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Least favorite alt-history story?

Fred the Great said:
I recall it was rather nationalist too, like particularly against the French. But it was a long time ago when I read it and had a disagreement with him.
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TBO (and this is the first book at that) takes time out to have a B-36 with conventional bombs drop them on the Champs Elysee as a political statement. I could actually let the in-universe justification slide if not for the fact that they're otherwise incredibly (and unrealistically for a WWII army) worried about losses to risk a B-36 on a stunt. But, the fact is that the book was written for a small, hard-right audience at the height of the "Freedom Fries" period...
 
Coiler said:
Well, for all that the first book isn't quite as bad, the rest of The Big One is pretty terrible.

The first book I mentioned in the review is the best part. Then it just goes bonkers. The surviving Germans in Russia manage to hold on for several years(!) and then retreat into the Middle East, where they join a talcman "caliphate" that has multiple caliphs and is de facto led by Kohmeini (I shouldn't need to explain how inaccurate this is). On the other side of Asia, the pop-history "China absorbs its conquerors" trope applies to Imperial Japan and you get -Chipan. Yes, it's called that. All these exist solely to provide pop-up targets for SAC's super-bombers without the evil McNamara to cancel them.

The real presidents all appear, simply so the immortal Mary Sue advisors can praise (Reagan) or scold them (Everyone else). Yes, there are immortal Mary Sue advisors in what otherwise prides itself on its realism. And a lack of other butterflies, there's still a Falklands invasion in 1982 (only with more toys), and the fighting in Southeast Asia in the late 1980s that dooms Chipan and kills its leader Masanobu Tsuiji is full of names from the real Vietnam War to the point where either the author was lazy in choosing them or these geriatrics were dragging themselves to the front line (including Ho Chi Minh, who appears long after he died of natural causes. I could nitpick a lot more, but you get the idea.
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You have immortal beings, talking bombers, magic oil deposits in Siberia, so a zombie Ho Chi Minh isn't that implausible. Put that all aside a US Cold War with a Imperial Japan and her co-prosperity sphere would be an interesting but pulpy AH setting.
 
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The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove is pretty bad. Africaan terrorists go back in time to give Bobby Lee AK's and modern medicine to treat his heart condition to make sure slavery and white supremacy wins, but somehow after Lee wins the Africaans lose and Lee ends up becoming president of the CSA, freeing its slaves, and everyone sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya.
 
StephenColbert27 said:
The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove is pretty bad. Africaan terrorists go back in time to give Bobby Lee AK's and modern medicine to treat his heart condition to make sure slavery and white supremacy wins, but somehow after Lee wins the Africaans lose and Lee ends up becoming president of the CSA, freeing its slaves, and everyone sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya.
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Well, given that Lee thought slavery shouldn't be abolished until the day Jesus comes back, I find it extremely unlikely that he would abolish it even if future books showed that it was. He'd be a hardliner on slavery thinking the Americans abandoned God or something like that.
 
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Stateless said:
David Frum wrote a short piece in Andrew Roberts' What Might Have Been? called The Chads Fall Off in Florida, in which Al Gore is all exposition in Air Force One and they say they'll leave Iraq for Hillary apropos of nothing.
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Not to mention a hamfisted 'Gore would have worried more about the environmental impact of war in Afghanistan than getting Bin Laden' thing.
 
USSManhattan said:
I'd say the alternate endings of the 1996 game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time would be mine. The game itself I still enjoy being a Titanic buff and it was great fun as a kid, but two history degrees and many books later, those alternate endings...

-No World War I because a necklace and the RL copy of the Rubaiyat are not used to finance the Black Hand and, among other things, they do not assassinate Franz Ferdinand (since I guess those are the only ways to raise money and that's only way to trigger a war in 1910s Europe).

-No World War II because Adolf Hitler's painting (the one used painted in 1914) is made famous for getting off the Titanic and he becomes a famous painter, irregardless of if World War I happens or not.

-No Soviet Union because of a Tsarist spy's list of names (including Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky) is delivered to the Okhrana and they're all hunted down. No mention about the whole "autocracy" thing.

Mixing and matching items saved from the ship gives such delights as Soviet Europe, Nazi Europe and Hitler nuking London.
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The great man theory of history is inherently flawed but if you accept the premise of a first person mystery game about changing the past then it can't really be helped. Whilst the scenarios are implausible some of them were at least inventive, preventing the Russian Revolution only for Germany to become Communist or for the surviving Tsarist regime to be unable to fend off Barbarossa were both novel ideas.
 
Jasen777 said:
Stars and Stripes Forever and the resulting series. So terrible people try to claim it's parody.
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A summary for those who don't know. The U.K. intervenes in the ACW for the Confederacy over the Trent Affair by accidentally invading the Confederacy. Union and Confederate forces unite to face the new threat. Few books later... American steam tanks in London. And all the characters talk in newspaper headlines.
 
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