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Least favorite alt-history story?

My first foray in AH was reading a YA novel about a failed American Revolution with the founders in exile in Spanish Louisiana. I'd never heard of Turtledov until AH.com
 
Count me along the many who only learned about Turtledove through AH.com.

Mind I don't think that's a coincidence. This conversation has made me wonder how much I actually care about and want AH fiction at all. I'm not convinced I do. Like certainly I've never had much interest in an action book/film set in a Nazi conquered England. If I wanted to consume an action story, it seems likely that the quality would be higher among non ah action stories as there's more of them written by more famous authors. And the ah background itself is sketched out and implausible so it doesn't really have any appeal to my history loving side. So why bother with it?

I like fiction, I like characters and stories but a regency romance set in a world where it's the Stuarts on the throne rather the Hanovers is either not going to be a regency romance because it's focused on the ah side or its a regency romance with a gimmick it mostly ignores, in which case is it likely to be any better than Heyer writing the same story without that gimmick? I'd just rather read Heyer.

This thread talks about the trade off between writing a story and characters on one hand and exploring the mechanics of how history differed in the ah world on the other. And personally I'd rather get the latter, otherwise I don't see the point of making it AH.

So if the story and characters don't matter to me why do I want fiction at all? I'm not sure I do. My interest in Alternate History is primarily as a way of examining history. I got into it through Niall Ferguson writing dry essays about how things could have gone differently as opposed to Turtledove writing sex scenes and action scenes in an ah world. And well when I'm interested in finding out more about real life history I read an actual history book, rather than historical fiction.

I'm up for reading just essays and fake history books rather than a story for the same reason that I read actual history books. I find just discussion of history interesting. The articles on this site have kind of convinced me of this in that if I'm going to read 50,000 words about ah in the thirty years war or WW1 the articles by @Alex Richards and @David Flin generally appeal to me more than a similar sized fiction story. And certainly I'm happier with my attempt to explore a revolution in Dahomey in essay rather than by vignette.
 
I think I'm a much better writer when it comes to mood and atmosphere than when it comes to plotting. Long form pieces elude me- but trying to create a strong sense of 'These are the people who are, right now, in this place,' if you know what I mean? That I think I can do.
 
Elektronaut said:
He's probably a big feature for people my age or older but there's tons of other, more mainstream gateway drugs for people to get into AH now.
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Turtledove worked better when the hook was "go into a bookstore/library and find the alternate history novel in the sci-fi section" (at least that's where his stuff was in the bookstores I went to as a kid). When it's either "watch The Man In The High Castle" or just "Go into Amazon and type in 'Alternate History' into the search bar, find a lot of AH books (if not necessarily good ones)", he loses his distinctiveness.
 
Coiler said:
Turtledove worked better when the hook was "go into a bookstore/library and find the alternate history novel in the sci-fi section" (at least that's where his stuff was in the bookstores I went to as a kid). When it's either "watch The Man In The High Castle" or just "Go into Amazon and type in 'Alternate History' into the search bar, find a lot of AH books (if not necessarily good ones)", he loses his distinctiveness.
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There's also a lot of free stuff (such as the Old Country), so the bar to trying Turtledove is comparatively higher.
 
Coiler said:
I still think he was a gateway for many alternate history fans and that his books still can be one, but that he doesn't have the same cachet he used to.
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I've only read a single one of his books (Ruled Brittania). However, your "once great band" analogy works because I knew of him because Worldwar was in the library when I was a kid and some of his books were around shops & online.

The big gateway for me was Sliders on the BBC, the umpteen million Elseworlds comics in Titan trades, and Sonic the Comic and a Sonic book both doing a "Robotnik never existed". Sliders probably is a major gateway for a generation, so it's a real shame I looked at the Robin-Hood-but-in-San-Francisco episode a year or so back and found it was baaaaaaad.
 
For me the gateway was The Mammoth Book of Alternate History Stories, which was a birthday gift. There was one Turtledove in there (Islands In The Sea), but the one story that really hooked me near the beginning was Harry Harrison and Tom Shipley's A Letter From The Pope, where a letter of censure from said Pontifex reaches King Alfred (unlike in OTL) and rather changes the course of events.
 
I think the gateway for me was Harris's Fatherland which happened to be in one of the Readers Digest anthologies mum had, and then I just googled 'Alternate History' and found the old place. That was over 10 years ago now.

I do have a slight desire to give the Worldwar series a go, if only because its got probably the most unusual premise of the long series.
 
Charles EP M. said:
The big gateway for me was Sliders on the BBC, the umpteen million Elseworlds comics in Titan trades, and Sonic the Comic and a Sonic book both doing a "Robotnik never existed". Sliders probably is a major gateway for a generation, so it's a real shame I looked at the Robin-Hood-but-in-San-Francisco episode a year or so back and found it was baaaaaaad.
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If we're doing the discussion of how everyone got into alternate history and their personal preferences in the field, count me as among those who got into AH before Turtledove (despite him being around at the time), and would have been into AH regardless of whether Turtledove ever published a thing.

The first actual AH fiction I can remember reading was John Christopher's Fireball trilogy. Christopher was better known for other works such as the Tripods books, which I read first, and then got into Fireball. For those who haven't heard of that series - it is rather obscure these days, and deservedly so - it involves a couple of characters transported to a modern world where Rome never fell, the Aztecs conquered the Incas and were still around, and China was... strange. That was the first AH series I read, and I've had a level of interest in the genre ever since. The first serious AH scenario I worked out in my head (long before getting involved in soc.history.what-if, let alone AH.com or here) involved a scenario where Hitler died in the trenches in WW1 and how Europe would have evolved from there. Looking back on that scenario, it was abysmal since I lacked much historical knowledge, but it got me interested in looking from there.

I read plenty of Turtledove's earlier stuff back in the day, although I haven't read a single thing he's published since the end of the TL-191 series, and never touched even a lot of things he published earlier than that. I also read some of SM Stirling's earlier stuff (including the Draka (cough)), but haven't touched anything he's written since the turn of the century. I bounced off the Ring of Fire series despite several attempts. I've read other AH mainstream published fiction too, but not for a while. In fact, looking at mainstream published AH, I don't think I've bought anything new in the last decade or more. All I've read since then has been online AH and some of the smaller publishers (mostly things through SLP itself).

My interest in AH was and remains mostly exploring a changed world. On the whole, I find that's done best through online forums or spinoffs of the same. Even within this thread, I note that there's a wide divergence of views on the timeline format, but for me, it remains a format which if done well can give that experience of exploring a changed world which isn't readily available in many narrative AHs.

I can certainly enjoy stories set in an AH world, including quite a few on here. Still, if I'm just looking for a good story, there's a plethora of good storytellers out there who are writing fiction set in the real world or in entirely imagined worlds, and I can and do enjoy plenty of those too. I don't need to read AH just to find good stories, and provided it does the world-exploration aspect well, something doesn't need to be a good story for me to enjoy it as AH.
 
I read What If? when my brother brought it home from his Saturday job at the library. Now, he specifically did so because he thought it would interest me. This may have been because we had somehow already had a discussion about alternate/counterfactual history before I knew it was a Thing beyond idle musing; it may have been because I liked history, and this was a different take which he thought I'd like. I no longer recall which. I doubt he will either.

Then, in early 2008, I googled 'alternate history' (or possibly 'counterfactual history'), read the wiki article, then followed the link on the page.
 
You know, I actually found alternatehistory.com because a mate of mine was telling me about how his classmate had submitted an essay on the Dismissal, and the teacher had asked him in front of the class: 'Dave, at any point when you were writing about how the country spiraled into civil war, did you notice that you were researching your essay on a website that's literally called alternatehistory.com?'

Which is a hell of a reference.
 
Charles EP M. said:
That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?
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I can assure you that by my time (mid-late 2000s), some residual complaining was the only thing left in the Draka "fandom".

I did get into AH around the same time that Stuart Slade's The Big One series was at its height, and that left a weird "stamp" on me that it's taken over a decade of reading other fiction to give it a fair shake (it's still bad, it's just not as uniquely bad when compared to other 2000s technothrillers and internet alternate history pieces).
 
Charles EP M. said:
That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?
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Can't be sure as I'm not American, but the impression I got from the Draka fandom was that it included several things which gave it appeal at the time:
(1) Rule of cool villains in the Draka who had style of a sort (albeit one that doesn't stand up to anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge);
(2) A sense of fascination of being anti-America, like the worst aspects of the American Revolution floating to the surface, but hey, still America, right?
(3) A certain macabre appeal for dystopic fiction, which has always been an undercurrent in AH, particularly during the late stages of the Cold War;
(4) Having the bad guys actually win, which was a novel idea at the time (less so now).

Some of those things (particularly (3) and (4)) are less appealing these days, particularly since September 11.
 
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