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Least favorite alt-history story?

The Two Georges. Why does a union of North American and Britain have to be portrayed as technologically way behind the current day? And why are there always zeppelins instead of planes? And cars use steam engines instead of regular gas. What if an alternate reality was technologically up to date in a parallel universe?

I don’t think it is actually technologically way behind the current day. Here's what it says about planes:

Bushell savored his feeling of contentment with the world; he knew it too seldom. He leaned back in his chair, peered out the window once more. Suddenly he pointed. “Look! There’s an aeroplane!”

“Where?” The fat man stared. “Ah, I see it. Not a sight one comes across every day.”

“Not in peacetime, certainly,” Bushell said. The aeroplane flashed by at breathtaking speed, twin wings above and below its lean, sharklike fuselage providing lift. It was gone before Bushell got more than a glimpse of the blue, white, and red roundel on its flank that announced it belonged to the Royal North American Flying Corps.

The fat man puffed moodily on his cigar. “So much speed is vulgar, don’t you think?”

Useful for the military,” Bushell answered. “In civilian life, though, there’s not usually much point to dashing across the continent in ten or twelve hours. You hardly have the time to accomplish anything while you’re traveling.”

“Quite, quite.” The fat man’s jowls wobbled when he nodded. “If you need to get anyplace in such a tearing hurry, chances are you’ve either started too late or, more likely, put less thought into your journey than you should have.”

And here's what it says about TVs:

A patch of light in a dark doorway made Bushell’s head whip around as the steamer passed through an urban stretch. When he saw the doorway belonged to a tavern, he relaxed. “I was afraid that might have been a fire,” he said, “but it’s just a televisor screen.”

“Nothing like getting together with your chums after a hard day, soaking up a pint or two while you watch the cricket matches or rugby or tennis or whatever happens to be showing,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Keep your eyes on the screen and you don’t have to think about what ails you - or much of anything else, come to that.

They passed a trafficator whose wigwag signs gave cars on the cross street the right of way. “Do you know,” Bushell remarked, “one of the airship passengers was boasting at supper last night that he had a televisor screen in his own home.”

His friend turned to stare at him, incredulous distaste on his face. “You are joking, I hope.”

Bushell raised his right hand, as if he were about to stand in the witness box. “Upon my solemn oath.”

The wigwag switched. He put the steamer back into gear.

“Why would anyone want such a thing?” Stanley said, not so much to Bushell as to the world at large.

“Wireless is one thing: you can read or talk or do anything else you care to while it’s on. But a televisor screen ... if it’s showing something, you bloody well have towatch it. Suppose you have guests? I’ve never heard of anything so, so vulgar in all my life, I don’t think. Besides, televisors don’t come cheap. What did this chap do, anyhow?

So, it sounds like the Two Georges is close technologically to OTL, but for some reason, social pressures in the Two Georges mean that planes are exclusively in military use, and TVs are exclusively in bars and other public places.
 
And why are there always zeppelins instead of planes?
That's how you can tell it's an alternate history - it has zeppelins.

Or more seriously, while zeppelins aren't actually very realistic (they were abandoned for good reason, and not just because of the Hindenburg disaster), they are fun and I'm usually willing to give them a pass in AH stories, particularly novels. I think of them more as flavour than anything else.
 
I would say the origin point in writing is Warlord of the Air in which a world in which World War 1 never happens and the colonial empires stay around leads to Airships everywhere (one of which is flown by Enoch Fucking Powell).

I believe that's also seen as one of the early steampunk stories, despite it reading like Moorcock being mean about steampunk
 
One series I always rail against is Harry Harrison's 'Stars and Stripes' Trilogy: 'Stars and Stripes Forever' (1998), 'Stars and Stripes in Peril' (2000) and 'Stars and Stripes Triumphant' (2002). It starts off interesting with Prince Albert dying earlier and the Trent incident escalating so that Britain sends troops to support the Confederate States. However, the rioting by the crew of a single British warship is enough to make the CSA decide to halt the civil war and to join with the USA in crushing the British Empire. There is so much wrong with these three books. There are technological leaps but some of these simply reinvent things such as the bomb ketch already in existing. I could stomach a US invasion of Canada, though whether the Canadian population, especially those of Loyalist background would have been so welcoming as shown in the book, I doubt.

There is a cross-Atlantic invasion of Ireland (80 years of how difficult a cross-Channel invasion proved to be), that goes undetected and no British naval vessel is able to damage any US one. The Irish are grateful for their liberation and the Scots are happy to get independence, even though 140 years later they cannot get a majority vote for it. With minimal opposition English accept the end of the monarchy without much complaint. Not only do these books go too far in showing military/naval resistance to the US plans as utterly feeble, the expectation that people would accept such radical political changes appears deluded. I guess this should be apparent from the start when suddenly all the Confederate states appear to forget why they went to war in the first place.

I do not know if Harrison's trilogy is an example of one of these US alternate history stories that is really about trying to shape current political discussions, but even if it is not as explicit as some of those, it borders on them in really being more about nationalist propaganda than a good story or featuring an even remotely feasible scenario.
 
Moorcock would read mean if he were writing out a Mother's Day card.

The thing about Moorcock is that he often slips in contemporary satire even when looking at alternate history. He was certainly no fan of Enoch Powell. Perhaps the greatest 'in joke' is not in his alternate history but in his fantasy 'The History of the Runestaff' with a Granbretan in which Jhone, Jhorg, Phowl and Rhunga (i.e. The Beatles) ruled and Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard feature as gods.

Moorcock is very much a writer rooted in the counter-culture attitudes. I was also interested to read that he felt there had become insufficient 'punk' in the steampunk of the 2000s. I do wonder how he would view the recent generation which much more diverse voices featuring, but I imagine he would approve.
 
What is Queen Nixon?

Queen Nixon (aka Queen Nixon in Nelson Mandela 4 Apartheid/Nuke Free WWIII/Ted Bundy is Your Alt-Right President) is a comical nickname for the awful wikibox timeline New Deal Coalition Retained, which pretends to be about the title.

It is not. It is not even remotely close to what the title suggests.
 
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I've sort of noticed a trend about the timelines that are unusually bad is that they're just so long and thorough.

The longer something goes on, the more any flaws it might have are going to be obvious and the harder to come up with new stuff, and we're talking AH so the longer it goes on the more you're going to be different to regular history and that can open the door to "THE RINGO-LENNONIST STATE OF MERSEYGRAD" or something.
 
The longer something goes on, the more any flaws it might have are going to be obvious and the harder to come up with new stuff, and we're talking AH so the longer it goes on the more you're going to be different to regular history and that can open the door to "THE RINGO-LENNONIST STATE OF MERSEYGRAD" or something.

And in Queen Nixon in...'s case, we progress from crazy, awful Alt-Right bullshit about US politics to crazy, awful Alt-Right bullshit about the entire fucking world.

It's idiot fascist turtles, all the way down.
 
I've sort of noticed a trend about the timelines that are unusually bad is that they're just so long and thorough.

Queen Nixon, for example, is >1200 book-length pages long.
That's also true of some really good TLs. Decades of Darkness and Look to the West are also really, really long.
 
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