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Alternate History General Discussion

In terms of scrolling through an AH library and going 'wait, wtf' on the authors, difficult to look past all the politicians. Churchill, Galloway, Varoufakis etc. But the fact there's so many of them I suppose dilutes the effect.
 
In terms of scrolling through an AH library and going 'wait, wtf' on the authors, difficult to look past all the politicians. Churchill, Galloway, Varoufakis etc. But the fact there's so many of them I suppose dilutes the effect.
Given the number of politicians who try to rewrite history as it is, it’s not surprising that some of them turn to alternate history.
 
Some of them I can see doing it - like, Varoufakis's seems a straight-up "how I think things should go" by a politician disgruntled how things went. It's just Galloway himself doing a Nazis Won timeline where the SS operate out of real-life Whitley's department store (I just learned that happens) which is weird. It feels like a joke in a Kim Newman story.
 
In terms of scrolling through an AH library and going 'wait, wtf' on the authors, difficult to look past all the politicians. Churchill, Galloway, Varoufakis etc. But the fact there's so many of them I suppose dilutes the effect.
I think it would be weird if those politicians were Very Serious People, but a lot of the politicians who get into alternate history are notable for their disdain for that mindset. Even Churchill and Gingrich, while mainstream figures, spent a lot of their careers fighting the Very Serious People. I suppose a weird politician to write alternate history would be someone like Keir Starmer or John Delaney.
 
I remember when I was reading up on the Mahdist Wars and @Japhy was reading on the Second French Intervention in Mexico, I mentioned to him that some Sudanese soldiers had gone over with Maximilian and fought in the French Mexican war. And he was like 'that's like Wikipedia level history, man, it's trivia but it's not important. The Mexican war would have played out the same whether they were there or not' and he was entirely right to call me on that.

I disagree with his take here. It's interesting in and of itself to see the effect of an increasingly global world more and more interconnected. It'd be like saying there's no interest in knowing Rome had some Sarmatian soldiers stationed in Britannia's garrisons. Big picture, did it change a thing in the Mexican war? no, but microhistories have their own worth and not all histories are about war. Did the Sudanese bring cultural artefacts with them? did they influence a village, a town, a province which was afterwards markedly if not massively different in practices from the rest of Mexico? How did the Mexicans react to their presence? Did some of the Sudanese troops stay?
 
I disagree with his take here. It's interesting in and of itself to see the effect of an increasingly global world more and more interconnected. It'd be like saying there's no interest in knowing Rome had some Sarmatian soldiers stationed in Britannia's garrisons. Big picture, did it change a thing in the Mexican war? no, but microhistories have their own worth and not all histories are about war. Did the Sudanese bring cultural artefacts with them? did they influence a village, a town, a province which was afterwards markedly if not massively different in practices from the rest of Mexico? How did the Mexicans react to their presence? Did some of the Sudanese troops stay?

I think trivia is interesting and micro histories likewise can be interesting, though this was very much trivia, I had no greater information beyond 'hey this thing happened'. But it must be kept in mind that it's trivia.

There is a problem with tertiary reference sites which focus on trivia on a way that damages understanding of history. It's cool that a white Australian fought in the Nama war of vengeance against the Herero Genocide. But a wikipedia page on that war shouldn't focus on that. And it often can do because it's interesting and it happened. And the result is third world conflicts often are seen through the lens of european figures who are there but who are quite tangential. Like the focus on the 17th century Ayutthhaya politics in western sources is often on their foreign advisors rather than native lords.

It pushes an emphasis on foreign politics in a way that is misleading.

And for amateur AH it's particularly a problem because the audience likes cool trivia. So someone reads about those sudanese soldiers and are like 'oh, I need to find a role for them' but they do that without a broad understanding of either mexican or sudanese politics so it either doesn't say anything, it's just a trinket of information which goes 'oh yeah this happened, isn't that cool' or it says something stupid and we get a sudanese emperor of mexico.

This is something I'm wary of in both my articles and my stories. I like trivia, so if I write a detailed article about Liberia then I throw in a fun anecdote I know because its fun even if its not relevant. But the entire article can't be trivia. There has to be a point to it.

Historical fiction has to say something, it can't just be pointing at microhistories and going 'look, that happened'. And as someone who kind of loves doing that, it's something I try and keep in mind because I know it's tempting.
 
I think trivia is interesting and micro histories likewise can be interesting, though this was very much trivia, I had no greater information beyond 'hey this thing happened'. But it must be kept in mind that it's trivia.

There is a problem with tertiary reference sites which focus on trivia on a way that damages understanding of history. It's cool that a white Australian fought in the Nama war of vengeance against the Herero Genocide. But a wikipedia page on that war shouldn't focus on that. And it often can do because it's interesting and it happened. And the result is third world conflicts often are seen through the lens of european figures who are there but who are quite tangential. Like the focus on the 17th century Ayutthhaya politics in western sources is often on their foreign advisors rather than native lords.

It pushes an emphasis on foreign politics in a way that is misleading.

And for amateur AH it's particularly a problem because the audience likes cool trivia. So someone reads about those sudanese soldiers and are like 'oh, I need to find a role for them' but they do that without a broad understanding of either mexican or sudanese politics so it either doesn't say anything, it's just a trinket of information which goes 'oh yeah this happened, isn't that cool' or it says something stupid and we get a sudanese emperor of mexico.

This is something I'm wary of in both my articles and my stories. I like trivia, so if I write a detailed article about Liberia then I throw in a fun anecdote I know because its fun even if its not relevant. But the entire article can't be trivia. There has to be a point to it.

Historical fiction has to say something, it can't just be pointing at microhistories and going 'look, that happened'. And as someone who kind of loves doing that, it's something I try and keep in mind because I know it's tempting.

Yes.

But at the same time somebody's trivia will be somebody else's trove of research for the future.

Like, what are the chances we learn about whether the Sudanese in Mexico had a cultural impact if nobody knows they were there because it was too trivial. I wouldn't have learnt about them if you hadn't mentioned them. I'm probably not going to do anything about it, but it could be the start of somebody's investigation into something more. And it starts because it brought some colour to the overall story.
 
Yes.

But at the same time somebody's trivia will be somebody else's trove of research for the future.

Like, what are the chances we learn about whether the Sudanese in Mexico had a cultural impact if nobody knows they were there because it was too trivial. I wouldn't have learnt about them if you hadn't mentioned them. I'm probably not going to do anything about it, but it could be the start of somebody's investigation into something more. And it starts because it brought some colour to the overall story.

I'd be interested if someone did choose to write a story about the war from the perspective of a sudanese soldier, but it does seem like they just turned up, fought a bunch of battles and then left. There was 453 of them in Mexico of which 316 returned to Paris 14 months later to be honoured in a parade and then came back to Egypt where they mostly died at the hands of the mahdi.

I wouldn't start there if wanting to understand that war.

I think good Ah would take that trivia and put it into the larger story of the war, but bad Ah just uses that trivia without the broader interest.
 
it could be the start of somebody's investigation into something more.
This was a point that I did think of when I first saw the post. Trinkets qua trinkets are probably not useful. But that can spark someone coming at it from the Mexican angle wanting to understand where these soldiers were coming from, or someone learning about Sudan wanting to understand this war that some people there briefly got thrown into.
Although, as said, often it doesn't.
 
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