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Least favorite alt-history story?

Incidentally, is Turtledove his REAL name ? such a strange sounding / meaning name... a turtle and a dove hybrid, I just can't imagine that... in an alternate universe where Turtles rule over Earth, they are divided in two opposite factions. Some turtles wants war - Turtle "hawks" other are peaceful - the turtles... "doves".

Runs for cover !!!

It is, in fact, so much his real name that he published some of his early novels under other names at the insistence of his editors who did not think it was appropriate.
 
It is, in fact, so much his real name that he published some of his early novels under other names at the insistence of his editors who did not think it was appropriate.
Some of Turtledove's pseudonyms:

Eric G. Iverson
Mark Gordian
Dan Chernenko
H.N. Turtletaub (which is German for Turtledove)
 
Incidentally, is Turtledove his REAL name ? such a strange sounding / meaning name... a turtle and a dove hybrid, I just can't imagine that... in an alternate universe where Turtles rule over Earth, they are divided in two opposite factions. Some turtles wants war - Turtle "hawks" other are peaceful - the turtles... "doves".

Runs for cover !!!

They're birds.

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And one-twelfth of a popular Christmas song.

Although if we're talking weird surnames, I think HR departments have even celebrities beat. I've had a meeting with two reps from a company's HR department whose surnames were (I shit you not) Window and Sill.

The city attorney of my hometown is surnamed 'Slye'.

His former partner is 'Burrows'.

Yes, these are literally names you would give fictional attorneys as a joke, and would be rightly pilloried for doing so.
 
Surely enough in France is a Doctor called "Bonnemort" - would you accept to be cared by a physician with the name of "have-a-good-death" ?

And well, Jean Marie Le Pen daughter (not Marine but her elder sister) married a man with the name of Maréchal (as in Maréchal Pétain, LMAO).

And since Vichy France anthem was "Maréchal, nous voilà" (Maréchal, here we come to you) imagine Le Pen in a crowded railway station searching for his stepson and shouting, his right arm raised (of course) "Hé, Maréchal, nous voilà !" ROTFL

There is also a trademark of canned food in France called William Saurin. Well, during a summer part time job spent checking tax returns sheets, I FOUND HIM. William Saurin, of all names. With my colleague we actually ran a contest for the silliest names we could find and laughed our arses off. I remember I found many Renard (foxes) and, more disturbingly, some Chevreuil (deers !). Those people ought not crossing a forrest in autmn or when Elmer Fudd is around...
 
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One of my "guilty pleasure" favorite internet pages. Most stupid / unfortunate French names, ever.

http://www.geopatronyme.com/cdip/insolite/malsonnants.html

OMFG I found my (aptly named) math teacher there ! http://www.geopatronyme.com/nomcarte/BAISECOURT

Imagine... you have for three entire years a math teacher that is, by himself, an insult to the job of teacher, the worst of his kind. Stubborn, bad faith, racist, guaranted 100% of a bastard.

His name ? "Monsieur Baisecourt".
Baise = fuck.
Court = short / fast / brief

"Hello, I'm your math teacher, and my name is M. Fastfucker"

Can you believe that ?

This sounds straight out of one of these creepy Ben Stiller movies with De Niro, but unfortunately I can assure the man is unfortunately, very real.
 
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More recently when working at the Archives service of a large city, the Director (a woman) was called Vatican. Unbelievable. I searched on this website, she is the one and only. Even more astonishingly, at the bottom end of the service was the janitor whose name was Leprêtre, which translates as "The priest".

so much for France obsession with laicity ! We had a pope and a priest, LMAO.

A long time ago was an athlet with the name of Charles Trouabal, which sounds like "trou de balle" - bullet hole, but also "ass hole". He was from Martinique and aparently his name was a relic from slavery, where black orphans were given humiliating names on purpose.

There is also the astonishing case of that french basketball player with the name of Gelabal, which exactly sounds like "J'ai la balle" = "I got the ball ! I got the ball !"
Imagine the airplane-like Over / Roger situation on the playground
"A toi, Gelabal !"
"Quoi ?"
"Non, pas toi, j'ai la balle !"
"Hein ?"

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickaël_Gelabale
 
Yeah, it gets worse when it's revealed that a few nukes do fly, but not many and too late to change anything.

Because that is why the USSR stockpiled the damn things. To not use them when they were needed in an existential struggle.

For me it was when the Soviet Union was invaded by NATO(!) with the West Germans led by a "redeemed" Nazi(!!) and the Soviets didn't use nuclear weapons (!!!).

Actually, at points the TL reminded me not so much of a Neo-Nazi Wank (which it very much was and is) but a weirdly meta TL whose basis was "what if the West was exactly the bunch of fascists the most unsubtle Soviet propaganda said it was".
 
I've never read it so I like hearing funny details.

They're funny in isolation. Taken as a whole, they form a 500lb gorilla that sits on the reader.

Especially with that damn awful writing style. I can't emphasize its badness enough. It's like reading a technical manual that was originally written in another language and has gotten a lifeless, occasionally wonky translation.
 
I suppose this could be a long rant. It's just a lazy gimmick that's gotten out of hand. More deeply, it speaks to how Wikipedia is actually making the sum of human knowledge less, not more, and how so many peoples' understanding of history is based entirely on Wikipedia articles.
That's a fair point, especially the last bit. It also probably encourages people to start timelines without doing much research beyond Wikipedia, which not only lessens the quality of the product but makes it less likely that timeline will be finished or even get off the ground. I include wikiboxes in my timelines because they're fun to make, and because sometimes I don't want to go traipsing around Google and Getty for two hours in hopes of finding the right graphic. Even so, I know how dull it is to have all the wikiboxes be election-based, so I like to mix it up sometimes, throwing in speeches, catastrophes and labor strikes in with the typical battles and elections.
 
I do sort of like the idea of information being presented in a clear and cogent way that's not just blocks of text, but wikiboxes seem to discourage rather than encourage creativity.
I've had a lot of fun writing extracts alt-Wikipedia which are unreliable sources, as part of timelines. There may be ways to do a similar thing with wiki boxes, such as showing different edits of a wikibox as part of an edit war about a contentious event.
 
Since we're on a rant here about bad alternate history, let me get my widest brush and say the entire art form of the timeline makes bad stories of good alternate history. You may write a good, neigh-perfect timeline, but the issue is you then need to craft a story or all you've done is the intellectual equivalent of exhibitionism, depending on the degree of separation your alias has from reality. Some timelines pull this off and have a good enough story to even be publishable, but the majority don't- and this being the internet, Sturgeon's Law dictates that as the pool expands, the more shit you need to wade through to get to the good.
 
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