- Location
- Over the rainbow
I respectfully disagree.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.
Timelines are their own art form. As a form of alternate history, they're perfectly respectable and should be considered on their own terms. Sure, they're not to everyone's tastes, but then that's true of any art form. Criticising timelines for making bad stories is like criticising a sculpture for making a bad story - a timeline isn't necessarily telling a story, nor is a sculpture. There may well be a story behind the sculpture, just as one or more stories may be written in the world explored by a timeline, but that doesn't make a timeline a bad alternate history any more than a sculpture is a bad story.
If crafting a story, then of course the alternate history is simply part of the setting for the story. But a timeline doesn't need to tell a story in itself; it may simply be exploring an alternate world, or have another purpose.
I would agree that Sturgeon's Law applies to timelines as much as it applies to anything else. Even then, though, my view of most published books is that the large majority are bad for one reason or another, and that's after passing through the filter of publication. When timelines lack that filter an even higher proportion are going to be bad. But that doesn't mean that a timeline has to be bad, and there are plenty of timelines which I've enjoyed on their own terms without needing a story attached to them.