I'll admit, I browsed the post-1900 - and will comment more here on post-1900 threads too - because my knowledge of most stuff pre-late-19th-century is a lot spottier than post. If you do a really in-depth Norse Ireland AH, if it's not footnoted I'll not know which bits are the AH unless you start with an obvious "Irish Vikings bash up the Tudors" chapter
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Least favorite alt-history story?
- Thread starter Resurgam
- Start date
I'll admit, I browsed the post-1900 - and will comment more here on post-1900 threads too - because my knowledge of most stuff pre-late-19th-century is a lot spottier than post. If you do a really in-depth Norse Ireland AH, if it's not footnoted I'll not know which bits are the AH unless you start with an obvious "Irish Vikings bash up the Tudors" chapter
- Pronouns
- he/him
I suppose my counter argument to that is that hasn't stopped mainstream non alternate historical fiction such as Zulu, Black Sails, Sharpe, Braveheart, Cleopatra, The Last Kingdom, Last Samurai, White Queen, etc covering areas with less historical awareness.
I don't think you really do need to rely on things the audience already knows.
- Location
- Over the rainbow
I’ll admit that one of the more whimsical scenarios floating at the back of my mind is a scenario where the alt-Confederacy does better in the West for Reasons, leading to Kentucky being majority supportive of the Confederates. Until they get crushed in the East with Union steam tanks.
Plausible? Not remotely. But would be fun to write in a silly sort of way.
- Location
- Over the rainbow
The difference is that AH is more about showing the changes to history. Historical fiction is just about being immersed in the era. Readers with different levels of historical knowledge can still enjoy that, and potentially learn something more about the era. (Setting aside questions of historical accuracy for the moment.)
With AH, a big part of the point is the changes to history. Which are harder to appreciate without knowing knowing the history. And readers with only a casual knowledge of history will wonder more about whether they’re finding out about real events or unreal events.
And if it’s an AH story where the changes are minor or irrelevant to the story, one might as well just write it as straight historical fiction. Easier to write, and much easier to market to a wider audience.
Thinking about it, a mainstream aimed, broader strokes narrative-focus AH would be able to do a field we're not as familiar with because it would target something we did have an idea of, or at least it would use that as its way in to talk about other stuff*. "So you know Haiti is a poor country dominated by America, but in Guns Of The Hispanola we've got one that isn't and there's some war!" "China became communist but in The Woman In The High Building, it's not and look what's different and there's some sexy sex!" Or so on. And that audience won't need or expect more than broadstrokes about what changed.
* Gurinder Chadha had an interview with Film Stories #7 saying she's basically tricked mainstream audiences into seeing racially political films about an immigrant father who wasn't allowed to do what he wanted and wants to protect his daughter from British society chewing her up by saying "CHECK OUT THIS LOVELY CHARMING GIRL FOOTBALL FILM"
* Gurinder Chadha had an interview with Film Stories #7 saying she's basically tricked mainstream audiences into seeing racially political films about an immigrant father who wasn't allowed to do what he wanted and wants to protect his daughter from British society chewing her up by saying "CHECK OUT THIS LOVELY CHARMING GIRL FOOTBALL FILM"
Much of the existing stuff that could fall into that category (to varying degrees depending on the individual work) just isn't marketed or branded as alternate history. There sadly just isn't that much incentive (and thus motivation) to do so.
Major Major
Member
How about (deep breath) The Plot Against America?
Everyone was so wildly enthusiastic about a real-life Big Name Author writing AH. Yet he fell into a morass of blunders, weird assumptions, and laziness.
Consider:
Lindbergh wins every state except Maryland, running on a pure isolationist platform
He campaigns by flying all over the country in The Spirit of St. Louis (it was an exhibit in the Smithsonian by then)
Once inaugurated in 1941, he flies to Iceland to meet with Hitler (it was occupied by the British then)
He then flies to Hawaii and meet with Prince Konoye, agreeing to permit the Japanese to continue the China Incident
After his disappearance over the Atlantic, the special election brings Roosevelt back to power, and WWII goes on the same as in OTL but slightly later
It turns out that the Nazis engineered his campaign by being behind the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.
And I won't even get into the errors he makes about Louisville (well, like having the airport be several miles out of the city when in real life it was on the city line then).
Everyone was so wildly enthusiastic about a real-life Big Name Author writing AH. Yet he fell into a morass of blunders, weird assumptions, and laziness.
Consider:
Lindbergh wins every state except Maryland, running on a pure isolationist platform
He campaigns by flying all over the country in The Spirit of St. Louis (it was an exhibit in the Smithsonian by then)
Once inaugurated in 1941, he flies to Iceland to meet with Hitler (it was occupied by the British then)
He then flies to Hawaii and meet with Prince Konoye, agreeing to permit the Japanese to continue the China Incident
After his disappearance over the Atlantic, the special election brings Roosevelt back to power, and WWII goes on the same as in OTL but slightly later
It turns out that the Nazis engineered his campaign by being behind the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.
And I won't even get into the errors he makes about Louisville (well, like having the airport be several miles out of the city when in real life it was on the city line then).
- Location
- Albany, NY
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Plot Against America was a rather cheep political screed about George W Bush being a dictator, which was the whole problem.
That said the HBO Adaptation this year was brilliant.
That said the HBO Adaptation this year was brilliant.
Major Major
Member
Well, there was one, I didn't actually read, but . . .
Sit around the fire and listen to the Old Prospector bloviate.
Back in the Elder Days, when soc.history.what-if and alt.history.what-if were the places for online AH, we didn't have none of them boards or sich, there was a feller . . . oh, never mind. There was a poster on the SHWI and AHWI Usenet who was called "Quonster". He had several appalling opinions, saying things like, for example, that Hogwarts would have thrown Harry Potter out when he showed up for the first day of class, if he had been in charge. And others. One of his usernames was Backto1913.
Anyhow, he claimed to be a "Peninsulare". Which was his term for being a Korean. And one day he began to write about a Korean future-war book. This epos was titled Def-Con. It was written by a popular Korean writer named Kim Kyungjin, with the aid of a team of Korean generals and admirals as technical advisors.
[There seems to be a real writer named Kim Kyungjin, and I once saw a page for a book titled Def-Con by Kim Kyungjin on Amazon, but they wanted too much and had no description.]
The scenario was that the two Koreas had reunited. The United States had gone to war with the united country.
The Koreans sent the personnel of an infantry division, and several ex-North Korean commando teams, to Mexico, which had fallen into even worse drug-gang anarchy. This unit moved to the north and invaded Texas.
The Koreans took weapons from Texas National Guard armories. The Texas National Guard seemed to be helpless. The governors of the neighboring states refused to send their National Guard units to Texas.
The commandos spread out over the south and west. Bridges were destroyed, making it impossible to move up troops. Single commando teams destroyed entire defense plants.
The Mexican-American population revolted and joined the invaders, highlighted by the Mayor of San Antonio, a Chicano, declaring for the Koreans.
Once Texas was secured, the Koreans turned west and attacked California.
Now to be fair, the entire rest of the posters tore this apart, and Quonster continued to post justifications. But it still sticks in my mind as one of the worst AH/Future-war books I've ever heard about.
As I recall, Quonster disappeared a little while later, saying he would be back in three months. He never came back, it seems.
Sit around the fire and listen to the Old Prospector bloviate.
Back in the Elder Days, when soc.history.what-if and alt.history.what-if were the places for online AH, we didn't have none of them boards or sich, there was a feller . . . oh, never mind. There was a poster on the SHWI and AHWI Usenet who was called "Quonster". He had several appalling opinions, saying things like, for example, that Hogwarts would have thrown Harry Potter out when he showed up for the first day of class, if he had been in charge. And others. One of his usernames was Backto1913.
Anyhow, he claimed to be a "Peninsulare". Which was his term for being a Korean. And one day he began to write about a Korean future-war book. This epos was titled Def-Con. It was written by a popular Korean writer named Kim Kyungjin, with the aid of a team of Korean generals and admirals as technical advisors.
[There seems to be a real writer named Kim Kyungjin, and I once saw a page for a book titled Def-Con by Kim Kyungjin on Amazon, but they wanted too much and had no description.]
The scenario was that the two Koreas had reunited. The United States had gone to war with the united country.
The Koreans sent the personnel of an infantry division, and several ex-North Korean commando teams, to Mexico, which had fallen into even worse drug-gang anarchy. This unit moved to the north and invaded Texas.
The Koreans took weapons from Texas National Guard armories. The Texas National Guard seemed to be helpless. The governors of the neighboring states refused to send their National Guard units to Texas.
The commandos spread out over the south and west. Bridges were destroyed, making it impossible to move up troops. Single commando teams destroyed entire defense plants.
The Mexican-American population revolted and joined the invaders, highlighted by the Mayor of San Antonio, a Chicano, declaring for the Koreans.
Once Texas was secured, the Koreans turned west and attacked California.
Now to be fair, the entire rest of the posters tore this apart, and Quonster continued to post justifications. But it still sticks in my mind as one of the worst AH/Future-war books I've ever heard about.
As I recall, Quonster disappeared a little while later, saying he would be back in three months. He never came back, it seems.
Major Major
Member
I think my memory mercifully deleted those opinions.
Even his historical knowledge was . . . deficient, as when he claimed that Robert E. Peary reached the North Pole but his assistant and chief worker Matthew Henson didn't. I know something about this. HE WAS WRONG!!!
If anyone asks I'll be glad to go into the details. (P.S. Tomorrow is Matt Henson's birthday.)
They still do, but most of them have either migrated to Russia or are on Discord or 8chan trying to doxx/swat feminists or BLM activists.
Talwar
Well-Known Sword
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I vaguely recall that Korean story, or at least hearing of it. Never read it. It definitely sounds like a thing.
TR1996
Well-known member
- Location
- Adelaide, South Australia
Still a more plausible Korean invasion of the United States scenario than the one in the Red Dawn remake.
It worked as a sort of slow creep in how bigotry can seem to be something relegated to fringe extremists only to become the norm very quickly, I think it helps in it being told from a child's perspective as well. The contrived happy ending did kinda spoil what had been good about the book but I think one of the things that makes the HBO adaptation really stand out is that it makes the ending more bittersweet and contemplative. It fixes other things too, like the election being a lot closer. Also the notion of Lindbergh being a Nazi puppet is presented as more of a conspiracy theory than heavily implied to be the truth as it was in the book although it kept the Iceland meeting which felt a bit bizarre. There were other elements where it felt like they went above and beyond, like the newsreels featuring 2nd Kharkov but they missed that one? Who knows, maybe Roosevelt used his remaining months as President to hasten the American occupation in order to try and force Lindbergh into taking some responsbility in the Atlantic.
It's rather poetic that the film about standing up to oppressive foreign powers had to make its plot nonsensical to appease an oppressive foreign power.
Space Oddity
Hold on, hold on, tomorrow will be there.
I've been meaning to ask--is this ever getting written?
Hey! I appreciate the interest! The answer is maybe. I have over 100 pages of notes written up for all the content up to the 1980s but I gave up on it a while ago. I might get back to it at a certain point but the TL is exhausting to get through as I'm sure you're aware by now.
Space Oddity
Hold on, hold on, tomorrow will be there.
As I've noted before, Congressman's style is atrocious enough to have made a TL with a decent concept unreadable. When added to the hateful, chaotic drek that is Queen Nixon in... it's like letting the proverbial 800 lb gorilla sit on your head.
Did you have anything on the conventional WW3?
I actually, with my fascination for such things, found it actually wasn't either a knockoff of primary sources or technothrillers beyond the very surface (ie, conventional WW3 where the Soviets invade Iceland). In any detail, it was, well...
- From the first wikibox, the numbers of troops stated are consistently too high and the number of tanks consistently too low (and the wikiboxes are often describing situations where the formations would be at full strength). Normally I'd let it pass, but if all you're describing is numbers, well, the numbers should be more accurate.
- See, if this was following technothrillers, especially later ones, the Soviet advance should be foiled with NATO airpower/smart weapons at a low human cost, and it isn't. If this was following primary sources/studies too literally, it'd read like them (trust me, I'd know) and it doesn't. Instead the initial advance is almost 4 million Soviet troops grinding their way across Neo-Imperial Germany over the course of several months against almost 3 million NATO ones. Remember what I said about the troop numbers being too big?
- The inspiration (when there's any coherent inspiration at all instead of just picking a spot of the world and plopping a wikibox with giant numbers and E-list OTL figures down on it) is obviously from World War 2. Bomber aircraft just drop on cities. Everyone has a totally mobilized population. The war lasts for more than two and a half years of constant high-intensity fighting. The way the final battle of Moscow is described is clearly based on the Battle of Berlin.
- I also have suspicions that some of this might be inspired by/taken from AANW, because that also has dry descriptions of gigantic armies fighting across Europe for years. It certainly feels closer to that than any published 198X WW3 tale I've read.
- It's still in my eyes the most coherent part (very relatively speaking) of NDCR because the war is at least a common backdrop to everything instead of just a bunch of unrelated wikiboxes and stock photos.
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- He/Him
I remember hearing NDCR essentially makes Tony Benn huff glue and become Peter Shore but wacky which is a look to say the least for starters.
I’m not going to read it because I have better things to do.
I’m not going to read it because I have better things to do.
Space Oddity
Hold on, hold on, tomorrow will be there.
It's complicated, I'd argue--on the one hand, the Nuke Free WWIII does give the thing a thread that much of the rest of the TL lacks--the closest equivalent elsewhere in the TL would be the later Ted Bundy is President Serial Killer "plotline". The problem is that entire thread is improbable, off-putting and dull even by the standards of Queen Nixon in... Yes, Congressman is no longer simply horrifying us with terrifying pro-fascist randomness, but he is instead reading us a technical manual badly and insisting it's art.