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Least favorite alt-history story?

Bush was a Realist and long story short, basically didn't want the USSR to break up or there to be instability in Eastern Europe OTL, so I emphatically don't think he would care about any of that in an incipient WW3 situation. The emphasis would overwhelmingly be de-escalation not forward gains, even if Eastern Europe is in a state of eruption. They'd happily throw those movements under the bus in this situation to achieve a settlement.

I suppose one of the problems they faced was that a lot of the applicable footage for Bush would have come from the Gulf War, where he'd be using language which he wouldn't have used if the threat was exponentially greater. Conversley, it does mention that the coup does take a toll psychologically on Bush and his appearances in other media have alluded to the fact that could make him more belligerent.


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Given it starts with Gorby being disappeared I'm not sure why they couldn't also bump off Bush, but I imagine they couldn't find enough footage of Quayle talking about enough things foreign policy wise.

Just a thought but have Bush be indisposed (maybe he's caught up in that Neo-Nazi attack?), Qualye being "unavailable for comment", and the heavy implication is that Baker's in charge throughout the whole thing?
 
This is less a convinced condemnation and more just putting something out there to a collective review, but I just checked out that 'Five Years Less' timeline on post-1900, and the whole thing starts off with Andrei Kirilenko become a highly reformist Soviet leader, which seems... odd, because as far as I know Kirilenko was firmly a Brezhnev protégé-crony, and as you would suspect from that status, was also highly anti-reformist. Presumably if he did become leader it would be firmly on behalf of that faction.

So I'm curious about whether this is another timeline entirely based on the Rumsfeldiaisation of someone's political views, or whether there's something deeper I'm missing about Kirilenko's views.

Pretty doubtful about this whole premise anyway as I know Marshall Ustinov's support was crucial in his mate Andropov becoming leader with a joint Army-KGB powerbloc, and Interweb tells me he was already defence minister by '76.
 
This is less a convinced condemnation and more just putting something out there to a collective review, but I just checked out that 'Five Years Less' timeline on post-1900, and the whole thing starts off with Andrei Kirilenko become a highly reformist Soviet leader, which seems... odd, because as far as I know Kirilenko was firmly a Brezhnev protégé-crony, and as you would suspect from that status, was also highly anti-reformist. Presumably if he did become leader it would be firmly on behalf of that faction.

I suppose the benefits of seventies Kremlinology is that everything can be boiled down to "Your guess is as good as mine" and Kirilenko does come across as a prominent but especially unremarkable figure. I can't say I've come across anything that indentifies Kirilenko as particularly anti-reformist but the notion of the reforms ITTL being enacted seem pretty optimistic under his watch. Some of them go further than Gorbachev, albeit more competently handled than Perestroika ever was and no Glasnost.

It was good to see a focus on economics early on though, even if it has gone off more to the wacky side of things by this point.
 
I suppose the benefits of seventies Kremlinology is that everything can be boiled down to "Your guess is as good as mine" and Kirilenko does come across as a prominent but especially unremarkable figure. I can't say I've come across anything that indentifies Kirilenko as particularly anti-reformist but the notion of the reforms ITTL being enacted seem pretty optimistic under his watch. Some of them go further than Gorbachev, albeit more competently handled than Perestroika ever was and no Glasnost.

It was good to see a focus on economics early on though, even if it has gone off more to the wacky side of things by this point.

I looked this up, and all I could find was 'There is some evidence that a group around Kirilenko in the seventies was working around an economic reform which would have introduced higher productive investment and wider differentials among workers'. Which I guess makes the thing grounded in a partial reality but an interest in wider labour differentials equally doesn't exactly speak of the further-Gorbachev quality you note, any more than Andropov's discipline campaign was deep political reform.
 
They may not be my least favorite of all time, but, particularly after reading the originals, I've grown to dislike most "fix the Draka" TLs. Part of it is a "have your cake and eat it too" issue where "Ok, we'll have this Africa-spanning supervillain state with little changes to the outside world and then we'll apply logic to it".

But a bigger part of it is trying to treat a soft setting as if it was a hard one, which comes across as sort of like "A Valkyria Chronicles novelization written by John Hackett".
 
They may not be my least favorite of all time, but, particularly after reading the originals, I've grown to dislike most "fix the Draka" TLs. Part of it is a "have your cake and eat it too" issue where "Ok, we'll have this Africa-spanning supervillain state with little changes to the outside world and then we'll apply logic to it".

But a bigger part of it is trying to treat a soft setting as if it was a hard one, which comes across as sort of like "A Valkyria Chronicles novelization written by John Hackett".

Yeah exactly. Also the Draka have never really struck me as so interesting a concept that they needed to be further explored.
 
I assume this is because the Draka books were a big thing in the late 80s and early 90s when the communities started up?
 
They may not be my least favorite of all time, but, particularly after reading the originals, I've grown to dislike most "fix the Draka" TLs. Part of it is a "have your cake and eat it too" issue where "Ok, we'll have this Africa-spanning supervillain state with little changes to the outside world and then we'll apply logic to it".

But a bigger part of it is trying to treat a soft setting as if it was a hard one, which comes across as sort of like "A Valkyria Chronicles novelization written by John Hackett".
I'm curious what you think about Decades of Darkness. From what I hear, it arose out of a challenge to try and create a realistic Draka, and though I'm just over halfway finished with it (it's really long), so far it strikes me as quite engaging and well done.
 
I'm curious what you think about Decades of Darkness. From what I hear, it arose out of a challenge to try and create a realistic Draka, and though I'm just over halfway finished with it (it's really long), so far it strikes me as quite engaging and well done.

I think a pretty significant difference is that while DoD USA rolls a couple nat20s, the world changes around them and presents them with credible challenges instead of making a hyper-slaver Afrikaner Empire and not have world history meaningfully change until WW2.
 
They may not be my least favorite of all time, but, particularly after reading the originals, I've grown to dislike most "fix the Draka" TLs. Part of it is a "have your cake and eat it too" issue where "Ok, we'll have this Africa-spanning supervillain state with little changes to the outside world and then we'll apply logic to it".

But a bigger part of it is trying to treat a soft setting as if it was a hard one, which comes across as sort of like "A Valkyria Chronicles novelization written by John Hackett".
I think part of me reacts positively to fix the Draka TLs as a counter-reaction to the argument that the Draka are simply the bad guys getting all the benefits and breaks the good guys usually get in stories - stories tend to have the good guys get all the breaks during the narrative itself, with the bad guys getting breaks in the backstory (so seemingly overwhelming odds for the good guys to overcome are set up) - but the Draka gets both the backstory breaks and the in-narrative breaks.
 
I'm curious what you think about Decades of Darkness. From what I hear, it arose out of a challenge to try and create a realistic Draka, and though I'm just over halfway finished with it (it's really long), so far it strikes me as quite engaging and well done.

I think it's far enough removed from the Draka that it can't really be seen as a Draka fix it.

Classic Draka fix its take the concept of the hyper slaver afrikaner empire and go from there. DOD flat out abandons that and has it's dark mirror evil USA be the actual USA. That is looking at what Draka is trying to do and doing the whole concept differently but getting the same theme, it's not taking the Draka and trying to do things with them.
 
I'm curious what you think about Decades of Darkness. From what I hear, it arose out of a challenge to try and create a realistic Draka, and though I'm just over halfway finished with it (it's really long), so far it strikes me as quite engaging and well done.

It's very good, but it's also very much an orange to Stirling's apple. The technical/background appendices aside, you can't really compare the series as written to anything made in a completely different format.
 
I think part of me reacts positively to fix the Draka TLs as a counter-reaction to the argument that the Draka are simply the bad guys getting all the benefits and breaks the good guys usually get in stories - stories tend to have the good guys get all the breaks during the narrative itself, with the bad guys getting breaks in the backstory (so seemingly overwhelming odds for the good guys to overcome are set up) - but the Draka gets both the backstory breaks and the in-narrative breaks.

To be a little fair, at least in Marching Through Georgia, while they're still Mary Sues with a lopsided advantage, the tone doesn't doesn't sink to the level of later Tom Clancy (give the slightest nominal "oh they're a threat" before chapters of gratuitous stomping), much less Stuart Slade (don't even bother with that and just go right to the stomps, all while everyone constantly exclaims how good they are).

It does get worse in the The Stone Dogs, and in Under The Yoke, well, that's the least of that book's problems.
 
To be a little fair, at least in Marching Through Georgia, while they're still Mary Sues with a lopsided advantage, the tone doesn't doesn't sink to the level of later Tom Clancy (give the slightest nominal "oh they're a threat" before chapters of gratuitous stomping), much less Stuart Slade (don't even bother with that and just go right to the stomps, all while everyone constantly exclaims how good they are).

It does get worse in the The Stone Dogs, and in Under The Yoke, well, that's the least of that book's problems.
Improve it by having America with the nukes of 1948 of the Big One facing the Draka of the same year.
 
If there's one good lesson to learn from the Draka series, it's that it's the hyperexample of a work set in Africa that has no interest whatsoever in Africa or Africans. For that matter, it doesn't even have any real interest in Afrikaaners either- even if you're just going to be using the Evil Seef Effreekans who hate Bleck Peeple, Paul Kruger and Jan Smuts both would make far more interesting antagonists in a timeline than Sterling's lot.
 
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