Alternate History General Discussion

[ChrisNuttall]

Ah yes realism the most important thing way it comes to stories where places are magically sent back to the past

Ha.

My point is, you get one change – the introduction of future knowledge/tech – and the divergences have to flow from there. If you give General Lee, for example, a bunch of history books condemning slavery, the confederate government and the CSA in general, do you think he’s instantly going to accept the South not only lost, but it was in the wrong from well before Day One? Do you think his men will instantly accept modern-day attitudes and march on Richmond to free the slaves?

Point is, a lot of our social attitudes developed slowly, with quite a bit of forward and backward movement as time progressed. The West embraced a degree of freedom, individualism, meritocracy and restricted government that fed our technological development. Ideas like the NHS sprang out of a belief it wasn’t right to leave people sick – the poor had rights, even though they were poor; being poor didn’t mean they were bad people who deserved to suffer. We tested ideas in the free marketplace of ideas and did our best to discard the ones that didn’t stand the test of time.

By contrast, states that forbade change (Imperial China), allowed ideology to poison their development (the USSR, Communist China) or simply bought most of their tech from outsiders (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia), lingered behind the more free-thinking states.

My point is that if you go back to the middle ages and introduced the wonders of modern medicine and tech, the local rulers might not see the benefit of changing their entire societies to match ours, because their positions would be seriously weakened. They honestly thought they deserved to rule by divine right, not simply because their ancestors were lucky bandits, and wouldn’t take kindly to you suggesting otherwise. It’s much more likely they’d try to pick and choose what they introduced into their societies, and you’d find it very hard to convince them otherwise.

Chris

 

[Von Callay]

I don't have the same sense of needing to be disillusioned about how much worse it might go if the story was instead about Jennifer Roberts.

Had a little more of a think about this specifically, and talked to Lady Von Callay about it, and she pointed out that you could do an interesting rewrite of the story because it would be different in ways that aren't just directly worse. Changing it to be about a woman doesn't just change how the downtime Icelanders react to the uptime, it also changes how the uptimer is going to react to them. Hypothetical Jennifer Roberts, US Army nurse, can still be as ridiculously out of her depth as Gerald without doing some of the foolish things he does. She might not think anyone would listen to her in the first place if she starts talking about how she's from a land of flying wagons or showing off that she has a firearm, and so won't try. Essentially, because her starting position is worse than his, she might not be as overconfident as him and wouldn't end up making the same mistakes even if given the chance. I feel silly for not seeing it immediately, but that's perspective for you.

Maybe its just as bleak in the long run, though, that it turns out Jennifer can survive being displaced a thousand years in time because she decides not to be disruptive, beyond teaching midwives to wash their hands.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

Had a little more of a think about this specifically, and talked to Lady Von Callay about it, and she pointed out that you could do an interesting rewrite of the story because it would be different in ways that aren't just directly worse. Changing it to be about a woman doesn't just change how the downtime Icelanders react to the uptime, it also changes how the uptimer is going to react to them. Hypothetical Jennifer Roberts, US Army nurse, can still be as ridiculously out of her depth as Gerald without doing some of the foolish things he does. She might not think anyone would listen to her in the first place if she starts talking about how she's from a land of flying wagons or showing off that she has a firearm, and so won't try. Essentially, because her starting position is worse than his, she might not be as overconfident as him and wouldn't end up making the same mistakes even if given the chance. I feel silly for not seeing it immediately, but that's perspective for you.

Maybe its just as bleak in the long run, though, that it turns out Jennifer can survive being displaced a thousand years in time because she decides not to be disruptive, beyond teaching midwives to wash their hands.

I actually had something of an idea along those lines, where a midwife and/or a third world trained doctor (my wife is the latter, which gives her an interesting perspective on makeshift solutions) was displaced to Elizabethan England. She’d have problems convincing people she knew what she was doing at first – female doctors were rare if not unknown; female midwives were common – but once she did, there’d be a vast set of changes; boiling water, for example, or smallpox vaccination. The latter offered a bunch of darker possibilities – an expanding English population would cause faster settlement of America (directly or indirectly), or smallpox might be used for germ warfare quicker than OTL. (I don’t recall if Cortes used it deliberately, but Amhurst definitely did in the 1750s.)

I was never sure where to take the story, from there.

Chris

 

[Qaz_plm]

Ha.

My point is, you get one change – the introduction of future knowledge/tech – and the divergences have to flow from there. If you give General Lee, for example, a bunch of history books condemning slavery, the confederate government and the CSA in general, do you think he’s instantly going to accept the South not only lost, but it was in the wrong from well before Day One? Do you think his men will instantly accept modern-day attitudes and march on Richmond to free the slaves?

Point is, a lot of our social attitudes developed slowly, with quite a bit of forward and backward movement as time progressed. The West embraced a degree of freedom, individualism, meritocracy and restricted government that fed our technological development. Ideas like the NHS sprang out of a belief it wasn’t right to leave people sick – the poor had rights, even though they were poor; being poor didn’t mean they were bad people who deserved to suffer. We tested ideas in the free marketplace of ideas and did our best to discard the ones that didn’t stand the test of time.

By contrast, states that forbade change (Imperial China), allowed ideology to poison their development (the USSR, Communist China) or simply bought most of their tech from outsiders (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia), lingered behind the more free-thinking states.

My point is that if you go back to the middle ages and introduced the wonders of modern medicine and tech, the local rulers might not see the benefit of changing their entire societies to match ours, because their positions would be seriously weakened. They honestly thought they deserved to rule by divine right, not simply because their ancestors were lucky bandits, and wouldn’t take kindly to you suggesting otherwise. It’s much more likely they’d try to pick and choose what they introduced into their societies, and you’d find it very hard to convince them otherwise.

Chris

Good points. Realism in characters is important yes like you said it would be moronic offensive for groups like the confederates or Nazis give up after seeing a few history books but you’re discounting the influence of geopoliticial aid and such. Like ISOT’d present day America could easily go “hey can you please stop burning heretics and if you do we’ll send doctors and weapons so pretty please stop” or give an ultimatum

 

[Md139115]

There’s still excellent writing, but the level of participation in the vignette contests has dropped considerably.

Im wondering whether there would be some interest in a contest for longer stories - say 5000-17000 words, short stories and novelette length rather than vignette and flash fiction length. Some over a suitable time period, perhaps 3-4 months.

Does require considerably more investment of writers’ time, of course, but on the other hand it does give more potentially saleable product if writers want to try onselling it.

Got to be honest, I can’t see that really fixing anything. I perceive three issues that are contributing to the decline and none of them are related to the contests:

1. SLP is fundamentally a left/center-left political forum first and an alt-history forum second, where the writing discussions are saturated with politics and vice versa. This is the wishes of the community and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with creating such a space, but it means the writing pool has to come from that spectrum. More than a few people (myself included) never intend to write on here again because of the ideological disparities.

2. There was a sharp nose-dive in output around the time the weekly zoom chats began. Having never attended one, I cannot say this with any certainty, but having had my own output collapse since I started regularly discussing ideas with a close friend, I think that there is an issue of, effectively, we’re only really writing to please a few close acquaintances and just telling them the story orally saves time and effort. No need to write most vignettes when you can tell someone a plot in fifteen seconds in the normal ebb and flow of a conversation.

3. This one is going to be really controversial but…

Good writing requires one to be in a bad or awkward place mentally; not so bad that one is unable to work, but uncomfortable enough that strange ideas are filling one’s head and catharsis is charging the page with emotion. The last four years have caused most of the forum to be in completely different mental health states than they were previously. Between the political crises and health scares and Covid lockdowns and more people that I can count starting HRT, most of the core writing community on here is either feeling too good or too bad to write anything as good as what they did in the past. Perhaps this one could change, but I’m not sure that’s really desirable. I really don’t want to go back to being on the edge of a nervous breakdown again to make a worthy successor to The Cow.

 

[SpanishSpy]

There’s still excellent writing, but the level of participation in the vignette contests has dropped considerably.

Im wondering whether there would be some interest in a contest for longer stories - say 5000-17000 words, short stories and novelette length rather than vignette and flash fiction length. Some over a suitable time period, perhaps 3-4 months.

Does require considerably more investment of writers’ time, of course, but on the other hand it does give more potentially saleable product if writers want to try onselling it.

I think a lot of it was that the early vignette challenges were when the forum was shiny and new, and now the forum community has settled into something less dynamic and more constant.

 

[Gary Oswald]

We also are I think doing more calls for anthologies now, theres been five this year with two (scotlands and sports) live now. I think some of the communities short story inspiration is being channeled to that rather than the contests.

I'd be much more worried personally about general creativity if those calls were being unanswered but that isnt happening yet.

 

[kratostatic]

I can get behind points 1 and 3 to some extent, but

There was a sharp nose-dive in output around the time the weekly zoom chats began.

The zoom chats starting coincided with the initial lockdowns (indeed were created as a response to them), which may well have had a larger impact on people's creativity; kind of leads into your 3rd point.

And in the specifics well here I cheat compared to you because I am on them reasonably often. I don't know of any regular zoom chat participants who were prolific before and now don't write.

For me personally they've given me enormous amounts of idea fodder which I simply didn't have before. Granted, my output is extremely low, but then again I think my pre-covid output was literally zero.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Also because I'm me, I did try and work out the stats of entries in SLP's vignette contests so we're looking at actual numbers rather than vibes.

2018 - 9 contests with an average 15.9 entries

1 - 21 entries, 2 - 15 entries, 3 - 17 entries, 4 - 12 entries, 5 - 21 entries, 6 - 14 entries, 7 - 17 entries, 8 - 13 entries, 9 - 13 entries.

2019 - 12 contests with an average 9.6 entries

10 - 13 entries (7 of which were by one person), 11 - 12 entries, 12 - 9 entries, 13 - 5 entries, 14 - 8 entries, 15 - 10 entries, 16 - 13 entries, 17 - 15 entries, 18 - 8 entries, 19- 7 entries, 20 - 10 entries, 21 - 6 entries

2020 - 12 contests with an average 7.8 entries

22 - 8 entries, 23 - 6 entries, 24 - 5 entries, 25 - 8 entries, 26 - 4 entries, 27 - 5 entries, 28 - 14 entries, 29 - 9 entries, 30 - 8 entries, 31 - 10 entries, 32 - 12 entries, 33 - 5 entries

(Figures from mid 2020 are undercounts because by this point we started seeing entries written but not entered the poll and then deleted so I can't track them but they're in the right ballpark)

2021 - 12 contests with an average 8.25 entries

34 - 8 entries, 35 - 7 entries, 36 - 8 entries, 37 - 14 entries, 38- 10 entries, 39 - 8 entries, 40 - 7 entries, 41 - 7 entries, 42 - 9 entries, 43 - 7 entries, 44 - 6 entries, 45 - 8 entries

2022 - 8 completed contests so far with an average 6.1 entries

46 - 6 entries, 47 - 6 entries, 48 - 4 entries, 49 - 7 entries, 50 - 6 entries, 51 - 8 entries, 52 - 5 entries, 53 - 7 entries

So I think there's a few takeaways from this. First of all the drop is from 16 short stories written a month to around 6 or 7 short stories written a month. That is significant but like also 6 or 7 short stories a month is still quite impressive and probably more sustainable than the former. Especially when there is still writing happening outside the contests.

Secondly is that the big drop happen early 2019. Like from 2019 (average 9.6) to 2021 (average 8.25 but undercounted) it's not a big difference. People above were pointing at early 2020 in terms of lockdowns or weekly zoom chats but that doesn't seem to be when the drop happened, it's earlier.

Thirdly, is that 2022 so far does seem lower than the general 2019-2021 average. I don't know if that's just a trickle of people leaving the forums or putting their writing time into other projects catching up on us (I know I've entered no vignettes this year cos the articles and the anthologies have taken up my creative time instead), a lack of enthusiasm over the topics (it is very notable that some topics just get more entries than others) or something else but it is there.

 

[Coiler]

In my case it was because of me first doing blog posts and later writing my two novels. Something had to give.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

I haven’t written anything this year, but that’s nothing to do with the forum culture and very much due to life in general.

 

[Jared]

In the spirit of "why did I bring up the level of vignette participation when I haven't done that much", I've only done 3 of 9 so far this year and am unlikely to do any more due to various writing commitments - unless inspiration really strikes from a prompt. So maybe I'm part of the declining numbers, IDK.

 

[Charles EP M.]

it is very notable that some topics just get more entries than others

Two years in, I've stopped trying to guess which ones will catch on unless it's something like Steampunk or daft systems of government, catnip to SLPers - but even then steampunk blew up more than I expected. People have views!

 

[Md139115]

Secondly is that the big drop happen early 2019. Like from 2019 (average 9.6) to 2021 (average 8.25 but undercounted) it's not a big difference. People above were pointing at early 2020 in terms of lockdowns or weekly zoom chats but that doesn't seem to be when the drop happened, it's earlier.

Interesting. I partially retract my statement then.

 

[TR1996]

I have no skin in this fight, being only a recent and intermittent contributor to the vignettes, but I must admit the ''good art comes from tortured people'' idea has always made me pretty uncomfortable.

 

[David Flin]

There’s still excellent writing, but the level of participation in the vignette contests has dropped considerably.

The reason I've largely given up writing here is simply because there was precious little feedback.

It's that simple. I wrote what were essentially ideas and first drafts and so on.

Generally speaking, I'd write something, and it would disappear without trace. Which got demoralising. If I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I can't improve as a writer.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Engagement and audience enthusiasm makes a big difference in motivation to write absolutely. It can sometimes feel as a reader that a like or a comment doesn't mean anything but I can say from my perspective, every one I get means a lot to me and I try and give that in back in turn. I tend to get good engagement on this forum and it really has encouraged me to write more (I am much more productive now in terms of articles and work that is going for publication than I have ever been before).

@RyanF would always make the effort once he finished his own vignette to go around and offer some feedback to the other entries as part of mutual encouragement. If you look through the contests sub forum you find that the vast majority of stories have at least one reply (the median story judging by that got 3 comments with around 40 stories out of 500 getting 0 and around 40 out of 500 getting 10 or more, the median story also gets around 13 likes, with pretty much all of them getting at least 3) and a lot of that is just Ryan doing his rounds.

@Charles EP M. is another one who regularly engages with both the articles and vignettes. And @Yokai Man is probably the most enthusiastic reader I've ever encountered.

As writers we always want more feedback, and we always want more detailed feedback, but I do want to say publicly how much I appreciate people like Ryan, Charles and Yokai. It's an example I need to follow more often myself but as a writer I can say, knowing that there are three people at least who are guaranteed to read and respond even if none else will, is hugely encouraging.

I have said it before but I used to post on amateur writing forums where you'd put something out and just never get any response and on here you're almost guaranteed to get one comment and 5 likes at a minimum and that feels so much better than 0 comments and 0 likes.

Just one enthusiastic reader can really make you want to sit down and write a new story so you can get that reply from Charles whereas otherwise you might be tempted to do something else instead.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Yeah, you can always count on good feedback from Ryan

 

[Coiler]

I have no skin in this fight, being only a recent and intermittent contributor to the vignettes, but I must admit the ''good art comes from tortured people'' idea has always made me pretty uncomfortable.

I failed completely at writing anything but short blog posts during the COVID lockdowns and such. After I got the vaccine and the accompanying giant sense of relief, I was able to power through and write The Sure Bet King. So for me at least it was the opposite.

 

[SpanishSpy]

With the exception of Christmas stuff, the first writing I did in a few years was Yearning to Breathe in August 2020 - the plot just built itself in my head and I needed to write it down.

Nowadays I use the vignette competitions as a way to just keep writing fiction.