A Letter From Your New Blog Editor

[lerk]

During the War on Terror many people used to write stories about the end of Islam, America nuking Mecca and Medina etc. So this isn't something new. Nowadays one of the most popular TLs on AH.com is literally called "The Death of Russia" - which launched 7 months after the beginning of the Russo-Ukraine War. I think the thing is that people like to read about stuff related to current events and a part of me thinks that a similar thing is present in Russia.

And re: my forcefulness. When I learned how Russian AH authors ended up promoting current Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, it shook me. As I said, the stories from my mother's family are of surviving a similar invasion of similar evil; many in the community don't have that. The thought was: Am I doing the same thing? Is my community doing the same thing, entirely by accident? This, more than anything else, is what drives the latter half of the essay.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

And re: my forcefulness. When I learned how Russian AH authors ended up promoting current Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, it shook me. As I said, the stories from my mother's family are of surviving a similar invasion of similar evil; many in the community don't have that. The thought was: Am I doing the same thing? Is my community doing the same thing, entirely by accident? This, more than anything else, is what drives the latter half of the essay.

I'm not sure i can explain this very well, but I'll do my best.

I think there is a fundamental difference between creating a fictional dystopia based on past nightmares - nazi, communist, dixie, whatever - and actually wanting to live in it. Most of us are very aware that we craft our worlds as settings for exploration, be it something as simple as a list of dates and events or detailed scenarios or novels, not as ideas people should think are pretty good ones and should be put into practice as soon as possible. You can argue we don't think about the deeper implications if you wish, and you might be right, but most of us aren't here for the deeper implications.

To us, AH is a hobby. It isn't a community that can realistically change the world. Frankly, I have some trouble believing the spread of pro-Putin/Russia novels in Russia really did boost Russian nationalist feeling. although I'm not Russian and I will defer to anyone who does have more insight into Russian thinking. (Come to think of it, Russian nationalism/fascism hasn't been anything like as discredited as Nazism so it may have had a more subtle impact.) No one likes to be lectured, let alone be assaulted with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) accusations of unpleasant attitudes and any such discussion needs to be approached with all the care of a surgeon undertaking brain surgery.

YMMV, of course.

Chris

 

[David Flin]

To us, AH is a hobby. It isn't a community that can realistically change the world. Frankly, I have some trouble believing the spread of pro-Putin/Russia novels in Russia really did boost Russian nationalist feeling. although I'm not Russian and I will defer to anyone who does have more insight into Russian thinking. (Come to think of it, Russian nationalism/fascism hasn't been anything like as discredited as Nazism so it may have had a more subtle impact.) No one likes to be lectured, let alone be assaulted with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) accusations of unpleasant attitudes and any such discussion needs to be approached with all the care of a surgeon undertaking brain surgery.

For me (and others may well beg to differ), if one wants to have an impact, to achieve something positive (opinions may differ as to whether something is a positive or a negative), then the very first requirement is to get listened to.

If the AH fiction is boring and cures insomnia in the readers, then it doesn't matter a damn how worthy the message is, no-one will pay it any heed. Tastes vary, and all the rest of it, but -like it or not - JK Rowling is more influential as an opinion former than anyone on this forum because she has acquired an audience.

I contend that a dystopia is fundamentally more interesting as a setting for a story than a utopia, simply because a dystopia gives a clear challenge, something for the characters to strive to change. What do the characters do in a utopia where everything is perfect?

But, first and foremost, if the aim is to change the world, the very first thing that one needs to do is to get the world to listen.

@SpanishSpy , in his opening letter, referenced Building a Better Future, which I am proud of having had a part in producing (along with ruffling a few feathers in getting the damn thing produced). It's a record of what around a dozen people put together in an attempt to do some good. However, because the audience is so small, it had very modest impact. To date, it has raised (and I would need to check accounts to be certain of a precise number) around £800 for the appeal. Which, at the end of the day, is chicken feed. Hopefully it raised profile and gave those who both bought and have read something to think about, but I'm not going to pretend it's anything other than a drop in the ocean.

 

[Death's Companion]

I've struggled a lot to put my thoughts into words on this and all I can really settle on that this seems like the most emotionally fraught and least effective way of achieving something that probably doesn't need achieving. Like AH has a nazi problem and a bigot problem and a racism problem and sexism problem and numerous other problems and pruning that back is helpful, but this is also a pretty small and intimate community and like probably less than 1% of sales of AH work when you consider the giants that have sold millions and AH.Com as diminished as it is.

Feel that a crusade here is going to be of very marginal utility compared to just shouting down assholes as they pop up. Especially given how many articles are already on colonialism or the disenfranchised or picked up not addressing such when they fall short. I don't think shouting at the community to not endorse genocide is the main credential of the editor of articles particularly since on day one it ended up accidently going to far and drew fire for minimizing the holocaust, even if that wasn't your intent.

It just seems such an outspoken stance for a fairly minor position is going to rapidly degrade that position's functionality. You could have basically summed up your view in a paragraph that you come from a minority background and are more conscious than most of the double standard so you'd hope to encourage an increasing awareness of that viewpoint. It would be fairly boilerplate admittedly but again the role is just an editor of a hobby website's article section.

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

I would like more AH utopias, if only to see what people come up with. Really go wild with it too. 9/10 confedernazi AH books I've read are either nerd wargaming (which is cool for an audience other than me) or "what if historical atrocities, but worse? In the 2000s? In Ohio? crazy right" type and it's dreadfully boring.

 

[David Flin]

I would like more AH utopias, if only to see what people come up with.

There are two big difficulties in writing AH utopias that hold the reader's attention.

Firstly, by definition, a utopia can't be improved. There's no great challenge facing the central characters, nothing much for them to do save act as tour guides showing off the author's worldbuilding exercise. Getting an interesting story out of that requires a greater literary skill than the vast majority of people possess.

Secondly, what I regard as a utopia (proper tea, a back that doesn't hurt quite so much all the time, a tense and close Ashes series played in a spirit of sportsmanship, and so on) may very well sound like a dystopia to others. The author has the problem of conveying utopia without the reader suddenly going: "So what about this group of people? You know, the people doing all the sodding work keeping it going."

 

[Death's Companion]

There are two big difficulties in writing AH utopias that hold the reader's attention.

Firstly, by definition, a utopia can't be improved. There's no great challenge facing the central characters, nothing much for them to do save act as tour guides showing off the author's worldbuilding exercise. Getting an interesting story out of that requires a greater literary skill than the vast majority of people possess.

Secondly, what I regard as a utopia (proper tea, a back that doesn't hurt quite so much all the time, a tense and close Ashes series played in a spirit of sportsmanship, and so on) may very well sound like a dystopia to others. The author has the problem of conveying utopia without the reader suddenly going: "So what about this group of people? You know, the people doing all the sodding work keeping it going."

I've been told that every single story as at its heart some form of conflict. Even if its the protaganist against the evil forces of the teabag not yet being removed from its container. There needs to be something the protagonist is engaged against and doing things about.

You could write a utopian society but your protagonist better be trying to save their relationship with a apology dinner or be preparing for a race to mars on their hover scooter or what not. Some settings are powerful enough to carry a story with the characters being mostly passive but those are fairly rare and even then a lot of their power is offering potential for fascinating stories.

I think AH suffers because a lot of people focus on the setting and how it was made (but described in scattershot and simplistic fashion rather than a coherent narrative) because that's the point and neglects the work of having a story. A holdover from the dark times of AH Timelines.

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

There are two big difficulties in writing AH utopias that hold the reader's attention.

Firstly, by definition, a utopia can't be improved. There's no great challenge facing the central characters, nothing much for them to do save act as tour guides showing off the author's worldbuilding exercise. Getting an interesting story out of that requires a greater literary skill than the vast majority of people possess.

Secondly, what I regard as a utopia (proper tea, a back that doesn't hurt quite so much all the time, a tense and close Ashes series played in a spirit of sportsmanship, and so on) may very well sound like a dystopia to others. The author has the problem of conveying utopia without the reader suddenly going: "So what about this group of people? You know, the people doing all the sodding work keeping it going."

I just think like, for something simple, a society without poverty would still have issues, but at the end of the day it's still a society without poverty and the potential of that is exciting to me. And yeah, nonideological utopian fiction is a pretty silly idea, but that's the same as dystopias isn't it? As a reader you've got to look at it and agree that's wonderful/horrible to get into it in the first place. And some very smart guy can be like "well poverty is human nature etc etc", but saying it's not possible kinda defeats the purpose of imagining a better world in fiction. The world doesn't have to be horrible to sustain a narrative.

 

[David Flin]

but saying it's not possible kinda defeats the purpose of imagining a better world in fiction.

My preference, and I freely admit that others may well have different preferences, is that the characters are involved in creating that better world.

Indeed, it's something of a leitmotiv of stories of mine that the characters start off with a world that isn't satisfactory and try to make it a better place. I guess that's part of my fundamental philosophy of life: we're born and then we die. In between, we should try and make the place we live in a better place for our having been in it.

A better place given to the characters at the start presents them with few challenges; the challenge lies in creating that better place.

For me, at any rate.

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

My preference, and I freely admit that others may well have different preferences, is that the characters are involved in creating that better world.

Indeed, it's something of a leitmotiv of stories of mine that the characters start off with a world that isn't satisfactory and try to make it a better place. I guess that's part of my fundamental philosophy of life: we're born and then we die. In between, we should try and make the place we live in a better place for our having been in it.

A better place given to the characters at the start presents them with few challenges; the challenge lies in creating that better place.

For me, at any rate.

Difference between fantasy and AH to me is whether it's possible for characters alone to fundamentally change society for the better I guess.

 

[Hendryk]

Did not the wave of chest-thumping American technothrillers in the 1980s prepare Americans to cheer on the desolation of Iraq, or the pulverization of Yemen?

In this spirit it's rather disturbing that the trending TL at the other place is called The Death of Russia and essentially involves genocide.

 

[Meadow]

Hi everyone.

It goes without saying that this turn of events is not what anyone would have wanted for SLP, for Alex ( @SpanishSpy ) or for the alternate history community as a whole.

Alex and I spoke over video call yesterday and he repeated his willingness to resign from the post of blog editor. After the conversation we have had, and his apologies made in this thread, I have decided to not accept that resignation at this time.

My reasoning for this is twofold: firstly, I believe the seriousness with which Alex views this role and responsibility - which in his blog post translated into something overblown and several steps too far, rhetorically speaking - is at its heart a good thing and could be valuable for this community. I was candid with Alex that I thought his initial blog post was overlong and risked seeming arrogant or pompous - he accepted this. Provided Alex understands that the responsibilities of this role far outweigh the status - which I believe he does - I think there is a way for this aforementioned seriousness to serve the community both here and around the AH-reading internet very well.

Secondly and more importantly, I do not believe that Alex is someone who, in the cold light of day, believes in what can best be summarised as Holocaust minimisation. After reading the discussion here, including his apologies, and also discussing it with him further, I believe what happened was the result of being tied up in one's own logic and rhetoric and ending up painted into a corner, unable to see the wood for the trees.

I realise that that last sentence is a string of clichés, so I will cite an extract of something Alex sent to me after we spoke, the entirety of which served to further convince me that his real position - which was catastrophically phrased in this thread to the point of offense - is in fact a position held by numerous historians and while certainly open to debate and disagreement, is neither a fringe nor extremist/fascistic view.

The other thing came from my reading of books on comparative genocide - there is very much a new school of thought that argues that certain genocidal practices and modes of thinking that were pioneered in European colonies were later used by the Nazis, who combined them with the longstanding hatred of the Jewish people to create something truly, unprecedentedly monstrous in its industrialization. I'm in particular influenced by Blood and Soil: a World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan, who was until very recently the head of the genocide studies department at Yale. He discusses the whole world, but he traces a line of genocidal logic in Western civilization from the Romans to the colonization of the Americas and Australia, the conquests of Ireland and Algeria (among other examples), and culminating in the Holocaust, and he demonstrates how many factors were similar, such as an effective doctrine of terra nullius and the idea that the enemies in question were 'landless' (see the common antisemitic slur of 'rootless cosmopolitan'), the idea of the perpetrator people needing more land, and a similar use of racism. I was also influenced by the work of Sven Lindqvist, who argued that the Nazis fought the Western Front as a 'civilized' (if any war can be called that) great power war while fighting the Eastern Front as a colonial war. I do not mean to say that Nazism wasn't horrible, as it obviously was, nor that it was unique in terms of magnitude and in terms of method, as it was, but likewise I feel that these continuities should not be ignored.

I do not necessarily agree or disagree with that view - frankly my serious academic study of History ended with my BA, and I do not seek to sit in judgment of scholars. But it does appear to me that Alex's position was and is one born from study and driven by a great and justifiable fear of the re-emerging far right in our societies. That, to me, does not disqualify him from having the position of blog editor.

But I am not the only opinion which matters here. Far from it, in fact. Alex was very open with me about his fear that he has irrevocably lost the trust of the forum community and possibly beyond. I can absolutely see why he would have this fear, and I do agree that it would damage the SLP blog and brand if I rode roughshod over such a situation were it to exist. Diagnosing where we are as a community is the only way to figure out a way forward.

So, in conversation with Alex, I have made a several-step plan to come through this situation. No specific end goal is planned for, beyond a desire to have a vibrant community reading an array of well-published and curated content on the site.

The first step is that Alex is going to take a break from the site and the forum, and he and I will speak again in January to see where we both are regarding his remaining in-post. Alex will not post during this time but will use the PM function should he wish to.

As a next step, I am locking this thread as the conversation has run its course, and as Alex will only be using PMs for the time being, he will not be participating in it further.

The final step is that the blog itself will simply take a break for a while. The timing is serendipitous, as most sections of the English-speaking Internet have some degree of festive slowdown during this time of year.

Sea Lion Press is a business, but it is also a community. I may have the right to make all these decisions alone, but I do not wish to. At Alex's request, I'm reaching out to all SLP staff and moderators to check in on how they feel about him remaining in the role of blog editor.

With this thread locked, I am also asking anyone who has something further to say about Alex's suitability as blog editor to PM me in the knowledge that we can have a totally confidential conversation about any issues you wish to raise.

Thank you for reading this post.

 

[Meadow]

Thank you to those who PM'd me and engaged in discussion on this issue. After considering it over the New Year break, and further discussion with Alex, we've come to the conclusion that Alex aka @SpanishSpy will not proceed as blog editor for SLP. I'm grateful for his willingness to take on the role in the first place, but it's become clear that his numerous skills and interests - many of which make him an excellent and welcome contributor to both the forum and the blog - make him not quite suitable for the editorial role.

I'll be working out a way forward for the blog in the near future. Thank you again for your patience.