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Least favorite alt-history story?

or when Churchill has the whole country liberally dosed with mustard gas after warning The Race about it.

I liked that the Big Five suddenly went, "Oh yeah, we can use gas!" collectively after that happened. It reminded me of the scene in Mars Attacks where the President has to be reminded that the US has nukes.

Wasn't she around in at least the first book?

She has a brief cameo in Anielewicz's PoV but that's about it, Jager barely gets a mention. To be honest the romance between the two of them always felt a bit forced, I realise that mututal attraction can transcend ideology and experience but if you're going to have that sort of bizarre match then it should really be explored in a bit more depth. Not that I didn't enjoy their respective PoVs, Jager's was particularly awkward when the Nazis start to lay into the Lizards and you can't help but wonder who you actually want to win.
 
I don't know where else to ask this, but perhaps this place might be appropriate, but just a question: How far away can a TL's POD should be from the present, to the point where the most plausible option is to have fictional characters play a center stage?
 
There's so much that could be said about Worldwar and Worldwar: Colonisation that honestly I don't know where to start. Despite its obvious flaws, it was the series that got me into alternate history along with The Guns of the South and the Southern Victory huge-ology.

Something to ruminate on, but one thing that always stuck out to me was the distinct lack of sea-based scenes in Worldwar especially as it seemed like every other scene in Southern Victory was on an aircraft carrier. I know we had the whole 'The Race comes from a desert planet without bodies of water' and 'it takes centuries for them to consider something heretical like using a different kind of screw' but IIRC there are constantly scenes, especially in the latter books when the push towards Chicago takes place, where ships can just transfer supplies over the water because it confuses The Race or something. That always stood out to me - I mean, they weren't stupid, and after a few weeks of 'what's this wet stuff' you'd think they'd be bombing anything that floats.
The Race being unable to learn and develop new technologies got old really quickly. I get that having a human vs. alien conflict where the aliens aren't 10 million years ahead of us technologically requires some justification like that. However, after a certain point it just became The Race grasping the idiot ball for dear life, and I started to feel like that was the only reason they were unable to crush the humans.

The Race becoming ginger-addicts was also really weird, and I was never sure if Turtledove intended for us to take that seriously or if it was supposed to be a comedic part of the series. I hope it was the latter, because an intelligent lizard becoming a hooker in exchange for ginger is impossible to take seriously.
 
I don't know where else to ask this, but perhaps this place might be appropriate, but just a question: How far away can a TL's POD should be from the present, to the point where the most plausible option is to have fictional characters play a center stage?
Depending on the PoD, 25 years to 50. I know that's broad, but really it's TL to TL.

Really just the rule of thumb is that once you're three generations deep you're going to be writing with purely fictional characters.
 
Losing the Peace is a prime example of TLs whose author just thinks "hm, how can I make the world be worse?" and not much else put into it.

There's a lot of structural bias towards dystopian TLs.

  • Sudden SHOCK VALUE antics can attract attention more often than small, subtle changes.
  • The fandom is, for whatever reason, more willing to slam utopian changes than dystopian ones, even if they're not as plausible. Perhaps this is because...
  • Dystopias make for very good bludgeons used to strike a political side you don't like.
 
I had a writer friend who wanted to do a story about the Challenger mission if the space shuttle had not exploded. I don't know if she finished it before she died, but I could never figure out what the story would be. I mean, shuttle goes up, missions get performed, shuttle returns, everyone's happy. Where's the story?
 
I had a writer friend who wanted to do a story about the Challenger mission if the space shuttle had not exploded. I don't know if she finished it before she died, but I could never figure out what the story would be. I mean, shuttle goes up, missions get performed, shuttle returns, everyone's happy. Where's the story?
If it was on AH.com, the teacher astronaut who died would go on to have a political career and defeat Hilary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary and then go on to defeat Trump in the general because she campaigned in Wisconsin.

Told in Wikiboxes.
 
I had a writer friend who wanted to do a story about the Challenger mission if the space shuttle had not exploded. I don't know if she finished it before she died, but I could never figure out what the story would be. I mean, shuttle goes up, missions get performed, shuttle returns, everyone's happy. Where's the story?
The story is in absence of the Challenger Disaster, I'd of thought, in which the social and political events that can be directly tied to it happening simply don't happen, and a gradual wave of changes due to these.
 
If it was on AH.com, the teacher astronaut who died would go on to have a political career and defeat Hilary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary and then go on to defeat Trump in the general because she campaigned in Wisconsin.

Told in Wikiboxes.
And be given an inordinate amount of Turtledoves and maybe even the Unapologetic Neo-Confederate Award for “Excellence”.
 
I really tried to get into Turtledove, but his American Empire series was just... boring.

It...isn't his best, to be honest. It could quite easily have been a trilogy instead of however many books it actually is

The 'prequel', How Few Remain, is very excellent and well-worth reading without needing to go any further.
 
I had a writer friend who wanted to do a story about the Challenger mission if the space shuttle had not exploded. I don't know if she finished it before she died, but I could never figure out what the story would be. I mean, shuttle goes up, missions get performed, shuttle returns, everyone's happy. Where's the story?
The story is in absence of the Challenger Disaster, I'd of thought, in which the social and political events that can be directly tied to it happening simply don't happen, and a gradual wave of changes due to these.

What moth said is how I've always pictured a timeline in which you don't see the loss of Challenger, considering it was (from what I understand correctly) heavily reported for Teacher-in-Space and arguably the social impact that it had?

Considering the pace of flights and the issues present and emerging pre-Challenger, something was bound to happen to the Shuttle sooner or later. It could've been something like a loss on one of the 'Death Star' missions (i.e. having to carry the Centaur-G in the payload bay) when the Shuttle was basically being pushed to its limit with the SSMEs running at 109%. Or you might've seen something instead like an RTLS needing to be performed and while it doesn't result in a LOCV (Loss of Crew and Vehicle), it sees a program stand down which then emerges into something bigger and a full review of the program...
 
You are all right to point out that if the Challenger had not been destroyed, the problems at NASA that caused the disaster would not have been corrected and a more serious accident could have happened during a later launch. Such as if a shuttle launch had gone off course and crashed in the middle of a city, instead of just exploding, for instance.
 
You are all right to point out that if the Challenger had not been destroyed, the problems at NASA that caused the disaster would not have been corrected and a more serious accident could have happened during a later launch. Such as if a shuttle launch had gone off course and crashed in the middle of a city, instead of just exploding, for instance.

I'm going to point out that there is no feasible way for a Shuttle to have 'gone off course and crashed in the middle of a city'. If a Shuttle launch, or any rocket launch, found itself heading towards a populated area, the range safety officer would destroy the vehicle.
 
I'm going to point out that there is no feasible way for a Shuttle to have 'gone off course and crashed in the middle of a city'. If a Shuttle launch, or any rocket launch, found itself heading towards a populated area, the range safety officer would destroy the vehicle.

As an addendum to this, like, the worst potential a Shuttle disaster could've been is what nearly happened to Columbia on STS-61-C (the mission immediately prior to STS-51-L), where after a scrub, it was discovered that a broken LOX sensor probe was discovered lodged in the prevalve of one of the engines. If the launch wasn't scrubbed and had seen main engine ignition...

The engine would've exploded (like, to put it into perspective for how powerful the SSMEs were, the hydrogen turbopump ran at seventy-five thousand horsepower. It was more powerful than the Titanic, which had fifty-five thousand horsepower combined), and would likely to have been guaranteed to have seen the Space Shuttle blow up on the pad.
 
Not to derail this back to 'the serial killer political career thread' again (he says, doing just that), but Harold Shipman was part of his local Conservative club. Him becoming an MP seems far-fetched though, but maybe a councillor.

This is an unwritten role in "For All Time" isn't it?

President Jones
Governor Jim Jones
Chairman Chikatilo

The logical continuation is Shipman being PM. IIRC Fred West was an admiral in Roem's continuation of the story.
 
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