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Alternate History General Discussion
- Thread starter Elektronaut
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TheKennedyMachine
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Has there been any serious TLs written about the POD of Bush Sr. losing the 1988 election, bringing the Reagan Revolution to a halt?
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It's everywhere, regardless of the nominal subject - Dukes of Hazzard (TV version - can't speak for the film) and the films Sweet Home Alabama and Steel Magnolias come to mind.
Imagine, if you will, a group of aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, brushed aside all welcoming missions, set up a podium, and declared that iguanas are beautiful and are now a protected species, then without saying another word packed up and left. Some people, including most governments out of fear of orbital bombardment, would immediately move to protect iguanas. Some more, out of the belief that the aliens are obviously more enlightened than us, would begin obsessively doting on iguanas in the way some do on dogs and cats. Some more, enraged at the aliens for dictating what reptiles humanity should like and even more so at the politicians and sycophants upending everything in uncritical response, go on an anti-iguana crusade. But most of humanity would have the same basic reaction of “WTF just happened?”
Such is the degree of alienation between American academia to mainstream American culture(s), and such is the response when one of the works of this academia achieves escape velocity and is introduced to everyone.
Talking of the Lost Cause, it's not a good look that AH.com still has an award named after an unrepentant Confederate apologist. I thought they got rid of that years ago when the design of the award was changed to remove the stylised Stars and Bars.
Well you have the Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act, Immorality Act, Suppression of Communism Act all in 1950.
Whilst you've got plenty of racist legislation going back decades before 1948, and apartheid was an expansion and refining od that, it's not like nothing changed
This older vid came up on Mastodon - the Alternate Historian wondering what if Caesar's assassins got away with it:
Of course, that all goes without saying, but it's not like pre-1948 SA was a non-racial utopia.
Consider this from Ranji Nowbath, writing (on the condition of black South Africans) in the aftermath of the Durban Riots, in 1949, so after the NP victory but before the various apartheid laws began to be codified: 'In the city the African worker is housed in compounds. There is no life for him; there are no family obligations for him; there are no civic responsibilities for him. He is compelled (not by the Indian) to live a life devoid of all decent things. There is no security for him; there is no future for his children, and there is no outlet for his energies and emotions. He is frustrated and thwarted. His whole life is one long unending queue of disabilities. He has nothing worthwhile enjoying or living for, and when somebody set off the spark the Indian, more or less a fellow-sufferer, caught the brunt of his fury, hate and pent-up frustrations.'
So, while of course laws changed and racism became even more explicitly legislated for post-1948, for an ordinary black South African, I don't think there was much material difference between the pre- and post-1948 governments.
Makemakean
Mr Makemean
- Pronouns
- Logical, unlike those in German
I was reflecting on this the other day, and I'm not entirely sure that I think that that necessarily is a bad thing.
Take Sea Lion Press itself for example. From the more memorable, and popular titles it has produced in recent years, we have Agent Lavender, Arose From Out The Azure Main, Not An English Word, Shuffling The Deck, The Curse of Maggie, T' Yorkshire Assembly, Remain Means Remain, Boristopia, For Want of a Paragraph, President Ashdown Is Retiring, and The Fourth Lectern.
All titles that take place in the past fifty years of British politics. You further look into the sort of stuff that people produce in the old TLIAWs, well, those tended to be very modern British politics-centered.
One of the most popular threads in the scenarios section is Lists of Heads of Government and Heads of State. Who has control of Oakport Council, a Labour Party/Conservative Party analogue list, What if UKIP had won the Eastleigh By-Election?, something featuring David Alton becoming PM as a member of the Christian Democratic Party in the early 21st century, something featuring Terence Milligan becoming PM as a member of the Common Wealth Party in the 1980s, Jacob Rees-Mogg as PM in the 2030s, Leaders of Lincolnshire County Council, MPs for Great Grimsby, North Lincolnshire, and South Humberside, and Leaders of the Unionist Party (the "Yoons"), and that's just in the first 10 pages alone.
We still haven't gone over countless other analogue lists that people have drawn up over the years. Britain as France, Britain as Germany, Britain as Sweden. Nor "classics" of the genre, such as What If Gordon Banks Had Played. And a million different others. I find myself thinking of that old timeline where Gordon Brown pulls it off and wins the 2010 election, where Margaret Thatcher is killed by the IRA, Uhura's Mazda's by-election timeline, etc., etc.
And we have so far confined ourselves merely the British politics in the past fifty years. If we expand ourselves to also cover American and Canadian politics, we can expect to catch far more fish.
It strikes me that that kind of alternate history that most people want to read, certainly to write, on this forum, is about politics in the past fifty years, frequently, the more modern the better. Not just stories set in the modern day, but stories specifically having modern politicians as their main characters. Sometimes their only characters.
And while it's fair to say that some of the stories I've mentioned actually do feature some very finely written character studies--how @Meadow and @Lord Roem treated Enoch Powell in Agent Lavender springs to mind in particular, and I really liked their take on Roy Jenkins and Tony Benn's relationship in the original draft, found it beautifully poignant--for the most part, these stories I've mentioned are not character driven. They're entirely politics driven. What will this mean for the next election, the next party leadership review, will they launch a challenge or not, will this affect the economy, etc., etc.
The subject matters frequently mocked as belonging to the cliches of the genre, the American Civil War and World War II seem to be decidedly in the minority here. In the past ten years of reading alternate history, both here and in the Old Country, I've seen far, far, far more of Gordon Brown and David Cameron than I have of either Robert E. Lee or Adolf Hitler!
For better or worse, people aren't interested in stories about "What if the Byzantines had invented the printing press in the 13th century?", or "What if the Ming Chinese had reached California?", or "What if Hideyoshi had decided against invading Korea?"
People aren't really interested even in exploring the personalities of inner characters of modern political figures. They're far more interested in what John Smith's first budget as a Labour Chancellor under Neil Kinnock would have looked like than what really made him tick.
People are interested in speculating about "If Gore had won in 2000, would the Dems have won again in 2004?", about "What if David Miliband had won the 2010 election?", about "What if Jean Charest had taken over after Mulroney, could the PCs have continued in Official Opposition at least?"
Given that, it's hard to come to the conclusion that it's not just entirely to be expected that most of the discussion here will be about modern politics, it is in fact just as inevitable and as logical and as necessary for the production of fiction that is in keeping with what people actually want to read, as that on a science fiction forum, a lot of the discussion will be about space travel and robotics and science and technology, as that on a fantasy forum, a lot of the discussion will be about medieval Europe, about the Norse Sagas and Celtic folklore.
It's actually not bad at all.
It's just people doing research before writing.
frustrated progressive
SLPing Through the Cracks
All very true and insightful.
Not sure this should really be a surprise to anyone though, given that SLP as a forum community was founded specifically by politbrits and they still pretty much set the tone.
Agree with both, but just to add, creative writing requires more effort, and if I'm tired, it's easier to read The Pub than plug some paragraphs into a vignette...
On the other hand, the structuring of the vignette and other contests does force creative writing away from British politics, and get dozens of other topics out there. So does the blog which I've often found inspiring
frustrated progressive
SLPing Through the Cracks
Very true-and I haven't even tried to write a TL or anything seriously AH-y in years.
I do kinda feel like the vignettes have their own vibe but ofc the authors mostly overlap with the politbrits (as opposed to the good people of Graphics, who do sometimes seem like their own subgroup).
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
A Very English Scandal was a good Brit politics story, dunno if it would be without Hugh Grant though. The rest, just can't get into it.
I've only recently got into the creative writing side myself, after over two decades,
On the vignettes, I find about half the authors are people whose political comments I'm used to seeing in the pub, but the other half I only see in vignettes and the scenarios etc sub forum.
- Location
- Visiting BWBs.
Whether it's a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing depends, I guess, on whether one is hear primarily for the political discourse, the AH fiction, or something else.
Makemakean
Mr Makemean
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- Logical, unlike those in German
Yes, I fear my point somehow got lost.
Specifically, it was, if we actually look at the kind of AH fiction that people here seem to want to write and read, and define AH fiction accordingly, you cannot really disentangle these two in a particularly meaningful way.
It's like asking the question of whether one joins a forum for science fiction primarily to discuss science fiction or primarily to speculate and muse about space travel, robotics, research into genetics, artificial reality, etc.
Makemakean
Mr Makemean
- Pronouns
- Logical, unlike those in German
Whether or not they form their own subgroup I feel myself unqualified to make a remark upon. I will however remark upon that the overwhelming majority of all graphics in the graphics section is thoroughly politics-related. 95% of it (or so it would appear) consists of electoral maps, wikiboxes of politicians and legislatures and countries and monarchs and other leaders. As for the rest, 95% of that is about flags for various polities. It too is all very politics-related.
frustrated progressive
SLPing Through the Cracks
This is very true.
I've thought a lot about this dichotomy myself, and I think it's complicated.
Alternate History is one giant field connected with very thin threads, so what's a cliche in one part is unknown in another. The Soviet invasion of Iceland is one of my favorite examples for obvious reasons. In naval wargames and a couple de facto RSR fanfics, it's always there. But even in other conventional WW3s, Red Storm Rising is basically the only high-profile book where it happens.
So I'd say that demand for the big-name, big-divergence soft AH that's made to appeal to an audience that's less historically knowledgeable has already been met by the likes of Turtledove and company. If you're making a kit car in a shed, chances are you won't be motivated to build something like a Toyota Corolla. You'll build a hand-tuned performance sports car.
Now, what I think is interesting though not necessarily positive is that a new generation of online AHers have generally understood Axis victories as something bad[1] without really getting why. It feels almost like a box on an online litmus test that they avoid checking more than an understanding of AH. Sea Lion is out, but an Eastern Hemisphere country invading the continental US in a TL format is in (to give an extreme example). I think the tone of it is important (much as how I dislike dipping into the culture of another board), because if you do a TL-format Axis victory, you'll get some of the remaining grognards torching it instantly, plausibly and thoroughly[2], while if you do a post-WWII wiki-plucked Tl, they'll generally stay away and you'll only get fans who don't know any better.
[1]I'm not talking politically.
[2]Although this has been eroding. I've seen how military TLs and discuussions go from the infamous rivet-obsessed discussions of classic ACW/WWII AH discussion to, more often than not, stuff like the infamous Pakistani conquest of Gujarat and it being rarely challenged.
This genre could benefit as much from an influx of linguists as it would with people who knew economics. (Not actual economists though, those guys have weird ideas)
Semi-related thought, if an AH has, say, a PoD in the 1600s but advances all the way to the 1900s, should the writer have his characters travel by “Aeromobiles”, “Landships” and”autogiros” or just call them cars, trucks and helicopters and get on with it?