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Bestist Non-SLP AH

My honest opinion on the original AWOLAWOT is that it's kinda like a cross between the original For All Time and Zhirinovksys Russian Empire. It's both "put an out there figure in power" and "show how a few differences can snowball into dystopia".

It has many of the weaknesses that those have, but it also has a lot of the strengths-its clearly detailed and, while heavy handed, doesn't push too far too fast.
 
I'm not really a fan of dystopia but AWOLAWOT certainly does it better then the other big timelines. It's definitely got issues but the way it just ever so slowly wades into the deep end is marvelous compared to your usual "1862: the Confederacy holds New Orleans 1863: Confederate Annexation of Brazil and Protectorate of the Boer States"

It also helps that no matter how horrifying the results are everything is the sort of fits into the Overton window. Plenty of Dystopia fails to ever be "reasonable" in timeline, which Jeff did an Amazing job of doing.
 
While not my favorire AH so far (that's still Years of Rice and Salt), I'd posit Robert Harris' Fatherland is the perfect AH novel, and, if you're a layman, the only AH you'll ever need to read.

As the good High Concept story that it is, the gist of it is easily recognizable and digestable to your average reader of detective novels, thrillers, bestsellers, etc., that is a layman with no idea of what a counterfactual is, while also being attractive to your garden variety history or military buff. Thanks to history and pop culture, there's few settings as common and familiar as Third Reich, few bad guys as ubiquous as the Nazis. Sure, keeping the same system, the same organizations, the same names, the same chieftains in place over a 20 year period might stretch credibility to pedants like us, but it is rewarding to the average history fan to recognize those names and have a clue as to what is going on.

The Holocaust might be an obvious plot to uncover, and maybe the art plunder might have been interesting enough on its own in the hands of a great writer, but it might have been a disservice to make a novel about the Nazis Victorious and not center it around their biggest crime. And, once again, for the layman, there's no better way to keep the stakes high: uncover the horrendous thruth of the Final Solution or the Nazis win the Cold War.

The main characters are also perfectly built to exist within the world showcased by the story while also retaining the reader's sympathy: A middle aged workaholic police officer with a broken marriage, living in a crummy apartment, what could be more relatable to western audiences living under the aegis of American mass media? What did he do during the war? Stuck in a sub, not bombing cities or fighting our boys (or shooting partisans in The East), far away from the most disgusting of Nazi crimes, so plausible deniability for not knowing, while giving him Stranger in a Strange Land points. SS membership? Mandatory and he hates it, thank you very much. Party membership? Doesn't have it, so he's a cool rebel.

Charlie Maguire is also perfectly built, right down to her tomboyish name and haircut. Beautuful, feminine and petite, she's also fiercely independent, strongheaded and an intrepid reporter who makes all the first moves in her tryst with March, even though she's half his age and he's a Sturmbannfuhrer in Nazi Berlin, so we never feel either a power imbalance or that she's a "slut/floozy." So she can be a fantasy for the average male reader, particularly the downtrotten middle aged ones who would see themselves in March, while deflecting criticism by not being a shallow love interest and instead being a, perhaps stereotypical, strong female character, all while being MeeToo proof 30 years ago.

Of the villains, the main one, Odilo Globocnik, does stand out as a truly sinister, odious presence. A creepy, sadistic, vain, narcissitic brute with zero morality or scruples, he perfectly encapsulates the true nature of the system he represents, even better than the superficially charming and grandfatherly but utterly self-serving Nebe or the decreptit and unseen Hitler. On the other hand, Globus is 60 at the time of the plot, so some scenes are a bit head-scratching, even if we make allowances for very well-kept sixty year olds who exercise on the daily.
 
Japhy said:
It also helps that no matter how horrifying the results are everything is the sort of fits into the Overton window. Plenty of Dystopia fails to ever be "reasonable" in timeline, which Jeff did an Amazing job of doing.
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This is pretty much the best aspect of it--unlike a lot of dystopia timelines, AWOLAWOT doesn't feel like it was rigged into being eternally dystopic. 'President Mickey Mouse lol' leads pretty seamlessly into 'Oh god the South is literally on fire' via a reliable chain of logic, and the emergence of Rockwell as a Republican primary contender again makes sense in a way that 'omigod it's Ted Bundy Governor of Vermont' often doesn't.

In addition, things don't constantly go to shite everywhere--the Welles and Wood interludes provide a nice ray of sunshine through the clouds.
 
Just finished an entire-day reread of The Bloody Man - quite satisfying to come back to it with a generally better understanding of history than my callow new-poster days; feel free to recommend any other vintage timelines I should take a crack at.


I say "vintage" cautiously because in a lot of ways the work is still ahead of the curve - most authors do period viewpoints / period dialogue / period literature a fraction as well and (in part because of this) I can't think of a single other major forum work that focuses on the English Civil War. The absence is especially notable when on either side Elizabeth I and the Restoration have whole bodies of work generally along the lines of "WI: surviving Tudors" and "WI: surviving Stuarts". I think this is because the AH community tend to like monarchies, but more because they tend to like the *logic* of monarchies, where you just need to keep track of the personalities of one key family, the succession is obvious, and "wars" can be generally summarized as "the bloody warfare across central Europe was ultimately inconclusive and neither France or the Hapsburgs made massive gains, also all of Brazil was captured and named New Muscovy".

A point is being made of this mainly because I think the biggest strength of The Bloody Man is that it dares to dive into a period when that logic is emphatically *not* there, and with the removal of Cromwell the religious and political chaos gets even worse. And the timeline dwells on that. Thomas Totney, for ex. would be glossed over in your average timeline with "did the mad guy see a lot of eyes: historians disagree" but instead we are in his increasingly unnerving headspace every step of the way.

And Cromwell-in-Connecticut then functions as a rather neat counterbalance. On a theoretical level, Cromwell provides the source of strength for Saybrook and New England in general that his absence takes from England, while on a narrative level, Connecticut offers a nice breather from the somewhat manic course of events in the British Revolution and provides maybe my single favorite moment in Cromwell and the Shark. It therefore proves a point about "Great Men" while simultaneously making the story more readable, which is fairly damn impressive.

I think the only reason I wouldn't put it above, say, Fight and Be Right, is that the ground of a Revolutionary Britain has been fairly well-trod before by, well, Fight and Be Right. I've seen the point made that from a UK perspective nothing screams "Alternate History" like a British republic, which, fair, but (personally) I've noticed a slight tendency to overcompensate and have the change-of-regime be accompanied by, er, melodramatic levels of violence and violent levels of melodrama. Well-executed and period appropriate for sure, but when Charles II was getting his head blown off by a cannonball and Charles I was getting his throat cut by a scripture-quoting maid in the bath, I confess I was checking my watch and going "right, how many Stuarts to go?".

On a final positive note - The Bloody Man does showcase the quirk of EdT that I really do wish had been more widely adopted[1], i.e. the ability to narrow in on the historical legacy of a single person and really commit to exploring it. Counterfactual history would genuinely be a much better pursuit if structured along the lines of the reevaluation of Mosley or elevation of Randolph Churchill, and the removal of Cromwell is a fascinating inversion of that, even better than your average "Hitler dies in 1917" because we still get to see Cromwell have an impact elsewhere.

Well worth a read.


[1]Far be it from me to leave out the footnotes pointing out that, yes, that all actually happened in OTL, because god I wish that was more of a thing.
 
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Speaking of The Bloody Man has there ever been any word about Ed completing the trilogy?
 
The TL that helped get me into internet alternate history in the first place was "A Spanish-Moroccan War In 2002". It's clearly not perfect, but it:

  • Has a lot more detail than its contemporaries, and while descending into (admitted by its author) "Technothriller mode" at times, still manages to stay fairly grounded.
  • Covers a limited war that stays limited and wraps up at the right time.
 
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