Alternate History: G,H,I

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article here

With thanks to @Alex Richards for suggesting I.

 

[Alex Richards]

I think the thing to remember about the Great Man view on history I'd that it was written by people for who that very much was the case.

Like I think the push in Europe towards Autocratic courts and more centralised government was fundamentally a social one based on the needs of larger more expensive armies and their defensive counterparts, and the push to smaller courts is emblematic of the entailment of centralised beaurocracies to finance and manage these efforts rather than using local power structures, nobles etc.

But once you *have* a highly centralised court with a very small group of people making the decisions of the nation, who those people are becomes massively important. The trends in Germany are leading towards a religious conflict in the 17th Century, but it doesn't kick off in 1618 without Frederick V being an egotistical millenarian who literally believes this is God's sign that he will be victorious in Bohemia. It doesn't continue if he immediately dies and a regent goes 'sorry, we'll go back to being good vassals now? No grand pacts of course'. It doesn't last past the late 1620s without Ferdinand III being stubborn enough to think he can just overturn a century of Lutheran land seizures from the Church in northern Germany, and I don't think any King of Sweden other than Gustavus Adolphus would be ambitious enough to think they could dictate matters in Baden rather than just sticking to Pomerania and the North.

And then you throw in the fact that killing Ferdinand III in 1618 can easily allow you to obliterate Austria as a thing and you can plausibly create a situation where Central and Eastern Europe is dominated by highly religiously pluralistic states in Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia-Pfalz and Transylvania-Hungary, heck you might even very able to get France not to revoke the Edict of Nantes here, and you've just fundamentally changed the dynamic of Europe because the Counter Reformation and the strong Catholic Church are essentially restricted to Spain, Italy and Bavaria.

 

[FriendlyGhost]

On Games, I must be a bit of an outlier because although I've played quite a few games which could be labelled as AH-games (starting with the original Civilisation in 1991 (on four double-density 3½" floppy disks, with games saved to another)), I've never considered these as AH, just as a bit of fun. AH to me has always been about the written word (I know there are audio and film AH too, but I've never listened to / watched any of them). As far as I know I've never played a Paradox game - certainly not HoI - so all the references to these games in discussions here and in the other place go right over my head!

Regarding Historiography, I tend to have a 'chicken and egg' view of the 'great man or societal trends' argument. Namely, that all influential people* are people of their times, i.e. products of the societies they grew up in, and that societies will react to the actions, or inactions, of great people. I know this is a bit of a cop-out!

* I don't like the term 'great man' not just because it ignores the vast number of great women, but also because 'great' isn't necessarily the right word. Someone can have a huge influence on the world without being great (using the dictionary definition of 'outstandingly talented and much admired and respected' or 'a marvellous person').​

 

[Coiler]

Thanks for quoting me regarding "Games"

Anyway, I'm more partial to Great Man in the context of fiction, because it makes sense for characters to be influential on the story.

 

[RyanF]

Historiography - somewhere in the middle.

 

[napoleon IV]

Thanks for quoting me regarding "Games"

Anyway, I'm more partial to Great Man in the context of fiction, because it makes sense for characters to be influential on the story.

In terms of AH fiction Forces and Structures Theory works really well in the context of timelines, which aren't narrative fiction in the traditional sense and are often written in the style of history books, but fails in the context of narrative fiction.

 

[Max Sinister]

I miss a mentioning of the great RPG book "GURPS: Alternate Earths", but then, I'm very partisan about that book which got me into online AH.

 

[RyanF]

I miss a mentioning of the great RPG book "GURPS: Alternate Earths", but then, I'm very partisan about that book which got me into online AH.

I have a gripe with that book: that it did Stargate but with other timelines instead of planets and that's too rich a concept to be left to a few RPGs.

 

[Talwar]

A friend of mine started running that campaign and just...never asked us if we might be interested in it.

 

[Geordie]

I don't believe that there is only one possible person out of all the people ever born who could have invented the light blub.

I'm stunned that a Mackem living in Gateshead didn't put a Joseph Swan reference in there.