So
Malê Rising by Jonathan Edelstein. Started in January 2012, ended in December 2015 after the best part of 400 updates. Since then there's been various post narrative updates, guest posts and spinoffs. And it's probably the most influential work of amateur AH of that time period. It's what first sold me on ah.com, it's massively imitated and hugely popular. It was a thunderbolt in the community.
It also kind of does a lot of the things this thread complains amateur AH never does, it cares about ground voice views, it has vivid characters, it's utopian, its more interested in culture than war etc..
The first impression is the sheer ambition of the story. It covers the world from 1840 to 2015, which is a titanic undertaking just by itself. But MR covers the
entire world, it cares deeply about the Solomon Islands and Paraguay and Nigeria and Hungary alike. It's the first timeline of its type that was focused so much on the third world, Africa in particular.
But it's not just that either, it's also ambitious in that it aimed to create an utterly unrecognisable world. In this timelines 21st century, the very concept of the state doesn't really exist. Countries are a matter of citizenship, rather than borders, with different laws for different ethnic groupings and republics and monarchies existing in the same territory but having different populations.
The highest ambition of any work of AH is to create something genuinely alien and MR tries so hard to do that. It isn't just 'what if Germany as France' but 'what if Germany as something no country in otl ever was'.
So in many way's given how high the aims are, it would be as triumph if it just stumbled over the finish line.
But it does more than just that. This is a story that cares about people as people rather than just as pawns to shuffle about. They fuck, and dance and eat and write and love and live and its the humanity on all sides that shines through. Some stories in a mixed narrative-faux essay style, such as Axis on Andes, often feel insecure about the narrative and retreat to the essays again and again even when the narrative is the better bit. MR doesn't do that, it use the faux history books to join dots but the writer relishes his characters and his story. And he is showy in his prose. There's a swagger to this that AH rarely has.
One of the things that separated this story at the time and still does is the 'literary updates' excerpts from books written in this timeline, from dozens of different authors from tens of different cultures. It's an astonishingly confident thing for one man to try and mimic german adventure stories and malian oral tales and make each feel like they're from different voices but equally beautiful. But he pulls it off.
He pulls it off to such an extent, that he actually fleshed out one of the excerpts (an afro futuristic sci-fi story) into an actual book and got it published in american sci-fi magazines.
It's also in a genre often fond of dystopias, a liberal utopia, which depicts a world far more multi polar with much less inequality, a larger range of globally influential cultures, and a much greater spread of wealth, where European minorities unions are stronger and the people are more politically capable of standing up to oppression.
But to an extent this runs into the same problem that all utopias do.
Which is it's very much post history. This is the system that works and so it just keeps working and there's no challenges to it, no new crisis. Just good times still rolling. So the last 50 years of the timeline don't really have a climax, its just the same point (everything is good now) being repeated again and again. It's often beautifully told, but its repetitive and feels extraneous.
And well, you have to buy into a liberal consensus to believe in this utopia. I remember a marxist-leninist on here becoming disenchanted with the timeline because it believes that if you pass the right laws and make the right protests, you can solve what he viewed as the innate problems with capitalism and globalism. And if you don't, it falls flat.
And that idea, that power structures designed to enrich the powerful and disenfranchise the powerless can be entirely redeemed if only they are reformed to give the powerless more of a say with in them, perpetuates this timeline, not just in terms of the global economic system or multiculturalism but in terms of monarchys and colonial empires. Ultimately the happy ending Edelstein offers includes huge parts of Africa remaining in colonial empires. There's this belief that any structure can be an uplifting one with good actors involved that I'm unsure about.
It's particularly uncomfortable with say the Herero, who in this timeline become 'good germans' and join the german empire as equals, remaining a part of it. And sure, that's the promise colonialism was often sold on but in real life the Herero were lined up and shot and used as slave labour and sent to concentration camps.
By trying to find the best possible result for Africa you end up portraying various states as their best possible side. When you have on one side a German official declaring that every single man, woman and child of the Herero was to be exterminated and on the other a German official saying the Herero are Germans and should have the full rights of that. Well the latter is a much better outcome for the Herero but the former is what happened. And if you paint every colonial relationship as being the latter not the former, in order to get that richer post colonial Africa, than you're saying things about colonialism that you maybe don't mean to.
Which is the other point, I don't really buy a lot of the characterisation of societies and people, I don't recognise this German Empire and there's just this whitewashing of various figures so we get that happy ending.
@SpanishSpy coined the term 'trinketization' for knowledge that is broad but not deep and there's a lot of that here. Honestly I think MR is very lucky to be primarily about Africa and not Europe because if these character's were better known, he'd get ripped to hell on accuracy.
Like he does a thing on the Sudan and introduce the man who would be the Mahdi, because hey he's someone I've heard of, but the Mahdi is a village leader who organises strikes to force reform of the Egyptian system. And, like no, that's not remotely who he was. It's the name but nothing else and there's no real insight into the actual Sudanese situation. The writer just doesn't want the Mahdist War to happen so suddenly it's very different.
It's the flipside of the ambition, it's that he tries to cover every society in the world and nobody can ever know them all that well so you get Zanzibar doing this and the Zulus doing this and Msiri doing this and if you know nothing about this part of the world, you're like cool but if you do, you know he's using the name but nothing else really. Msiri is working for a white governor in the congo, which he refused in otl, ok then. Zanzibar is enforcing the slave trade ban, which they thought to the death in otl, ok then. Tippu Tip is a humanist concerned about the fate of his people, really? The Zulus are happy to accept British overlordship without fighting, sure. The Kru just want to be Liberian citizens and its all ok if the franchise is extended to them, nevermind the actual argument was all about trade visas (ok I also used this one, but both of us are stretching massively).
The politics at a grand scale just feels like pieces being moved around to get certain results with no real attempt to deal with the personalities or even agendas that existed.
But whenever you get frustrated, you get to a scene Edelstein actually wants to write, where say a Nigerian soldier falls in love with a Rwandan prophet and it's charming and sincere in trying to depict existing cultures adapt to new times and you get why this was so powerful as a story.
It's a fairytale, it's a version of history and politics that I simply don't buy, but it's a beautiful fairytale. It sells a vision of the world and makes me want to believe in it.
It's still the benchmark of what I would like to achieve in my own writing.