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Alternate History: D,E,F

Surely one aspect of a Dystopia is that it enables the author to generate a challenge for the characters, namely how to improve things.

In a Utopia, the characters can justifiably sit back, enjoy things, and do nothing very much. In a Dystopia, they have the choice of getting on as best they can, or trying to do something about it. Both options can lead to interesting stories.

In Six East End Boys, for example, I start with a dystopic vision, and develop what the central characters do about it.
 
You've hit the nail on the head re own voices being used as an excuse or demand for not writing outside one's demographic: deliberately less variety from some writers, a big problem if a genre is heavily skewed towards a demographic. Like, Axis of Andes couldn't exist, both due to which continent it's on and because
the third act is that we've actually been reading the origin of a Native revolution, which means seeing their POV. So you just don't get an English-language story about a Native revolution in South America.
Who benefits from that? The point was to boost writing by underrepresented writers, not give straight white men a way to go "I only write about straight white men because I'm progressive"
 
Most AH writers, in the English language at least, are WEIRD. They are from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic countries. This is true of the average internet user (of English language sites) but isn't true of the average person in the world.


As such SLP has had writers from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland and France. But none living in China or Nigeria or Argentina.
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Indeed, and I think it's an issue we should address more proactively. Our current demographic makeup tends to be self-perpetuating.
 
Good choices for the three letters.

I do agree with the view that from a storytelling perspective utopias are boring because where's the conflict/challenge... and if there is one then is it really a utopia... and what's a utopia that looks like a utopia but isn't really a utopia... and so on.

Good call on Eurocentrism calling for authors to not ignore, educate themselves and write but amplify actual own voices as much as possible.

And on the final one, the end point of almost all science fiction set in the future is future history/alternate history, I believe someone wrote a small monograph series once on this phenomena in the Before Times.
 
I mean there's basically two reasons to write a story set in a Utopia.

'Person from a non-Utopian society gets to see the shiny Utopia and how wonderful it is'

'Person who doesn't like the Utopia because they are wrong is trying to destroy it and it must be saved.'

Naturally both can be a bit flat in terms of plots which is why most sci-fi apparently featuring a Utopian society ends up introducing some sort of flaw or element that demonstrates that it require improving.
 
Nazi victory to me is to picture a Home Owners Association as the government in America. We play down the horror and control and play up "see how neat, tidy, clean, and PERFECT everything is?" How tall is the Grass in Germany? was from the POV of an elite. A man with authority, money, and more. Yet he is a broken thing... and he happens to live in a Nazi occupied America.

My next was CSA ALL THE WAY and it is about the CSA winning but it also is my take on the oddity of the "perfect dictator" trope AH suffers from. To me any time we get a dictator it is a hyper competent one. Yet the CSA CANNOT be a major world power, pop is too low, resources scare, and it is built on ensuring half the population is in staggering poverty and fear. One big thing was it being rooted in how much I hate "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" notions that US Southern characters tend to get. Not skill or ability but just "If I try hard it will succeed!" Yet in a CSA dominated world it would be a place where landowners and their decedents always get the benefit of things.
 
there has been some excellent AH written about non European societies, from writers like Jonathan Edelstein and Jared Kavanagh, but within both SLP and larger English speaking AH spaces these are exceptions, not the rule
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Never having read AH by a Nigerian , I really enjoyed Male Rising, and it works because of the massive amount of research behind it. Free and Happy Land works for the same reason.

Obviously everyone who writes should write what they want to, and I'm not going to complain about another UK election night special, for example, as I enjoy, but frankly the research effort involved in writing an excellent 1990s Mongolian AH is hardly less than a 1060s English AH?

There are subtleties and sensitivities you don't get if you're not from that culture, but if you're alive to that fact, and you're prepared to put the research time in that helps. So do Beta readers, which is sort of what this site is.
 
Fenwick said:
Nazi victory to me is to picture a Home Owners Association as the government in America. We play down the horror and control and play up "see how neat, tidy, clean, and PERFECT everything is?" How tall is the Grass in Germany? was from the POV of an elite. A man with authority, money, and more. Yet he is a broken thing... and he happens to live in a Nazi occupied America.
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I wonder how many people who watch The Man in the High Castle understand that if you just remove the swastikas from that poster you have OTL's 1950s suburban America.

The-Man-in-the-High-Castle-propaganda-poster.jpg
 
Hendryk said:
I wonder how many people who watch The Man in the High Castle understand that if you just remove the swastikas from that poster you have OTL's 1950s suburban America.

The-Man-in-the-High-Castle-propaganda-poster.jpg
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Indeed, it makes it decent satire but - IMO - not very interesting AH. Like, the Nazis didn’t run Germany like contemporary American suburbia. There’d have been more differences than what we see in the show.

I haven’t actually finished season 3, but I plan to. So far the best AH scene was the “church” sequence that turns out to be a riff on Positive Christianity and what the Nazis had in mind long term - really very well executed. The show could definitely have done with a lot more of that.
 
Meadow said:
Like, the Nazis didn’t run Germany like contemporary American suburbia.
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I was gonna say, I don't remember Hitler having a 95% tax rate on the highest earners, improving standards of living for millions and presiding over a period of high social mobility (not for all, of course). Surely the best edgy modern comparison to 1950s American suburbia would be Modi's India, where valid criticisms such as mistreatment of minorities such as Muslims and Christians tend to get countered by "millions of people now have indoor plumbing for the first time in their lives, your argument is invalid".
 
Fenwick said:
One big thing was it being rooted in how much I hate "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" notions that US Southern characters tend to get. Not skill or ability but just "If I try hard it will succeed!" Yet in a CSA dominated world it would be a place where landowners and their decedents always get the benefit of things.
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I recently came across a claim that the bootstraps line was a parody, seeing as pulling on your own bootstraps doesn't actually lift you anywhere at all. Which is interesting to contemplate given your objections to the belief.

I'm probably the only person w who thought of this particular Vignette when reading the F section, but it is, I feel, a very good example of the "future history tells us more about the writer's ideas in the present than what the future might be like" idea. It's very 2015 in its conception.
 
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