballed from there), the resulting firestorm pretty much consumed the site and a lot of people quit or were shown the door. The mods ended up having to ban all discussion of the stories or the author. In fact, IIRC, the site's owner/admin, the aforementioned militant-atheist engineer, went more or less AWOL for quite a long time, leaving the running of the site up to the rest of the mod team.

*There were some other dodgy things going on too, like the fact that one of the most prominent posters on the author's forums, who actually was promoted to that site's mod team at one point, who claimed to be a (female) general in the Thai Army, is now more or less acknowledged to have been a persona (or sockpuppet, if you want to put it that way) of the author. I think it's a measure of how convincing the deception was that almost nobody, for literally years, questioned "her" posting style, which was done in a bad, in fact stereotypical, dialect, which in turn ignores the fact that almost no well-educated person who has English as a secondary language writes English in a dialect unless they're writing a story with a character who speaks English in a dialect.

 

[joea64]

I posted on othertimelines.com back when it had a forum and all of its follow up sites. I've got tons.

(...)

There was another guy who was a regular author who churned out constant pure shit, be it his Lee of the Union TL were RE Lee takes command of the US Army and wins the Civil War in a matter of weeks, seems nice right? Eventually it goes on to have the US turn into a sort of good guy draka with a super tech advantage that no one else catches up to, meaning that the US when pearl harbor is attacked basically fights off the Zeroes with Supersonic jets with guided missles.

Another TL by the same guy, I can't even remember the name for but I can remember the nickname we gave it, K for Kendetta, where in J Edgar Hoover is elected president in 1932, Allies America with the Nazis and establishes a dictatorship that lasts decades. Involves JFK being torture by experiments that turn him into a super solider who becomes a super freedom fighting terrorist who blows shit up a lot. His brothers also do freedom fighting stuff like inventing space travel so they can use satellites to interrupt Fascist TV broadcasts and cause a Fascist coup by showing America photos of hoover in drag, until Ted Kennedy gets to kill Nixon and then commits suicide after giving an Aaron Sorkin speech. The TL involves America committing genocide against Jews and Blacks but also involves Colin Powell being a collaborationist Army officer and Muhammad Ali being protected by Jews in Florida and becoming the First Jewish American president. Also has the author as a world renowned historian who is friends with other historians like... Hugh Jackman.

I remember that particular fellow. He called himself "Uncle Mike"; the "Lee of the Union" timeline only ever appeared in its entirety on another AH forum (othertimelines? I don't remember at this remove in time), but was something...special. He had bees in his bonnet about conservative Republicans and spent a lot of time jiggering the events of that and other TL's he wrote so that they'd always do more or less the same things, end up coming a cropper and humiliated by liberal Democrats. He was also obsessed with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Oh yes, and he had no capacity for accepting criticism; he'd always respond with variants of "if you don't like it, write your own damn TL!". I wonder what happened to him; he seems to have dropped off the radar completely after he posted the first couple of chapters of "Lee of the Union" at AH.com and it went over there like the proverbial lead balloon.

 

[Matt]

The top worst ones had to be the Federation Party series (Only the first volume remains online, sadly) where a political movements that's main goal is to make Star Trek real won elections across Europe but also elected a Sci-fi writer Neo-Con President of the US in 2008. That writer being the author after he made himself more successful, the actual PoD being that his parents were more supportive of his hobby. Included him writing in the death of a Star Trek Enterprise actresses family so she'd fall in love with him, Tom Clancy as the National Security Advisor, Hillary Clinton ruining her chances by dropping the N word and in the sequel WWIII between the US and North Korea as the President is trapped behind the lines and has to fight his way out. Also democrats refusing to support the war even after the Norks take down the internet with pop up adds and nuke South Korea, Japan, Guam, and several US states.

Lucky for you, I’m almost finished with my reconstruction of Federation Party II: A Resumption of War. Yes, that was the super serial fucking title of it.

 

[Japhy]

Lucky for you, I’m almost finished with my reconstruction of Federation Party II: A Resumption of War. Yes, that was the super serial fucking title of it.

My hero. I'd actually forgotten the subtitle.

 

[Matt]

My hero. I'd actually forgotten the subtitle.

Not sure how heroic I’ll be considered ‘round these parts after I post it here.

 

[The Red]

and a TL that he cross posted at the Zoo about Scotland becoming a world spanning super power which made very, very little sense.

Nothing to do with A Scotsman in Egypt I hope?

 

[Japhy]

Nothing to do with A Scotsman in Egypt I hope?

No, more like Scotland was somehow whiter and thus better.

 

[Matt]

My hero. I'd actually forgotten the subtitle.

Who could forget this:

MATT LAUER: After the attempt on your life, you started what some are calling a revolution in education. By what some are calling magic, you managed to pass the most sweeping changes in public education in this country's history.




MURPHY MacCANN: I certainly wouldn't call it magic. I'm convinced that, in order to survive as a nation, we need better education. Y'know, while I was in the hospital here in Austin, one of my aides brought me a letter from a woman. She's not what many would call a woman of high moral standing, if you know what I mean. She has three kids, all by different men; she's had a history of drug and alcohol abuse and she's been living on welfare for most of her life. Now, it seems that her fourteen year-old daughter is pregnant.

Matt, she wrote to me to let me know that, back in 2006, she voted for the first time, and the first vote she ever cast was for me. She said she voted for me because I stood up for what I thought was right, and damn the consequences. She knows it's too late for her to change, but she asked me to do what I could so that her granddaughter could grow up in what she called "a Star Trek world " That letter made me realize that the political BS was unimportant. I had a job to do for not only the folks who voted for me, but for all the people of Texas. So I looked around to see how I could best make the world better for that woman's granddaughter
-

 

[Japhy]

Considering that the guy McCann is based off is functionally illiterate I'm actually proud of those posts

 

[lerk]

Late to the whole "For All Time" conversation but I've always felt that someone should make a reverse For All Time - a TL where everything goes as good as possible.

 

[Redshank Galloglass]

NDCR got worse and worse, so thats probably my least favorite alt-history story.

 

[Japhy]

NDCR got worse and worse, so thats probably my least favorite alt-history story.

I do kind of feel bad that the kid who wrote it eventually got chased off the site. But that running battle in that thread would never have risen up to be what it was if he had just tried to be open to critics and been trying to improve his craft rather then create his personal global political fantasy.

There were always going to be certain people who aren't capable of adult conversations about writing and couldn't just recognize that as bad as it was he was a teenager, but it would have helped. Still would have been pretty gross but it could have been more in the room of acceptable AH.

 

[Matt]

While re-reading the 1st Federation Party timeline, I found this example of John Harris not fucking getting what Star Trek was about(and wondering if he was a Tea Partier who went back in time here):

JOHN HARRIS: Obviously, they don’t know anything more about me. I think Europeans have become… over-sensitized to conservatism. They were traumatized by the Nazi era. Their opposition to the use of military force is a symptom of that trauma. I also think they've overcompensated for that era with socialism. In many cases, it works for them. Sweden has one of the best social security systems in the world, but they also have the highest taxes in the world. Now that’s great for someone with that mindset, but Americans don’t have that mindset. That’s why Senator Clinton’s ideas on socialized medicine were so derided, back in the ‘90’s. People keep forgetting that America is not Europe. We don’t think the same way.

STEVE RIFFLE: Well-put. I have to agree. Socialism is not the American way, yet Europeans can’t seem to wrap their brains around that. Now, the war in Iraq is one place where I don’t agree with John, and I’ll start bringing the troops home if I’m elected, but I do agree with both John and President Bush that we do not and will never need permission from anyone, not Europe and not the UN, to send our troops anywhere in the world. Should any nation attack us, you can be damn sure that we’ll pound their military into the ground and change their regime. Sure, in Star Trek, Starfleet officers were diplomats and explorers more than soldiers, but one thing you forget is that they also knew how to fight and were not shy about doing so. Teddy Roosevelt was right when he said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”