• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Alternate History General Discussion

Any exceptions people know to the general trend of "the farther from the POD, the worse it gets?"

Decades of Darkness is a very good example of a TL that gets better as it progresses, as is Disaster at Leuthen and indeed Look to the West. For me personally Fight and Be Right does feel unfinished; I do feel like EdT should have carried it out to 1940 as the world by then is completely different to the world as FaBR ended.

However, I do understand why you would end a timeline before present day; my own timeline Decades of Discontent will end at some point before the turn of the millenium because for me it would feel unnatural if I tried to extend it to 2020.
 
For me personally Fight and Be Right does feel unfinished; I do feel like EdT should have carried it out to 1940 as the world by then is completely different to the world as FaBR ended.
I don't agree with this, mainly because Fight and Be Right to be the story of Alt-Randolph Churchill if anything. Once he's died it would be like continuing a popular TV show with your main character dead, sure you could do that, but it would be a bit hollow.

I think the glimpses of the future are much better, because you find it tantalising but there's enough room for you to imagine other things.
 
Hitler isn't someone you think as being even semi good as a WW1 spy.


I mean, he spied for the Reichswehr IOTL. If anything he was too successful.


with Rakovski proposing that "Dolfi" should write a book called Our Struggle and hahahaha GET IT


95f.gif
 
I mean, he spied for the Reichswehr IOTL. If anything he was too successful.





95f.gif

Liviu Radu also wrote a book about a Communist Hitler,but it’s told very badly,with literally all the OTL top Nazis becoming Communists (including Hess and Alfred Rosenberg) and Hungary remaining Communist.

Baldwin and Chamberlain still do the same things as OTL,but with the difference that Hitler is a Communist and Churchill makes his own splinter party out of protest.

Also WW3 happens in 1954 after Hitler and Stalin invade Poland and France and Edward Wood says yes to their every demand because he’s an dumb Appeaser (with only Mussolini and Carol ll opposing them) and then a Cold War between Communist Germany and USSR happens and then it gets hot after a bomb goes off during the 1 May Parades,killing among others “Comrade Air Marshal Goering and Comrade Interior Minister Hess”

Oh and Von Papen is basically the German version of Kalinin
 
Liviu Radu also wrote a book about a Communist Hitler,but it’s told very badly,with literally all the OTL top Nazis becoming Communists (including Hess and Alfred Rosenberg) and Hungary remaining Communist.

Baldwin and Chamberlain still do the same things as OTL,but with the difference that Hitler is a Communist and Churchill makes his own splinter party out of protest.

Also WW3 happens in 1954 after Hitler and Stalin invade Poland and France and Edward Wood says yes to their every demand because he’s an dumb Appeaser (with only Mussolini and Carol ll opposing them) and then a Cold War between Communist Germany and USSR happens and then it gets hot after a bomb goes off during the 1 May Parades,killing among others “Comrade Air Marshal Goering and Comrade Interior Minister Hess”

Oh and Von Papen is basically the German version of Kalinin


There you go. I had been aware that the basic premise had previously been discussed but I didn't know anyone else had a book on the idea. Having a look at it now and the format seems quite interesting although it's a shame about all the parallelism.
 
There you go. I had been aware that the basic premise had previously been discussed but I didn't know anyone else had a book on the idea. Having a look at it now and the format seems quite interesting although it's a shame about all the parallelism.
The story is mostly told via questionnaires and interviews of the former secretaries of Hitler,Hess and Mengele,who still think their bosses were nice people despite the crimes they did. Hence the intentionally ironic title,Questionnaire for ladies who were secretaries of very good men.

Oh,I forgot to mention-Al Smith becomes President in the book and ignores everything in Europe,as well as in Asia and letting the Japanese do whatever they want,being genuinely indifferent of world affairs and only telling the Japanese ambassador that America is btw willing to sell them Hawaii/Alaska,but only for a fair price.

No one in America cares about this expect Wendell Wilkie and FDR,who have made a third party out of anger.
 
It's more a scope thing, than a time thing, I think? The further you get from a POD, logically, the more butterflies flow outward.

If an author feels obligated to follow all the ripples it's easy to get bogged down exploring the entire world (including areas and topics well beyond the author's initial area of interest or knowledge) or it just degenerates into vague, broad strokes-type stuff. You can obviously try and limit your scope to just a nation or something, but any nation is inevitably going to be affected by worldwide events that are happening in the fog you've left unexplored.

My preference is for in-depth exploration of the POD and events immediately after. Mainly because that is grounded more in 'real' history, as opposed to being a type of ''fantasy without magic'' worldbuilding. As such, I'm generally in favour of prescribed end points, rather than the all the way to the present approach.

Though it also depends on what the TL aspires to be. If it's posing as 'serious,' 'academic' AH then I think things get difficult the further one gets from the POD, as it becomes impossible to keep track of all the butterflies and ripples- at some point the 'academic' approach becomes mere pretension, because you've reached the ''fantasy without magic'' stage.

Something that is a more relaxed thought experiment about a potential alternate world can perhaps go into broad strokes and engage in more freeform world-building without it being to its detriment. Narrative stuff, also, can obviously set itself 500 years after the POD and just drop a few hints as to what happened in the alternate world, and as long as the story is engaging and there's nothing too glaring, I'm probably not going to get too hung up on precise plausibilities and suchlike.
 
Narrative stuff, also, can obviously set itself 500 years after the POD and just drop a few hints as to what happened in the alternate world, and as long as the story is engaging and there's nothing too glaring, I'm probably not going to get too hung up on precise plausibilities and suchlike.

This is still just my personal taste, but I've found that when stuff with very similar divergences gets told in a TL format and a narrative format, even a clunky and obviously flawed narrative, the latter works a lot better.

I'd say my go-to example case would be comparing postwar The Big One and postwar AANW. Both are where the authors stacked the deck even more in favor of the US to show off a bunch of pet superweapons. Yet having even flat characters and even a clumsy plot just makes TBO's feel so much comparably better and more interesting (even to critique) than just pure descriptions.

The analogy I've always used for the TL format is that it's like a race car. Its design is specialized for one very specific thing at the knowing expense of almost all other qualities. The problem is when you make something with the cramped confines of a race car yet can't or worse, won't make it actually go fast.
 
Sorry to divert back to the concepts of plausibility versus reader engagement that was discussed here and the other thread, but my go-to example of the right way to do this is Martin Roy Hill's Hitler is Coming which I think is one of the best pieces of short AH fiction I've ever read

Now in terms of strict plausibility it immediately falls flat and fails even before the story itself begins. Our protagonist is a former OSS agent blackmailed into working for the American branch of the SS to investigate some mysterious murders, and a plot to assassinate Herr Hitler when he visits the ruins of the United States. This Reich-occupied USA has only been made possible by a mass bombardment of the East Coast by Nazi Nukes. As the story progresses, we find out that by mid-1944, as Allied forces advance through Italy, the Nazis were able to develop nuclear weapons sufficiently small to bolt to the warheads of V2s, which they then deploy in large quantities and force the Allies to surrender

Now in terms of strict historical plausibility, that's utterly daft given the Nazi technological base and knowledge of nuclear weapons, amongst many other issues. It would be akin to @David Flin writing a story where, after triumphing in the Falklands, the Argentinians then sail across the Atlantic and land forces in the UK and march on London. Totally implausible.

However that really doesn't matter a jot - because Hill is only using that implausibility to get him to the scenario he does want to write about - a shattered and defeated USA, occupied by the SS and Wehrmacht, and where he can use this former OSS agent to dive into a world where the 'professional' SS and Abwehr clash with homegrown American fascists like the German-American Bund; where the victorious Nazis are forced into uneasy alliances with incompetent, swaggering American fascists in an attempt to foil an ever-increasing resistance, and where inter-agency rivalry and back-alley backstabbings between Nazi agencies are far more dangerous to the occupation than 'Lucky' Luciano supplying Tommy Guns to the resistance.

Therefore an utterly implausible PoD is set up and then immediately brushed aside to get to the real meat of the story - which then unfolds rapidly and chillingly
 
I'm trying to wean myself off the need to justify everything through worldbuilding in AH - not in LTTW where that's the point, but in another project I want to do set in a different Cold War. I'm just going to imply vague and early divergences and not get into why Romania is divided three ways between American, Anglo-French and Soviet blocs.
 
I think the key to having an implausible PoD is just to briefly demonstrate it to the reader, handwave it, and then never mention it again

And if you have to mention it again for plot reasons, never go into more detail - the more detail and page-length you dedicate to it, the more flawed and obvious it becomes
 
I think the key to having an implausible PoD is just to briefly demonstrate it to the reader, handwave it, and then never mention it again

And if you have to mention it again for plot reasons, never go into more detail - the more detail and page-length you dedicate to it, the more flawed and obvious it becomes

To compare to some examples of science fiction - imagine if The Time Machine had devoted thousands upon thousands of words to the workings and scientific principles behind the time machine, or if The War of the Worlds opened with ten chapters on the evolution of life on Mars, the society that developed there and the principles behind their technology.

835367.jpg
 
I'm trying to wean myself off the need to justify everything through worldbuilding in AH - not in LTTW where that's the point, but in another project I want to do set in a different Cold War. I'm just going to imply vague and early divergences and not get into why Romania is divided three ways between American, Anglo-French and Soviet blocs.
Okay,now I'm interested to know how that happened.
 
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? (That one does go into some details on how the war was lost but in very vague strokes)

It's also what Team Yankee and Red Army do right with WW3. Unlike Red Storm Rising's "awkward" (to put it mildly) setup, neither of them go into much detail as to how it started and are all the better for it.
 
Back
Top