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Least favorite alt-history story?

Mussolini still dances the Mussolini. It is kind of weird, since it feels like over kill. Like I really doubt Hitler would give much a shit about Mussolini, actually this scenario seems like the perfect way to get Fascist on Fascist War eventually, since I doubt British and Italian interests overlap.

This ain’t Gabb, this was some obscure author who I stumbled upon at some random time.

Ah shit, my bad i got mixed up with another discussion there.
 
IMO the argument that we shouldn't criticize online AH threads because they're not professional and so criticizing them isn't fair falls apart given that we are also in the online AH community. If you post a story in the online AH community it's fair for online AH people to criticize you for it. I do however think there are three criteria that make an online AH story worth criticizing (I'll use Queen Nixon as an example of each criteria because this thread has talked about it to death)

I used very similar criteria for deciding to go ahead with my Fuldapocalypse review of NDCR. I was obsessed too much with the WW3 TLs that weren't really that bad or distinctive in hindsight, and a big part of the blog was so that I could examine fiction with a higher standard. Because I didn't want to backslide, I thought very carefully.

First, it wasn't that it was intended to be finished so much as how the arc with a clear ending that I was most interested in (the WW3, obviously), was finished, and had been for quite some time. I felt a lot more comfortable looking back at something ever-more in the past calmly than I would be with something in the middle.

Second, I felt like I could say long, reasonable calm (if still extremely critical) things about it. Because the WW3 was legitimately distinct, I could talk about how that was different from other conventional WWIII stories, and because it embodied (to me) so much of the flaws with online AH's style in such a massive way that other TLs didn't, I could use it to illustrate those flaws. I felt it wasn't emotional axe-grinding and did have substance. There was that and there was the blog being so established that I felt one post on an online AH, especially one very pertinent to the founding subject, wouldn't get in the way.

I ultimately reviewed NDCR because, long after the "Turtledove Drama" stopped, it still felt interesting. It felt interesting that it somehow took all the narrative and research flaws of the online TL format and seemed to amplify them. And it was interesting, especially having read so many more conventional WW3 stories, to see something that not only was distinct and distinctly bad, but had almost the exact opposite flaws that middle-of-the-pack military AH normally did. (Instead of being rivet-counted to excess, it didn't care about numbers or any kind of technical accuracy at all)

But I'm still very uncomfortable and personally reluctant to review more online AH. I think too much of it is just too small and too easy, and it feels like punching down.
 
IIRC, Gabb's the one that had a Labour leader dunk an underage prostitute in acid?

Yep. He's a relatively influential founder of libertarian think tanks who I think had a political career in Slovakia and writes various fiction and non fiction books.

The Churchill Memorandum is his most famous AH book, in which Hitler dies and Nazi Germany and the UK become good allies, the empire is maintained and the world is a utopia. With the only people threatening it being Churchill, who was bought by jews to start a ruinous second world war which luckily everyone else refused to and the far left, represented by the likes of Michael Foot, who is a serial killer killing rent boys in acid.

It's not much more respectable than NDCR but it has 13 five star ratings on amazon and costs money to read, so much more an acceptable target., in my view.
 
The Churchill Memorandum is his most famous AH book, in which Hitler dies and Nazi Germany and the UK become good allies, the empire is maintained and the world is a utopia. With the only people threatening it being Churchill, who was bought by jews to start a ruinous second world war which luckily everyone else refused to and the far left, represented by the likes of Michael Foot, who is a serial killer killing rent boys in acid.
I feel like I’ve just had a stroke reading that.
 
Ha, just noticed The Churchill Memorandum blurb has a quote on it:

"...[Gabb] has written a work of alternate history entitled The Churchill Memorandum. If you want to see the world through a pair of very different ideological glasses, I suggest you give it a read. If nothing else, it is guaranteed to blow your mind. " (Max Lindh, Sea Lion Press)

A quote taken from the second Anarcho-Capitalism article, which is not exactly pro the ideology and in context is going "so uh hey that book's a thing that exists".

Not quite as ballsy as the time the poster for the Tom Hardy Kray's film stuck a two-star review between the Krays so you'd 'read' it as a partially obscured four-star.
 
WAIT THAT'S THE FUCKING PLOT?!

Not really the plot is that germany is about to invade the soviet union and evil british socialists (foot and macmillian) are going to counter by leaking proof that British and germany had worked together to assassinate Roosevelt and Lindbergh (not false proof, this is a thing they really did) thus bringing the USA into the war on the side of the soviets. Which our heroes must prevent.
 
Ha, just noticed The Churchill Memorandum blurb has a quote on it:



A quote taken from the second Anarcho-Capitalism article, which is not exactly pro the ideology and in context is going "so uh hey that book's a thing that exists".

Not quite as ballsy as the time the poster for the Tom Hardy Kray's film stuck a two-star review between the Krays so you'd 'read' it as a partially obscured four-star.
Gabb should have taken @Skinny87's review and used selective quotations to say "The Churchill Memorandum is...the best...work of alternate history...written.
 
IMO the argument that we shouldn't criticize online AH threads because they're not professional and so criticizing them isn't fair falls apart given that we are also in the online AH community. If you post a story in the online AH community it's fair for online AH people to criticize you for it. I do however think there are three criteria that make an online AH story worth criticizing (I'll use Queen Nixon as an example of each criteria because this thread has talked about it to death):

1. It's intended as a more or less finished piece: I think a lot of published authors in this thread are coming in with the assumption that if you post a story on an online forum it's clearly intended as a first draft, but that doesn't really hold up when talking about stuff on AH.com and the like. I would say that most content on AH.com is intended as mostly finished, and Queen Nixon is a good example of that. The author clearly intends this to be the final (or close to final) version of the story. I agree that we shouldn't be attacking first draft as the "worst thing ever", but finished pieces are fair game.

2. It's popular and prominent: Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap, but from a reviewing perspective most crap isn't that worth commenting upon. Who cares about a story that only 3 people (including the author's mother) have read? However, popular works are inherently worth talking about. For instance, Queen Nixon was at one point one of the most popular works on the forum, generated a ton of discussion, and was nominated for a Turtledove. This is as close as an unpublished AH work can get to being a bestseller, and as members of the community it's fair of us to offer our perspective.

3. The author has decided to ignore constructive criticism: All writers make mistakes, and the best way to get a writer to improve is to offer constructive criticism. "This is shit" isn't at all useful, and if that's all an author hears they're not going to improve their craft and may even be driven away. However, some authors refuse to listen to constructive criticism. The author of Queen Nixon basically declared that anyone who offered criticisms of his work were trolls and that they should fuck off. At that point further constructive criticism is useless, and so going "Well actually here's all the reasons this is complete shit" is the only way to criticize a work. I understand the idea of simply ignoring works you don't like, and this thread has definitely talked about works like Queen Nixon far more than is warranted, but I also think that there's nothing wrong with really harshly criticizing terrible works from time to time. As long as you aren't spending too much time obsessing about bad works it's fine and actually pretty fun to pick apart the flaws of terrible media.

I have a fourth criteria--the work reveals something the AHTL community or even online culture in general. As I've noted, part of the black fascination of Queen Nixon in... and The Most Dreadful Thing is how they illustrate online neofascism's tendency to play games, operate in bad faith and put on transparent disguises, as well as the terrible thinking underlying it all. On the other end of the political spectrum, FL&G/Rumsfeldia is a pretty decent illustration of a writer losing the plot, as well as how projecting the present into the past can go.
 
If they were Socialist Prime Ministers I wouldn’t mind to be fair.

What is that?
Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo, which is the first story in the Rumsfeldia series. It's not quite as balls to the wall crazy as Rumsfeldia, but there's a lot of stuff that is out there (although it did feature Islamic militants in the Levant recreating the Caliphate despite being written before the Syrian Civil War started, which is entertaining in hindsight).
 
Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo, which is the first story in the Rumsfeldia series. It's not quite as balls to the wall crazy as Rumsfeldia, but there's a lot of stuff that is out there (although it did feature Islamic militants in the Levant recreating the Caliphate despite being written before the Syrian Civil War started, which is entertaining in hindsight).
Ah, wasn’t that the one where Donald Rumsfeld turns America into an ‘Anarcho-Capitalist dystopia and ‘Little’ Mao does a Pol Pot on China levels?

It sounds interesting.
 
My people, my people

@Gary Oswald has done a fine job in illuminating everyone to the key points of The Churchill Memorandum, but there are some other bits that make it just as bad/viable for criticism
  • Gold Standard fetishism being cited as a key reason for World Peace
  • Heated pavements and bullet-trams
  • The USA being a hellish dystopian failed state due to it banning weed
  • Michael Foot casually blowing Robin Day's brains out with a revolver
  • The implication that Michael Foot only became the head of the CPGB by repeatedly luring other senior members into his Moscow office, which had an acid bath set into the doorway
  • Deciding that Macmillan would still be Prime Minister and decided his nickname in the papers would be 'SuperMac'
  • Enoch Powell at the head of a secretive intelligence service employing Irish Nationalist assassins, and who is the entirely benevolent power behind the throne
  • The undercurrent of casual racism against Indians, in which our protagonist knows his Indian neighbour is around at least times because he smells of curry powder
  • Wasting a brilliant PoD - Hitler tours through Prague in 1938 in an armoured car, which overturns on an icy patch and breaks his neck
  • The assumption that, after the death of Hitler, Reichschancellor Goering is perfectly happy to remain within the Reich's 1938 borders and invade neither France nor the USSR, which also remains static and fails to invade anywhere through to the early 1950s
  • SuperMac
 
Fear, Loathing, and Gumbo, which is the first story in the Rumsfeldia series. It's not quite as balls to the wall crazy as Rumsfeldia, but there's a lot of stuff that is out there (although it did feature Islamic militants in the Levant recreating the Caliphate despite being written before the Syrian Civil War started, which is entertaining in hindsight).

The stuff relating to China is utterly silly and arguably everything outside CONUS should be taken with at least a pinch of salt but the American politics (and it is ultimately an American politics TL) are engaging and well written. I also think there's a charm in the very nature of the PoD being "there's a favourite son I read up on going to bat in a bigger arena" rather than, say, "Humphrey gets the nomination again" provoking the initial constitutional crisis.
 
Maybe it’s the fact it’s 20 to 12 in the evening but this sentence and image keeps on sending me into giggle fits.

Have this quote, for which additional context would not help process

[Foot] pointed round the still, terrified gathering. I saw Ian Gilmour shrink down in his place. Others rubbed their eyes, doubtless trying to work out if this were a drunken hallucination. No one moved. Foot looked at his watch. “Come on, you stupid fuckers,” he snarled—“or are you too pissy drunk on Harold’s booze even for that?” He pulled a revolver from one of his trouser pockets. He cocked it and, having chosen a victim at random, took careful aim. Almost before I’d registered the noise of the shot, I saw Robin Day jerk backward in his place, his forehead smashed in as if it had been a boiled egg attacked at breakfast
 
  • Michael Foot casually blowing Robin Day's brains out with a revolver
  • The implication that Michael Foot only became the head of the CPGB by repeatedly luring other senior members into his Moscow office, which had an acid bath set into the doorway

Damn it, Labour should have won in 1983 - no country would dare mess with us if we had Michael "the Monster" Foot as our negotiator on the world stage!
 
Have this quote, for which additional context would not help process
Ah yes, I’m sure Micheal Foot would call people ‘Stupid Fuckers’ and not call them a c*nt using a Romantic Poet analogy. I’m sure if I read that story it would be liking a continuous stroke.
Damn it, Labour should have won in 1983 - no country would dare mess with us if we had Michael "the Monster" Foot as our negotiator on the world stage!
“Oh shit, Foot just melt Gaddafi in an acid bath”
“Not again!”
 
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