Alternate History General Discussion

[Charles EP M.]

A related thing comes up in comics fandom (though not so much the writing): discussion on power levels and the plausibility of Who Wins In A Fight, crossing from bit-of-fun to utter seriousness. And writer Kurt Busiek has time and again had to tell people that the answer to Who Wins all depends on What's The Story, because if you want a story where Spider-Man fights against impossible odds against Magneto and wins, the power levels don't matter, Spider-Man's winning. And then we're just discussing the execution and if the writer got you to believe it.

 

[Gary Oswald]

A related thing comes up in comics fandom (though not so much the writing): discussion on power levels and the plausibility of Who Wins In A Fight, crossing from bit-of-fun to utter seriousness. And writer Kurt Busiek has time and again had to tell people that the answer to Who Wins all depends on What's The Story, because if you want a story where Spider-Man fights against impossible odds against Magneto and wins, the power levels don't matter, Spider-Man's winning. And then we're just discussing the execution and if the writer got you to believe it.

To be fair some comicbook writers do seem oblivious in the other way, as in not understanding what immersion and suspension of disbelief were.

I have always remembered Byrne replying to some fan saying 'I didn't buy this character with this background doing that' with 'I wrote it, he did'.

 

[Elektronaut]

This is the basic argument about The Man In The High Castle, isn't it? "This couldn't have happened" - yes, but how's the story, guys?

Pretty bad actually

 

[Thande]

"The Man in the High Castle" is not a great example because it's more about Philip K. Dick and drugs than it is about either storytelling or worldbuilding.

 

[RyanF]

"The Man in the High Castle" is not a great example because it's more about Philip K. Dick and drugs than it is about either storytelling or worldbuilding.

These days A Scanner Darkly is the better alternate history and The Man in the High Castle the better examination of Philip K. Dick and drugs.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Are we all talking about the book or the show?

 

[Thande]

Are we all talking about the book or the show?

I'm talking about the book.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Ah, because I haven't seen the show and started to think everyone was referring to a season where Dick is one of the characters.

 

[The Red]

Ah, because I haven't seen the show and started to think everyone was referring to a season where Dick is one of the characters.

You could argue that Stephen Root's character is an expy although only in a very loose sense.

The problem with the show isn't how the Axis wins the war inasmuch as how the Axis won the war keeps changing whenever the plot requires it to, the same going for the characters and the setting.

 

[zaffre]

My rule of thumb is that Nazi Victory AH is bad [exhales cigarette smoke slowly] not because the alternate history itself is unrealistic, though it is, but because I’ve never seen one that managed to justify being set then as opposed to the actual twelve years that the Nazis held the levers of power in Berlin. Want to write something about the Holocaust? Write something about the Holocaust. No story has shown me what specifying that the Nazis completely won and got everything they ever wanted really adds, except for a layer of sadism. And I don’t think “Nazis but they are at the Brooklyn Bridge” is a ticket that merits the price of admission. Certainly don’t think Dick’s pomo spin on it is.

 

[Gary Oswald]

My rule of thumb is that Nazi Victory AH is bad [exhales cigarette smoke slowly] not because the alternate history itself is unrealistic, though it is, but because I’ve never seen one that managed to justify being set then as opposed to the actual twelve years that the Nazis held the levers of power in Berlin. Want to write something about the Holocaust? Write something about the Holocaust. No story has shown me what specifying that the Nazis completely won and got everything they ever wanted really adds, except for a layer of sadism. And I don’t think “Nazis but they are at the Brooklyn Bridge” is a ticket that merits the price of admission. Certainly don’t think Dick’s pomo spin on it is.

But what if the nazis were doing bad things to .... British people? is very 'I am writing about prejudice and discrimination in a way which I know the audience will care about namely by making white men the victims', yes.

I don't think it can't be good, though. But then Naughts and Crosses is apparently very good and there is some power in telling those stories about an audience that views itself safe from that. It's the War of the Worlds thing. it could happen here and all that.

 

[Elektronaut]

I admit I last read The Man in the High Castle about twelve years ago but books I last read twelve years ago generally fall into that category for a reason.

My recolllection is that it's standard sixties New Age drug culture with a sideorder of Heydrich trying to stop WW3. I think there's about five times more talking about the I Ching than any character, plot or story element.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I Ching comes up a bunch of times but not that much, we're talking about a book where one of the big subplots is flogging knock-off culturally authentic merch for tourists & two disgruntled salesmen trying to do it themselves

it could happen here and all that.

Not to mention It Happened Here.

There was an American review, negative, of the Noughts & Crosses show that was basically "this is allegorical for contemporary Britain and I don't like allegories" but didn't seem to realise that's what it meant so it was all about how this Much Better (American) AH Story had greater divergence, or why the mainstream British show had everyone speaking English.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Not to mention It Happened Here.

There was an American review, negative, of the Noughts & Crosses show that was basically "this is allegorical for contemporary Britain and I don't like allegories" but didn't seem to realise that's what it meant so it was all about how this Much Better (American) AH Story had greater divergence, or why the mainstream British show had everyone speaking English.

Never seen Naughts and Crosses, my understanding is its very good but I can't judge.

I do, on the whole, find allegories on prejudice deeply tiresome. Both in classic Star Trek 'look a crazy world where heterosexuality is banned, makes you think' and the x-men 'mutants/wizards etc are deeply discriminated against' type.

It's at worst an excuse to tell stories about a minority without actually representing them and it rarely challenges the audience's bigotry as has been made very clear by the kind of people who loved stories about fictional oppression but then got angry when women and black people had screen time in those stories.

 

[Von Callay]

Never seen Naughts and Crosses, my understanding is its very good but I can't judge.

I do, on the whole, find allegories on prejudice deeply tiresome. Both in classic Star Trek 'look a crazy world where heterosexuality is banned, makes you think' and the x-men 'mutants/wizards etc are deeply discriminated against' type.

It's at worst an excuse to tell stories about a minority without actually representing them and it rarely challenges the audience's bigotry as has been made very clear by the kind of people who loved stories about fictional oppression but then got angry when women and black people had screen time in those stories.

That's the failure of writing the allegory directly and doing nothing with it beyond replacing real people and real prejudice with fake ones. How people discriminate against mutants as a one-to-one correspondence with how real prejudice works kind of falls apart when real world racism is not built on some people being able to shoot lasers from their eyes and others not.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Never seen Naughts and Crosses, my understanding is its very good but I can't judge.

It's quite good (and different to the book, though I prefer that ending). Has the advantage over most allegories in that the source novels are by a black woman and some of the main writers & other crew are black, so it can avoid some of the pitfalls and make barbed points (like the plasters all being coloured for darker skin) that aren't going to occur to the Whiteman Brothers.

And it avoids the big pitfall @Von Callay mentioned by not doing a full 1-to-1 allegory - there's bits of Northern Ireland, 50s Deep South, recent-past and contemporary Britain, and South Africa in there, with the show adding bits of modern America and a decolonisation/Brexit/UDI subplot.

That's work though, easier to go "but here in New Congo, the plantations are for white people!"

 

[Skinny87]

My rule of thumb is that Nazi Victory AH is bad [exhales cigarette smoke slowly] not because the alternate history itself is unrealistic, though it is, but because I’ve never seen one that managed to justify being set then as opposed to the actual twelve years that the Nazis held the levers of power in Berlin. Want to write something about the Holocaust? Write something about the Holocaust. No story has shown me what specifying that the Nazis completely won and got everything they ever wanted really adds, except for a layer of sadism. And I don’t think “Nazis but they are at the Brooklyn Bridge” is a ticket that merits the price of admission. Certainly don’t think Dick’s pomo spin on it is.

You know what?

*takes a drag of the cigarette; coughs; splutters; burns self*

I think you're fundamentally correct for 99% of the Nazi Victory AH fiction that gets generated, whether published or forum-based, because none of the authors want to do anything other than play in the Hitler-themed sandbox that such a scenario represents. Whether it's Tsouras' The Moscow Option tinkering around the edges of the Eastern Front, or the endless novels that are just Rubix-Cube variations on 'What if no Hitler/no Goering/no SS/the Panzers turn left instead of right outside Moscow', almost no AH fiction set in a Victorious Reich wants to interrogate the setting and expose its innards, or at the very least turn it towards something more useful

However in Part II of this, to be written when I'm not dealing with two kids overstaying their bedtimes, I'll argue that there is a tiny collection of authors (Leone; Roy Hill; Ciccone et al) that do actually achieve such an interrogation, or at the very least turn the scenario on its head to a specific interrogatory purpose

 

[Time Enough]

Not to mention It Happened Here.

That film is probably the best example of a good Nazi Victory (though nice subversion for a 60s based piece in that it lasts for like 4 fucking years) film because it’s more about the apathy of Britain’s to Fascism and how Anti-Fascism should use all measure possible to destroy fascism.

The use of actual British Fascists just hammers the point even further.

Also it’s a good low budget film despite error.

 

[The Red]

My rule of thumb is that Nazi Victory AH is bad [exhales cigarette smoke slowly] not because the alternate history itself is unrealistic, though it is, but because I’ve never seen one that managed to justify being set then as opposed to the actual twelve years that the Nazis held the levers of power in Berlin. Want to write something about the Holocaust? Write something about the Holocaust. No story has shown me what specifying that the Nazis completely won and got everything they ever wanted really adds, except for a layer of sadism. And I don’t think “Nazis but they are at the Brooklyn Bridge” is a ticket that merits the price of admission. Certainly don’t think Dick’s pomo spin on it is.

I think that certainly does go for a lot of Nazi victory AH but I can think of examples of it being done well in ways which justify the story being done in an AH setting. I don't think, for example, you could do Fatherland inside those twelve years. You could certainly do something about how fascism suffers from its own internal contradictions like with Der Hauptmann or the fight to expose the Holocaust to the world like with War and Remembrance but not so much the regime being slowly strangled by those contradictions to the extent it is motivated to remove any lingering trail of its true horrors in an attempt to gain some legitimacy with the rest of the world.

Conversely you have SS-GB which doesn't use the Nazi victory to analyse fascism but the British relationship with the war. It would be easy to do a similar story about the dilemma some people find themselves in straddling the line between resistance and collaboration somewhere else in occupied Europe but there's something about British people in particular having to come to terms with defeat given how the victory over Nazism has become such a part of the national character.

For each example you probably could have similar settings in OTL, a story about a detective stumbling upon Himmler's ludicrous efforts to style himself as a great humanitarian in the last days of the war or a story about a detective living in the occupied Channel Islands but thematically I don't think they would work in the same way.

 

[Time Enough]

One of the things I’ve noticed is a lack of LGBT+ alternate history. Not only in terms of characters but also looking at changes to LGBT+ history.

Which is a shame, one day I do hope to try and remedy this by potentially looking at the possible changes something like Harvey Milk surviving or a Bukhrian Soviet Union could have or how a surviving Weimar Republic impacts LGBT+ legalisation etc.