If those who had died in "their time" had lived longer (if Oscar Wilde had seen WWI and other ideas)

[Aznavour]

Basically the opposite of "oh, Kissinger/Thatcher/Henry Miller/whoever is still alive, who knew? (As opposed to vanishing into the Aether, as expected of characters who have fulfilled their role in the story.

Certain men and women seemed to have lived and died their lives entirely within the confines of what might be called "their time", often due to dying young while others in the same circumstances might have lived to 60 or even 80. Jack London died at the age of 40, and never saw the Russian Revolution or the birth of the USSR. Wilde and Nietzsche died before seeing the XXth Century. What might they have said of it, or of the Great War? Lovecraft, Kafka, Spengler and TR didn't live to see the beginning of WWII, Lennon, Guevara and others could never experience the end of the Cold War or the 90s. Trotsky never saw the final triumph of Stalinism.

So, what if? What if tumors and accidents and tragic deaths could be butterfiled away and people like the aforementioned could see what was beyond their time?

 

[Coiler]

For sports, there's always "What if Len Bias hadn't overdosed?"

 

[von mises]

The obvious one to me, is Henry Moseley, who died at Galipoli in his twenties and who probably would have got a Nobel Prize for his work had he lived.

 

[heraclius]

In UK culture, there's the question of Rupert Brooke - if he hadn't died (of blood-poisoning not in battle) on Scyros en route to Gallipoli in 1915 aged 28, would he have kept up his poetry and how would he have adjusted it and his 'late C19th Romantic' style to the terse, functional Eliot-style poetry of the 1920s? Would he have ended up as Poet Laureate in 1930 rather than John Masefield, as he was well-connected with the 'Establishment' via the Rugby School and Cambridge links? For that matter, as a Cambridge friend of the later Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton would HD have drawn him into Labour politics or influenced him into taking a Socialist attitude in the 1930s?

If Jane Austen had not had Addison's disease, TB caught off cows by drinking unpasteurised milk, or whatever killed her off at 41 in 1817 would she have kept up a long string of 'novels of manners' into the 1830s and been a close influence on the Bronte sisters? (And provided a lot more material for TV adaptations and films.) How about her own version of 'Pemberley' on the later lives of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, or a finished Sanditon which was notably unlike the recent derivative and 'PC' BBC version? Or the Bronte sisters living into their 50s or 60s to the late Victorian era, with Emily as a leading but still reclusive Mid-Victorian poet rivalling Robert Browning and Charlotte and Anne churning out more novels? They could have been the Yorkshire cultural equivalent of George Eliot in the W Midlands and been a live focus for the Haworth tourist industry, though probably Emily would have fled to some remote farmhouse to avoid her fans.


As I reflected on a visit to the Boathouse in Laugharne some years ago, how about Dylan Thomas drinking a bit less and having a more stable marriage; if he had survived to the TV age and turned into an eccentric 'Mn of Letters' in the 1960s-70s we could have had some interesting TV interviews with him by Michael Parkinson, or him ending up leaving Caitlyn and moving to California to work on films and interact with the 1960s San Francisco arts crowd there.

Would the UK have seemed so much of a 'Land Without Music' (apart from Handel who was a German ex-pat) if Purcell, born 1659, had not died young but continued to dominate the musical scene through the early C18th and churned out a series of operas as the 'Grand Old Man' of George II's court, with him not Handel providing the musical accompaniment for the 1727 coronation?

 

[Sideways]

If Terry Pratchett was still alive would he have become a mainstay of the new atheist community? It's one of those things that could have been really bad

If Olaf Stapledon had lived beyond the paper shortages of the early 1950s his career may have recovered and he may have written less eugenicsy stuff. Say outside chance of him writing into the sixties and seventies and producing more epic cosmic fictions, which could be a genre now

If Alison Brooks had lived she'd have generated now than just the term "alien space bats" and maybe she'd be in this community now. Also, if we had a living role model for women in AH maybe there'd be a point of entry for women into AH other than transition. Imagine how different the AH community would be if it was more welcoming of women.

 

[Hendryk]

One counter-example is H.G. Wells, which most people associate with the Edwardian Age, but who in fact lived long enough to see the aftermath of WW2, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't seem to have made a noticeable difference. There are just going to be people who are famous at one point, and then sort of fade into the background even if they're still around.

Now one figure I experimented with, mostly for shits and giggles, is Scriabin. In OTL he died stupidly in 1915 from a shaving wound that became infected, leaving unfinished what would have been his magnum opus, Mysterium, which was intended to bring the current cosmic cycle to an end and usher in a new one. In @Bruno's story "The Road to Yakutia", he's still working on it 20 years later, and in the process has become an outright cult leader.

 

[Elektronaut]

If Terry Pratchett was still alive would he have become a mainstay of the new atheist community? It's one of those things that could have been really bad

Did he show much public inclination towards it before his illness?

 

[Thande]

One counter-example is H.G. Wells, which most people associate with the Edwardian Age, but who in fact lived long enough to see the aftermath of WW2, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't seem to have made a noticeable difference. There are just going to be people who are famous at one point, and then sort of fade into the background even if they're still around.

Also a good point. Herbert Hoover springs to mind for a political example, or Harold Macmillan (whose longevity inspired Meadow and Roem's book on him being our eternal PM).

 

[Blackadder Mk2]

I've heard people say that George Orwell was moving rightwards near the end of his life, but that may have just been a reaction to discovering his part in giving names to MI5 and his general anti-Soviet attitudes. Another thirty years and he may have gone right-wing, but maybe he would have ironically become a tankie for Mao's China, or stayed the same and be vindicated by 1956.

 

[Alex Richards]

A really big one culturally could be Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was only 37 when he caught pneumonia and died in 1912.

He was already making his name as 'the African Mahler' and his Song of Hiawatha was famous at the time.

Having a major mixed-race - and visibly so- man from Sierra Leone as a major figure in more traditional Classical music through the 20s and 30s could be fascinating for its impacts on Jazz for example.

 

[Yokai Man]

I've heard people say that George Orwell was moving rightwards near the end of his life, but that may have just been a reaction to discovering his part in giving names to MI5 and his general anti-Soviet attitudes. Another thirty years and he may have gone right-wing, but maybe he would have ironically become a tankie for Mao's China, or stayed the same and be vindicated by 1956.

He also wanted to make another book about colonial Burma I think.

 

[Mumby]

I've heard people say that George Orwell was moving rightwards near the end of his life, but that may have just been a reaction to discovering his part in giving names to MI5 and his general anti-Soviet attitudes. Another thirty years and he may have gone right-wing, but maybe he would have ironically become a tankie for Mao's China, or stayed the same and be vindicated by 1956.

You actually just reminded me of something, a sort of reverse of this thread's purpose. But there's a quote I dimly recall that if Mao had died twenty years earlier he would have been remembered as a great man, if he had died ten years earlier he would have been remembered as a complicated figure capable of great heroism and also great cruelty, but as it was he died having committed some of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century.

 

[Thande]

You actually just reminded me of something, a sort of reverse of this thread's purpose. But there's a quote I dimly recall that if Mao had died twenty years earlier he would have been remembered as a great man, if he had died ten years earlier he would have been remembered as a complicated figure capable of great heroism and also great cruelty, but as it was he died having committed some of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century.

Although tourists still buy fridge magnets of him, so that itself is a bit of a simplification - a bit like the thing where people act as though 'eveyone knows' about Kissinger and Cambodia.

 

[Mumby]

Although tourists still buy fridge magnets of him, so that itself is a bit of a simplification - a bit like the thing where people act as though 'eveyone knows' about Kissinger and Cambodia.

true

i do 'enjoy' how in china, they have cut the gordian knot of working out whose face is appropriate to put on particular denominations of currency by simply deciding It Is All Mao, whether its a 5 yuan note that'll barely buy you a banana or a 100 yuan note that'll get you an unreasonable amount of breaded chicken

 

[Hendryk]

You actually just reminded me of something, a sort of reverse of this thread's purpose. But there's a quote I dimly recall that if Mao had died twenty years earlier he would have been remembered as a great man, if he had died ten years earlier he would have been remembered as a complicated figure capable of great heroism and also great cruelty, but as it was he died having committed some of the most heinous crimes of the 20th century.

In the same spirit, I suspect that a longer-lived Che Guevara would not be remembered as a youthful idealist but as a ruthless enforcer of Communist orthodoxy. You either die a hero and all that.

Also a good point. Herbert Hoover springs to mind for a political example, or Harold Macmillan (whose longevity inspired Meadow and Roem's book on him being our eternal PM).

There's also Alexander Kerensky, whom everyone forgot about after that unpleasantness in November 1917. Turns out he lived long enough to see the Brezhnev era.

 

[Hendryk]

I can imagine alternate history being popularized by women enthusiasts rather than men, and as a result being dismissed by the mainstream as "chick lit"...

 

[Gary Oswald]

I can imagine alternate history being popularized by women enthusiasts rather than men, and as a result being dismissed by the mainstream as "chick lit"...

Aren't there actually quite a lot of alt history books written by women in otl?

 

[Charles EP M.]

Did he show much public inclination towards it before his illness?

He was an atheist and I think he knew Dawkins (I might be misremembering the joke of Reverend Dawkins in Darwin's Watch), but did say in 2008: "I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution. I don't have much truck with the ' religion is the cause of most of our wars' school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God."

So it's possible if he'd escaped alzheimers, he'd have drifted into that sort of atheist circles, not liked them after a while, and there'd be a big atheist civil war on the internet over Is Pratchett Good Or Does He Suck

Aren't there actually quite a lot of alt history books written by women in otl?

I assume it's worked like other genres where there've been quite a few women writing but got glossed over when it came to writing the fandom histories.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

One counter-example is H.G. Wells, which most people associate with the Edwardian Age, but who in fact lived long enough to see the aftermath of WW2, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't seem to have made a noticeable difference.

And in fact, his reputation would almost certainly have improved without his weaker post-war writings and his role as a Soviet apologist.

 

[Jared]

If Terry Pratchett was still alive would he have become a mainstay of the new atheist community? It's one of those things that could have been really bad

Sir Pterry was around for long enough after the new atheist community formed without any indication that he wanted to join them. The vibe I always got from his work was more of the "hates God for not existing" type of atheist, not the new atheists.