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Least favorite alt-history story?

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.
I respectfully disagree.

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.
 
A good, near-perfect timeline has its own value as a thought-provoking intellectual exercise, by providing insights into actual history, and as entertainment, it's not a failure for not telling a good story because that is not the point- timelines aren't generally written with the aim of creating a good enough story to be publishable.

If you're reading all timelines expecting them to have a (conventional, narratively) good story you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

There's also variety within timelines as a medium, with some sub-types being more conducive to storytelling than others.

Setting out with the intention to write a story and then getting so mired in the alternate history that the narrative goes nowhere is perhaps a different matter.
 
As a masochist, after finishing the Trent Affair chapter in Dixie Victorious I vaguely committed myself to rereading the timelines on the subject, first being the American apogee, Burnished Rows Of Steel.

I should probably start by saying that it doesn’t *exactly* qualify as least favorite and points have to be given for scope / writing quality / depth of research. I do think, however, that it’s a good illustration of the danger of understanding a situation more enabling one to misunderstand it more.

To wit: exhaustive consultation of army lists down to the regiment level allows one to a) hammer people that disagree on pedantic points of detail b) construct an even better “best case” for one side and “worst case” for the other.

What do I mean by this? The single biggest divergence (and it’s reasonable seeming in itself, which is why a lot of criticisms missed it) is the Trent Affair leading to a sick McClellan demoted from general-in-chief after a month and then Lincoln appoints Mansfield and then Mansfield appoints competent West Pointers everywhere and takes Norfolk at the end of 1861 and burns it to the ground before the British navy even gets to the US.

This is simultaneously more informed (does your average Wikipedia reader even know who Joseph K. F. Mansfield is) and more misleading - Lincoln disliked Mansfield and still needed political generals, McClellan has too much clout and European experience to be (presciently) dropped in the middle of a war crisis, and the Confederates are presumably going to realize that Norfolk could be useful for the British navy and maybe they should defend it more at the same time that this occurs to the U.S.

Could the U.S. have hypothetically done all these things? Maybe, but it gets to the point where because of cumulative “butterflies” the CSA is doing worse in Virginia than in OTL, which is simply an on-face absurd outcome of Britain declaring war - and again, knowledge of detail does not help here, because explicitly having Lee fight Gettysburg and Antietam analogues (or the British Navy repeatedly fight Taku Forts analogugues) is “informed” but also profoundly cherry picking.



Ultimately I feel like greater knowledge of the history involved tends to improve alternate history but when you have an, er, desired outcome, it just provides so many more ways to *slightly* tilt events to accomplish it.
 
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One of the problems with Trent timelines is that, at least for a while, they were being written in part to spite whichever Trent timeline had immediately preceded them.

I'm not sure even Byzantine/Ottoman timelines prompt quite that degree of nationalistic... well, dick waving, frankly. It's worse because you often see a weird competitive dynamic emerge between author and audience. The update will feature the writer's chosen side carrying all before it, then they and their readers will take turn posting thousand word screeds on the Army of the Wherever's order of battle, they get increasingly excited and angry at each other until eventually someone storms out to start their own timeline to show what it's like when it's just done right.

The best one I've read is EnglishCanuck's TL (can't remember the name) which- at least in its revised form- seems to take a starting point the idea that no matter how Very Brave and Manly the Heroic Redcoats/Union Boys were, neither side was in any way prepared for war. The fact that the early campaigns basically consist of political generals attacking north against poorly trained militia nicely takes the sheen off the Glorious Battles for Glory thing you normally get.
 
The worst part of Burnished Rows of Steel was the author's planned ending, in which Britain doesn't get help from the US and is reduced in either alt-WWI or WWII (I can't remember) to a starving, nuked-to-hell nation. It was very obviously written with one hand, and I'm not entirely sure why the author hated Britain so much. It came off like a British person ran over his dog or something.
 
As a masochist, after finishing the Trent Affair chapter in Dixie Victorious I vaguely committed myself to rereading the timelines on the subject, first being the American apogee, Burnished Rows Of Steel.

Thrilling follow-up in the interests of fairness: An Unfortunate Event: The Trent Affair War.

Yeah, I feel fully comfortable putting this one in the "least favorite" category, considering that it has such highlights as, let's refresh our memories:

- half of Maine in 1860 was born in Britain and the state defects to the UK with open arms
- the South had 50,000 colored soldiers and the Civil War was "only an abolishionist war post-facto"
- literal quote: "The British public didn't give a monkeys about slavery " :cautious:
- because of... stuff, the Battle of Fort Donaldson (sic) is Grant failing to capture any soldiers followed by a decisive counter-attack (from Gideon Pillow, i.e. such a loser that Grant OTL accurately based his aggressive strategy on the knowledge that Pillow fucking sucked)
- "McClellan meanwhile had developed a bold new plan, typical of this dashing General" :cool:
- McClellan leaves a small force in DC to hold it (no) pivots north and surprises the British near Buffalo with a stunning attack (no) eventually decides that a coup is needed to overthrow Lincoln, does this and it ends well (no)
- it "was agreed" that Kansas would be a slave state, so off it goes, meanwhile Lincoln gets captured, stays in Britain, and is elected an MP for the University of London in 1880 (this is stupid but not in a way that actively offends me?)


I would feel bad about criticizing an obvious strawman except that the (c. 2008) response was "wow, finally a realistic timeline about the Trent Affair War" and the stuff about Maine and 50,000 Confederate black soldiers went wholly unaddressed, although people started catching on by "McClellan: God of War" or so. I dunno, my old account actually goes back quite a-ways on the board but it is unpleasantly jarring to remember how pro-Confederate / non-factual large portions of the AH community were just a decade ago.

Side-note, I tried reading a more recent naval one in the same vein and gave up because "then the mayor of new york surrendered the port because clearly this is up to him" and also it was all three sentence updates about the number of guns the ships had and I got bored. This leaves Wrapped In Flames, although I dunno that you'll see much about it here because that timeline is good.
 
Burnished Rows of Steel was their evil mirror universe equivalent.

But yeah, the McClellan Cabal is the fucking worst. zaffre sums up the problems with their approach pretty well, but doesn't capture just how psycho they are. They have little secret web hangouts (that are blogger comment sections because haha olds) where they try to dox TF Smith and me.

I didn’t know where to mention it, but the fact that two of the first three results for “Burnished Rows Of Steel” are the hate-blog named after it, criticizing it post by post for an audience of who (?) and also they missed an obvious Korean War reference username and doxed some random PhD candidate is

well it’s something

hahahahaha, I never actually read any of their nonsense except when they'd come into threads about other things and WELL ACTUALLY all over the place, but are you serious?

I remembered Kansas from the first time I read it and went in thinking “that must have been the worst of it”. I went out thinking that it is actually impossible to write a parody of Trent Affair War AH that would be in any way distinguishable from Trent Affair War AH.
 
For all of his knowledge

For all of his knowledge - which, as @zaffre intimates, was copious - on the subject, the author of Burnished Rows of Steel had an agenda. Remember that this is the author who thought that George III was the worst monarch in British history, because he lost America. A more devastating loss than those who lost their thrones, lives, and right to hand the throne over to their heir. Because America, fuck yeah. With apologies to Dr Seuss.

He did not like them, not one Brit,
He did not like their naval ships,
He did not like their soldiers red,
He wanted them to be shot dead,
He thought them sozzled on the gin,
And finished with a rolleyes grin :sneaky:

Lilac is bang on. When an author has an axe to grind, they are likely to use a wealth of knowledge for support rather than illumination.

Best,
 
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Enjoying @zaffre on various trent timelines. Can I assume there's no point in doing more as they're all basically the same? There was one very popular one on ah.com 'they shall meet us on the open sea' I think, that I glanced at, found impenetrable and backed away from.
 
Enjoying @zaffre on various trent timelines. Can I assume there's no point in doing more as they're all basically the same? There was one very popular one on ah.com 'they shall meet us on the open sea' I think, that I glanced at, found impenetrable and backed away from.


Wrapped in Flames is decent enough, especially in its revised version. Otherwise- yes, smile and back away.
 
I've not read TFSmith's timeline but I do recall he was regarded as ridiculously pro-Union in discussions outside of it so if he was pushing back against other offerings then it was only in small part. I seem to recall he said once that there was no way the Union could ever have lost the war.

I think there was a time where he was posting in US Civil War discusions simultaneous to 49th Tigers or whatever he was called, I.E TFSmith's Confederate mirror counterpart.
 
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I thought Civil War TLs were often the domain of Confederate apologists, like that AH with the name that escapes me, in which Richmond forms black regiments in 64 and wins the war by 65. Not sure if that one was a proper TL or just a really dumb scenario, though.
 
A Glorious Union is excellent, especially once you get past the rather dry updates on the war itself. It's got an interesting take on reconstruction, so far- on the one hand the ex-confederates are being treated much more harshly, to the point that the exile communities are much larger. On the other hand, there's some interesting implications that the Union is going to have an unhealthy cult of generals-turned-politicians with unfortunate consequences for civil society....
 
100%. The long and short of it is that yes, you had a diplomatic crisis that could have brought the US and Britain to war, but both sides were anxious to avoid conflict and neither had anything to gain or any particular reason to go to war. The scenarios presuppose two things:

1. That the British would want to go to war with the Americans simply because the author is anti-American and would like to see the U.S. defeated at the last point Britain could plausibly do so (or vice versa in the case of TF Smith).

2. That the U.S. acts completely insane for a few months just to set up this war.

Just like how yes, there were NATO and Pact troops facing off in Germany who had plans to go to war, but in a larger political context no one on either side had any particular desire to actually fight each other and way too much to lose to ever actually do it. You do have that very narrow window between 1985 and 1988 where the Russians still had an offensive conventional war plan and NATO had a chance to win without the war going nuclear, but that doesn't mean a conventional war was really imminent in a larger sense.

Knowing a whole bunch about the ratio of Leopard I to Leopard II in the West German II Corps may cause you to miss the point that this conventional warfare window only opened because of NATO's buildup and Russia's failure to match it, and that it was a product of much larger historical forces. A common person's understanding of the Cold War gives you a more accurate picture of the Fuldapocalypse scenario than a wargaming expert's. Similarly, the Trent affair only escalated to the point of (partial, symbolic) British mobilization due to initial American misunderstanding of the situation exacerbated by transatlantic communication difficulties. Expertise in the details of that mobilization can distract you from the fairly obvious fact that the British government had nothing to gain and no desire to go to war with their largest trading partner in defense of slavery.

I think the only difference I see between Trent and Fulda is that most Fuldapocalypse people don't have some type of wild anti-Communist (or pro-Communist) axe to grind, they're just looking at a wargaming scenario. The Trent people are usually goofy anti-Americans who think their surviving CSAs and weakened Americas represent a sort of utopia, whereas I've never seen a 1980's Hot War scenario that didn't emphasize to some degree bloody and destructive even a conventional war would be. Plus the best case scenario for Fuldapocalypse is...just exactly what happened OTL in 1991 without a war.



I think 67th Tigers had been banned for saying that actually slavery was good before TF Smith ever showed up, but they'd interacted elsewhere on the internet.

I do recall TF Smith saying that the U.S. should have used nuclear weapons on Anglo-French forces in the Suez.

I just remembered that back of the napkin scenario we came up with at the tiki bar - something about how a successful Mai 68 revolution was the only way for the Soviets to win WWIII.

Can't remember how we got there but that was a fun conversation
 
Enjoying @zaffre on various trent timelines. Can I assume there's no point in doing more as they're all basically the same? There was one very popular one on ah.com 'they shall meet us on the open sea' I think, that I glanced at, found impenetrable and backed away from.

That was the naval one I gave up on, yeah. Wrapped In Flames is reasonably objective (the only one where both sides win battles from time to time, which tells you how low the bar is here) but again the broader issue with Trent Wars is that neither outcome is, well, interesting? Either the British burn down D.C. again and we have a beautiful and attractive Confederacy or the U.S. just, like, eats Canada.

The core issue is that reading about all the tantalizing military possibilities, again, distracts from the political reality. Practically the only thing pro-UK and pro-US takes on it have in common is that the both sides suddenly, like, won't quit - either Woke Palmerston is dismembering the country or the US is pursuing a "Canada first" strategy because who cares about the literal army next to DC. To pivot off of @Burton K Wheeler's point - let's pretend the crisis somehow escalates to war. The boring reality is that Britain then pastes the U.S. fleet and skirmishes a bit in Canada and Lincoln goes "can we give you reparations and like, part of Minnesota" and Palmerston goes "great, we won, you got this Lee, bye" because a) Lincoln doesn't even want Canada and doesn't have time for this b) come on, Palmerston is canny enough to treat the CSA as useful idiots and nothing more
 

I'm a fan of the work. It's a great counterpoint to a lot of ACW works that do belong in the trashbin. Like there are real flaws when looking at the characterizations and the war gaming components but they're pretty well balanced by the narrative and the good ideas in the story. I kind of stopped following after my banning and his decision to have the US invade Abyssinia but the war itself was fascinating in a "I'm biting my tongue about some minor to moderate details right now" sense.
 
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