Alternate History General Discussion

[Avian Overlord]

Of course, dystopias can also be that, especially the latter.

This is true, but a lot of dystopian alternate history timelines go for broadly popular politics like "Hitler was bad" and "Nuclear war should be avoided"

 

[Charles EP M.]

I think another factor is that dystopias get a better reception that dystopias. If you have things turn out better than OTL it can often feel either naive or wanking the author's politics.

People broadly agree on What Is Bad in a way they may not on What Is Good. Is everyone having a gun and there's little law, police, or state because we just Shoot Bad Guys? Because there was a libertarian military sci-fi doing that with their utopia.

 

[Coiler]

For Harry Turtledove, how much do you think his flaws are the result of understandable compromises to sell to a non-enthusiast audience (ie, really blatant divergences and parallelism so that they'll get it) and how much do you think are just his own writing weaknesses?

 

[Charles EP M.]

I'd think it's pretty hard to sell books to a mainstream audience without the really blatant stuff, parallels, Hey Look That Thing You Know etc. A few years back at DragonCon, I was at a AH panel and one of the things that came up was they all agreed Battle Of Gettysburg Yet Again is tired but that's what sold. (One writer added they would really like to write a time travel story where an ancient Roman goes back to the founding of the city, but the publishers would go "nobody wants a story about a guy from olden times going to olden times")

 

[Coiler]

I'd think it's pretty hard to sell books to a mainstream audience without the really blatant stuff, parallels, Hey Look That Thing You Know etc.

I think this is apparent in how a lot of stuff that could easily be considered "AH as a setting" without too much trouble (if any at all!) simply isn't marketed as specific "Alternate History".

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

For Harry Turtledove, how much do you think his flaws are the result of understandable compromises to sell to a non-enthusiast audience (ie, really blatant divergences and parallelism so that they'll get it) and how much do you think are just his own writing weaknesses?

He’s really bad at writing sex but he keeps doing it.

 

[Jared]

He’s really bad at writing sex but he keeps doing it.

To be fair, a lot of people who are bad at sex keep doing it.

 

[Elektronaut]

He’s really bad at writing sex but he keeps doing it.

A trait also shared by a majority of fan fiction writers.

 

[Charles EP M.]

He’s really bad at writing sex but he keeps doing it.

This sort of thing - bad sex, really long stories with many books in a series - seems a bigger problem than "what if Franco but it's Alabama?"

 

[Charles EP M.]

A history of Franco's bad sex in Alabama, book 17.

A Scandal In Selma

 

[Christian]

On alternate history, do you guys that its a bit weird that American alternate history writers tend to be really fond of restoring European monarchies? I mean, I've read two stories about a better America after the civil war and in one France has a Bourbon king it shared with Spain and the other had a Bonaparte as Emperor of the country.

 

[Coiler]

On alternate history, do you guys that its a bit weird that American alternate history writers tend to be really fond of restoring European monarchies?

Not really. I think there's a big novelty factor at work with that.

 

[SpanishSpy]

Not really. I think there's a big novelty factor at work with that.

I also think it's Americans with their 'monarchy fetish' where they find it fascinating because it's something they've never really had other than a distant British monarch centuries ago.

 

[varyar]

On alternate history, do you guys that its a bit weird that American alternate history writers tend to be really fond of restoring European monarchies? I mean, I've read two stories about a better America after the civil war and in one France has a Bourbon king it shared with Spain and the other had a Bonaparte as Emperor of the country.

There's a lot of "Republic of Britain" TLs, too, although I'm not sure which side of the Pond most of those originate from.

 

[OwenM]

There's a lot of "Republic of Britain" TLs, too, although I'm not sure which side of the Pond most of those originate from.

In the same way you'll often get disunited Germany or Italy but unified Scandinavia or Benelux.

 

[Christian]

There's a lot of "Republic of Britain" TLs, too, although I'm not sure which side of the Pond most of those originate from.

Most of those types of stories, like the one where Britain becomes a socialist republic after the 1925 general strike, I’ve seen seems to be from British people, or at least non-Americans. So I’m guessing that the alternate history idea of what if we were a republic/monarchy seems to apply just as much to the British as it does to the Americans.

 

[Coiler]

So I’m guessing that the alternate history idea of what if we were a republic/monarchy seems to apply just as much to the British as it does to the Americans.

Well, the whole point of alternate history is to make something different, so I can definitely understand it.

 

[zaffre]

I think it's probably a mix of not being the subject area of the timeline (which, fair, everyone can't know about everywhere all the time) and This Is Your Brain On Presidentialism. I know it took me a while to wrap my head around how parliamentary struggles can be interesting, actually, and if you look at the drop-off in American interest from, say, the Tudors and Stuarts to the Hanoverians, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are more keen on the whole "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" thing than the South Sea Bubble.

Even now, if I was casually trying to come up with an interesting divergence for late-1800s France I probably would go "oh the Bonapartes come back" rather than have some ministerial change immediately leap to mind - and even if you then start researching France to work out *how* that could happen, the die has sort of already been cast.

 

[Von Callay]

I think it's probably a mix of not being the subject area of the timeline (which, fair, everyone can't know about everywhere all the time) and This Is Your Brain On Presidentialism. I know it took me a while to wrap my head around how parliamentary struggles can be interesting, actually, and if you look at the drop-off in American interest from, say, the Tudors and Stuarts to the Hanoverians, it's pretty clear that a lot of people are more keen on the whole "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown" thing than the South Sea Bubble.

Hereditary monarchy as an institution is easier to storyboard than any kind of democracy or other system. This person dies here, that one dies there, it's all established who becomes what on some charts and family trees. You only need one inconveniently placed musket ball or blood clot to shift a monarchy around, the great mass of the electorate is a lot harder to grapple with.

 

[Christian]

I do wish that, in alternate history, there would be more stories where Robespierre and Napoleon actually interacted. They were contemporaries, Napoleon having respected him greatly for quite a while due to Napoleon seeing him as providing the type of leadership France was in need of, and even when he got real bitter at Saint-Helena, he still thought of him better than the other revolutionaries.

So it does seem disappointing that there aren't any stories where they interacted, here is the kind of man Robespierre warned would take over if the government didn't have a firm grip on the situation, yet was the one his little brother commended as a great patriot. Certainly the dynamics would be interesting, not exactly the first time someone the revolutionaries put their faith in turning out to be different than they expected, coughPichegrucough.