Alternate History General Discussion

[frustrated progressive]

Ewww, hate this. That being said, imagining a Rohm/Strasserite Germany is interesting, even if it would likely collapse incredibly quickly under the wait of its own contradictions.

I think it's a neat way to get the vaunted "Nazis vs. Reichswehr" civil war to actually happen.

 

[Time Enough]

I think it's a neat way to get the vaunted "Nazis vs. Reichswehr" civil war to actually happen.

Oh yeah, I do think it would probably become a muddled mess rather quickly, whilst the Reichswher has the technical advantage over Nazi’s, the Nazi’s/SA had more man power, even if they were more Street fighting thugs than trained soldiers.

 

[frustrated progressive]

Oh yeah, I do think it would probably become a muddled mess rather quickly, whilst the Reichswher has the technical advantage over Nazi’s, the Nazi’s/SA had more man power, even if they were more Street fighting thugs than trained soldiers.

It also depends on where exactly the SS/other anti-Röhm Nazis fall-though for Röhm to have become politically central as in the above scenarios, they probably would already have been crushed.

 

[Masteroftheuniverse]

Why were there so many TLs about the 2010 general election and then none about any of the subsequent general elections?

 

[Jared]

Why were there so many TLs about the 2010 general election and then none about any of the subsequent general elections?

Can't speak for others, but for me enough time must have passed before I try writing a timeline about something. Where things are too recent it's hard to judge what would be the consequences of a divergence.

 

[OwenM]

Why were there so many TLs about the 2010 general election and then none about any of the subsequent general elections?

My suspicion is that besides what @Jared says it might be the "things didn't stop" effect.
By the time people would have started writing about the 2015 UK general election, 2017 was happening, then 2019, then.... it feels like arguably the closest there's been to a moment to catch one's breath and consider how we might not have ended up here might actually, be, er, now.....

 

[monroe]

My suspicion is that besides what @Jared says it might be the "things didn't stop" effect.
By the time people would have started writing about the 2015 UK general election, 2017 was happening, then 2019, then.... it feels like arguably the closest there's been to a moment to catch one's breath and consider how we might not have ended up here might actually, be, er, now.....

This, but also a trend I've felt is the ballance of how users engage with the forums- in the sense of the weight of being either the political discussion forum vs the creative writing forum shifted decisively to the former in the mid-10s, and has basically stayed there. Less people are discussing the scenarios as, well, scenarios, but as extensions of political debates and a way to relitigate and air their grievences. So there's no point having those discussions when you could just talk about it in PolChat, but also it's just an unpleasant atmosphere to write in.

Not to say this never happened when The Lecturn stories were being written, but it's a microcosm of a major struggle in these spaces.

 

[David Flin]

Not to say this never happened when The Lecturn stories were being written, but it's a microcosm of a major struggle in these spaces.

Oh, it's not a struggle. The creative writing area generates around 5% of the total messages on the forum; the political discussion area generates well over 90% of messages.

There's no likelihood of that changing.

The atmosphere is something I have views on, but do not intend to discuss.

 

[AH Layard]

Just a random thought, prompted by recent reading set in roughly the same era: Are there any TLs or published works revolving around Ford winning a term in his own right in the 1976 election, and how it might've happened/turned out, esp. with regard to the '79 oil crisis, the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? Would Carter have been the challenger again in 1980, or Ted Kennedy, or someone else altogether?

There is also one in Jeff Greenfield’s Then Everything Changed. It’s alright though farfetched/tongue in cheek in places:

Spoiler

Basically Ford makes his gaffe about no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe but spins it to mean that there won’t be in the future and that he’ll work towards liberty in Eastern Europe, thereby winning ethnic Eastern European voters. Ford protects the Shah and manages a transition to his successor in Iran, although this only pissed off the Saudis who cut back oil production leading to a major oil crisis in the States. Gary Hart defeats Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination after the media relentlessly focuses on Chappaquiddick, and then beats Reagan in the general. It ends with an alt-Lewinsky scandal referencing Hart’s womanising.

 

[AH Layard]

Oh, it's not a struggle. The creative writing area generates around 5% of the total messages on the forum; the political discussion area generates well over 90% of messages.

There's no likelihood of that changing.

The atmosphere is something I have views on, but do not intend to discuss.

As well as the balance of discussion I think there has always been a trend of creative writing/TL as polemic, rather than seeing writing as an interesting discussion of historical issues or creative in its own right.

I recall attending a lecture by Richard Evans about 10 years ago in which he dismissed counterfactual history as purely wish seeking that could also only focus on high political history and not on ideology or society. I think the quality of work on SLP and indeed in other places contradicts this.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

As well as the balance of discussion I think there has always been a trend of creative writing/TL as polemic, rather than seeing writing as an interesting discussion of historical issues or creative in its own right.

I recall attending a lecture by Richard Evans about 10 years ago in which he dismissed counterfactual history as purely wish seeking that could also only focus on high political history and not on ideology or society. I think the quality of work on SLP and indeed in other places contradicts this.

It depends on how involved you are with the community, I suspect. A simple story like Guns of the South or Island in the Sea of Time requires much less engagement, and background knowledge, than some of the far more detailed SLP works.

Chris

 

[monroe]

It depends on how involved you are with the community, I suspect. A simple story like Guns of the South or Island in the Sea of Time requires much less engagement, and background knowledge, than some of the far more detailed SLP works.

Chris

See I don't really buy this notion of 'simplicity'- Guns of the South is not any more complex than, off the top of my head, Liam Baker's Walking Back to Happiness, and indeed at points can require a similar level of background knowledge, with the distinction being that an American reader is going to know more about the US Civil War going into it than a reader would the intricacies of the mid-century British left simply because one is a subject taught and the other is somewhat niche hobbyist.

But the other thing with Walking Back is that- and this isn't a flaw of the piece, I think it's actually one of the greater strengths of it- you can easily see it as a pretty open reflection of contemporary British politics at the time it was written regarding the ascendency of the left within the spaces of Labour, while Turtledove is uncritically reflecting the politics of the Civil War as they were by the 1990s and regurgitating Lost Cause crap that the average reader is primed to accept without question.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

See I don't really buy this notion of 'simplicity'- Guns of the South is not any more complex than, off the top of my head, Liam Baker's Walking Back to Happiness, and indeed at points can require a similar level of background knowledge, with the distinction being that an American reader is going to know more about the US Civil War going into it than a reader would the intricacies of the mid-century British left simply because one is a subject taught and the other is somewhat niche hobbyist.

But the other thing with Walking Back is that- and this isn't a flaw of the piece, I think it's actually one of the greater strengths of it- you can easily see it as a pretty open reflection of contemporary British politics at the time it was written regarding the ascendency of the left within the spaces of Labour, while Turtledove is uncritically reflecting the politics of the Civil War as they were by the 1990s and regurgitating Lost Cause crap that the average reader is primed to accept without question.

I think we’re talking about two different things.

GOTS is a relatively simple war story/period novel that doesn’t demand its reader knows much about the time period – in fact, as you say, knowing too much about the Lost Cause Myth actually detracts, because you see Turtledove gave too much credence to the myth and not enough to reality. It’s a good intro to alternate history novels even though, as you learn more, you come to realise its problems.

(I’m not an expert, but I always had the impression the Lost Cause Myth remained relatively unchallenged until the late 1990s – it’s a field I really need to spend more time studying.)

A more complex story like For Want of a Nail (a brilliant piece of work) requires much more commitment from its readers, people who are willing to read a detailed outline rather than a character-driven story. These works tend to attract people who are already deeply invested in the genre, not people who are looking to read for pleasure.

YMMV, of course.

Chris

 

[monroe]

(I’m not an expert, but I always had the impression the Lost Cause Myth remained relatively unchallenged until the late 1990s – it’s a field I really need to spend more time studying.)

Aside but the Lost Cause was always heavily challenged- indeed in the afterword Turtledove cites a work from the 1970s, The Marble Man, which explicitly tears down the Lost Cause and the mythologising of General Lee, and makes strong objections to it.

 

[lordroel]

The Two Georges takes place in a Los Angeles called New Liverpool. The border between the North American Union and Nueva España is exactly the same as the border between the U.S.A. and Mexico. There was a war between the Francoespañolan Holy Alliance and the British Empire in the mid 19th century where NAU militia overran a lot of the lesser populated parts of Spanish North America while the Holy Alliance was bogged down in Europe, basically similar to 1763, and just by happenstance it gave us the same border that the U.S.-Mexico war fought between two very different countries for different reasons.

Seems that creating ore using the OTL borders is much easier for authors than creating original once.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

Aside but the Lost Cause was always heavily challenged- indeed in the afterword Turtledove cites a work from the 1970s, The Marble Man, which explicitly tears down the Lost Cause and the mythologising of General Lee, and makes strong objections to it.

That's interesting. I had the impression it started a lot later than that - the earliest reference I found was The Cause Lost (Davis, 1996), which came out four years after TGOTS (1992).

Learn something new every day <grin>.

There's room for another article here about pernicious lies/myths - the Lost Cause, the Good!USSR and the clean-handed Wehrmacht vs. the bloody-handed SS - that have embedded themselves in culture and cast a long shadow over our works, even though they're pretty much nonsensical.

Chris

 

[monroe]

That's interesting. I had the impression it started a lot later than that - the earliest reference I found was The Cause Lost (Davis, 1996), which came out four years after TGOTS (1992).

Learn something new every day <grin>.

There's room for another article here about pernicious lies/myths - the Lost Cause, the Good!USSR and the clean-handed Wehrmacht vs. the bloody-handed SS - that have embedded themselves in culture and cast a long shadow over our works, even though they're pretty much nonsensical.

Chris

But those articles already exist- indeed, I wrote two of them: The Marble Man and The Borders of Genre.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

It is the punishment of the South that its Robert Lees and Jefferson Davises will always be tall, handsome and well-born. That their courage will be physical and not moral. That their leadership will be weak compliance with public opinion and never costly and unswerving revolt for justice and right. It is ridiculous to seek to excuse Robert Lee as the most formidable agency this nation ever raised to make 4 million human beings goods instead of men. Either he knew what slavery meant when he helped maim and murder thousands in its defense, or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel – not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God.

W.E.B. DuBois, Lib Snowflake, 1928
​

As @monroe templeton says, people have been pointing out the bullshit of the Lost Cause for quite a while!

 

[Coiler]

It's not just the Noble Confederate stuff and contrived slave phase out ending that's a problem in GOTS, although those are the biggest two. What always left a bad taste in my mouth is how the time travelers themselves are puppy kickers who are there to make the Confederates look good by comparison.

Anyway, as bad in that sense as the book is, I've found myself not holding it against Turtledove. The ACW is just one of his many AH topics, and when he writes a development of an independent South most prominently, it... devolves into a Nazi parallel.

 

[JesterBL]

The Lost Cause was a dead letter in academia by the 1970s, arguably, but within popular culture? It persisted in mainstream representations into the 2000s and arguably is still a more mainstream view across wide swathes of the American populace.

Like, whether it can be taught that the Civil War was primarily about slavery is currently on the chopping block in multiple states.