Least favorite alt-history story?

[Von Callay]

The Valley-Westside War: Nuclear war occurs in the 1960s, leading to a post-apocalyptic world where Los Angeles is broken into several different nations.

This is the one that has a cheeky reference in it to one of the cross-time kids trying to depressurize by playing a computer game in their little hideout, but it's not very relaxing because the aliens invading during WW2 keep kicking his ass.

 

[The Red]

I remember the first Turtledove story I read. It was called The Gladiator and was part of his Crosstime Traffic series. The concept was a world where Communism had won the Cold War and the whole world was Communist. That was the first AH story that I'd read I'd previously read those What If? books, but they're not really stories).

I liked this one. You don’t often get Soviet victory scenarios for some reason and when you do they tend to be comically dystopian so it was interesting to see Turtledove instead have one PoV character who's opposed to the system and one who supports it to provide a contrast to what otherwise might be just a soapbox for Turtledove's own anti-communist views. Granted it does get a bit preachy at times in that regard and it would have been good to see a bit more of how the world actually works beyond Italy being Honecker's East Germany and San Marino being Gorbachev's Soviet Union.

That said my main gripe is that Turtledove seems to forget he's writing a work set in 2097 at times, he makes the argument that the Soviet sphere is much less advanced than the traveller's own world (presumably ours set in the future) but it gets a bit ridiculous on occasion, particularly with things like the military still using AK-47s or the animation in The Incredibles amazing both of the PoV characters with the implication that a century has passed since the Soviets won the Cold War and their computer graphics haven't reached the level of 2004 yet. I'm pretty sure that even Brezhnev would balk at that level of stagnation!

 

[TR1996]

Of course Elvis won't go into politics. Being the King is better than being the President.

But being Emperor is better than being King, so maybe he's going after the Presidency to pull some Napoleon III-type gambit?

 

[Jared]

Everyone knows that an Ace beats a King.

Scenario incoming where Elvis becomes a fighter pilot, becomes an ace in the Vietnam War, and ends up in the White House.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Scenario incoming where Elvis becomes a fighter pilot, becomes an ace in the Vietnam War, and ends up in the White House.

An American Trilogy

 

[Matt]

There were no good timelines at othertimelines. @Matt and I would know, we were there.

Though the community did have Statichaos in it so you know, eventually it produced AWOLAWOT.

Many of us writing then were young, naive and a bit stupid with our assumptions when writing alt-history there. I do miss some of the stuff there though, just not the schlock I wrote at times.

 

[Coiler]

Martin Archer's War Breaks Out is in the sort of "so bad it's good" territory. It helps that while a lot of the worst Fuldapocalyptic/"boom boom goes the tank" stories get bogged down in minutia and simply become dull, this just blissfully and crazily charges forward. (It also helps that it has no baggage worse than military thriller cliches)

It's the 1980s and the Fuldapocalypse has begun, and everyone's mostly using M60s and T-62s, but everyone is also using Eurofighter Typhoons (which didn't even fly until after the USSR collapsed IOTL), and somehow the Iraq and Afghanistan wars happened (don't ask me why or how) and Belgium got F-15 Eagles. And the main character is a Mary Sue general who goes from one star to commanding everything on the president's personal recommendation. And the USMC is somehow the backbone of the NATO defense, and they're getting, among other things, tanks airlifted from Israel.

Finally yes, there is an invasion of Iceland.

 

[OwenM]

Everyone knows that an Ace beats a King.

#DavidJay2020

 

[Japhy]

I do remember him joining a (not at all AH or writing) site that people from an AH.com spinoff were fond of mocking, yes. Those were sort of dark days for me and my Internet presence.

Who would have guessed that incels would actually wind up being a murderous thing?

 

[Jared]

Worthy of a wikibox TL.

I might even do that with a variety of wikiboxes which completely contradict each other.

 

[Bolt451]

Reading into Cold War Aircraft (so I know what a TL on AH.com is talking about) and I'm suddenly reminded of a short TL on othertimelines (I think) where the Avro Arrow isn't cancelled. Canada sells Arrows to the US in exchange for several Saturn V rockets and landed on the moon!

It wasn't bad, it wasn't really anything. It was just such a weird leap!

 

[Bolt451]

There were no good timelines at othertimelines. @Matt and I would know, we were there.

Though the community did have Statichaos in it so you know, eventually it produced AWOLAWOT.

Many of us writing then were young, naive and a bit stupid with our assumptions when writing alt-history there. I do miss some of the stuff there though, just not the schlock I wrote at times.

It was how I was introduced to AH as a concept I think. Beyond my brother writing an expanded universe for Fatherland when I was little.

Surprised my brother never joined AH.com or here! He's an avid reader of SLP books.

 

[Archibald]

Reading into Cold War Aircraft (so I know what a TL on AH.com is talking about) and I'm suddenly reminded of a short TL on othertimelines (I think) where the Avro Arrow isn't cancelled. Canada sells Arrows to the US in exchange for several Saturn V rockets and landed on the moon!

It wasn't bad, it wasn't really anything. It was just such a weird leap!

Interesting. OTL in 1960 a pack of 25 bright Canadian engineers, orphans from the cancelled Arrow, made their way into the United States and build... the Gemini capsule. I suppose that TL author was aware of that connection...

 

[Japhy]

Interesting. OTL in 1960 a pack of 25 bright Canadian engineers, orphans from the cancelled Arrow, made their way into the United States and build... the Gemini capsule. I suppose that TL author was aware of that connection...

Its still not a good AH

 

[napoleon IV]

World War II in May 1946 is pretty bad. The story's center is a fictional man named Sergo Peshkov, who is a Mary Sue. He's a genius with a vast amount of knowledge about everything, and easily becomes Joseph Stalin's top advisor. He helps severely damage the Manhattan Project, and as a result the Soviets do unrealistically well in WWIII. Also it's pretty clear that the author didn't do much research (for example he originally called the protagonist Sergo Peshkova, even though anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge about Russian would know that Peshkova is a female name).

 

[Coiler]

World War II in May 1946 is pretty bad. The story's center is a fictional man named Sergo Peshkov, who is a Mary Sue. He's a genius with a vast amount of knowledge about everything, and easily becomes Joseph Stalin's top advisor. He helps severely damage the Manhattan Project, and as a result the Soviets do unrealistically well in WWIII.

Ah yes, that. Just to start...

• The Soviet's biggest legitimate strengths (their ground forces) are actually downplayed, while their air/sea wunderwaffe (no really, a lot of them are originally LUFT46 Wunderwaffen that Marya Susanova somehow got into the Red Army in a year) are hyped up.
• Pigeon guided SAMs.
• One of the biggest examples of competence varying according to plot needs I've seen (and given that this is a connoisseur of bad fiction speaking...)

 

[Coiler]

Let me give a complaint about one trend that's been catching my eye since I've starting researching for a possible AH story concerning one: Second Korean Wars. I've noticed this pattern concerning them across multiple TLs where they seem to be used not as legitimate opportunities but just as conduits for "shocking swerves". Besides issues in execution and going straight to total war over more realistic unconventional/limited steps (which I can understand as a wargamer but still rightfully critique in terms of plausibility), there's the issue of:

• The north never attacking from a position of strength when the Americans/southerners are comparably weaker. Nope, it almost always happens to be a never-in-doubt situation where they're invading an already-on-alert south after the Soviet collapse (the POD is the Americans hitting the north's nuclear facilities, so they would definitely be on guard, taking away from any surprise).
• The Americans tend to use nuclear weapons outright even when they clearly don't have to.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Do not get me started on those Dirty Dozen/A-Team type monstrosities that excise every trace of common sense, competent writing, and replace it with the most dreadful unpleasant cliches imaginable to mortals.

 

[Coiler]

STORM FORCE

There's an unironic "Eagle Force" series that's basically Pulp Thriller Bingo, down to the exact type of guns used (Ooh look, giant pistols! Giant grenade launchers! H&K G11s because they're the Next Big Thing!" It was weirdly impressive.

And while I actually like such books, I'm not going to pretend they're anything they're not.

 

[The Red]

Let me give a complaint about one trend that's been catching my eye since I've starting researching for a possible AH story concerning one: Second Korean Wars. I've noticed this pattern concerning them across multiple TLs where they seem to be used not as legitimate opportunities but just as conduits for "shocking swerves". Besides issues in execution and going straight to total war over more realistic unconventional/limited steps (which I can understand as a wargamer but still rightfully critique in terms of plausibility), there's the issue of:

• The north never attacking from a position of strength when the Americans/southerners are comparably weaker. Nope, it almost always happens to be a never-in-doubt situation where they're invading an already-on-alert south after the Soviet collapse (the POD is the Americans hitting the north's nuclear facilities, so they would definitely be on guard, taking away from any surprise).
• The Americans tend to use nuclear weapons outright even when they clearly don't have to.

What would be the best time to invade? The way I see it there isn’t really a time between 1953 and 1991 where the DPRK wouldn’t immediately get thrown under the bus by the Soviets and/or the Chinese, or conversely an escalation into Fuldapocalypse. Having to contend with autarky afterwards gives more freedom of action but as you say, it only makes the situation less feasible.

I was going to wager that 1975 might have been the best time; the DPRK still enjoyed plurality (if not supremacy) with the RoK, the Americans were psychologically winded and had just been proven to leave an Asian ally to rot in circumstances ripe for analogy, etc but even then I can’t see Brezhnev and Suslov going for it. The Soviets have just had to help extinguish a similar proxy war in the Middle East and I can’t see them being inclined to support a far more direct venture.

The DPRK was pretty hardwired into COMECON up until the eighties and it’s at that point the cards begin to be stacked against them, so if it’s going to happen earlier I can’t help but feel there needs to be a major PoD earlier (successful Tet?) unless the argument is that Kim Il Sung slips out of lucidity at a far earlier date.