- Location
- Visiting BWBs.
Panel discussion here.
Panellists @Thande @Nick Sumner @Burton K Wheeler @SenatorChickpea @David Flin .
Panellists @Thande @Nick Sumner @Burton K Wheeler @SenatorChickpea @David Flin .
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Panel Discussion: The present and future of AH
- Thread starter David Flin
- Start date
- Location
- Derbyshire
This is the sort of discussion where I have to acknowledge that my personal reasons for wanting more diverse AH are a bit different from others.
Which is that, for all I'll acknowledge it's a massively important part of US history, I honestly can't say the US Civil War has ever had any real interest for me as a topic.
Which is that, for all I'll acknowledge it's a massively important part of US history, I honestly can't say the US Civil War has ever had any real interest for me as a topic.
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
True that Turtledove is still the only one who's really recognizable as a big author who writes alternate history specifically, all sorts of independently published online but his are all you see on shelves and in libraries etc. on a regular basis.
I think I alluded to this in David's discussion, but while this was true of Turtledove in the UK 20 years ago, his books seem to have all but disappeared from the shelves of mainstream UK bookstores now - which is a bit of a shame, regardless of one's opinions of his work, his books have often acted as a gateway to the wider world of AH (as indeed they did for me).
Turtledove's less and less in mainstream stores but every time I visit Forbidden Planet in London, there's an alternate history shelf and it's entirely devoted to Turtledove, the late Eric Flint, and Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen. Which tells us something about marketing because they definitely have other AH books in stock but they aren't on the Alternate History shelf, they're in the general Science Fiction A-Z. So there's an assumption that the customers coming in for an AH book are looking for a very specific thing
Marketing AH to non-history nerds is tricky, and often not really worth it as it'll be more confusing without more appealing. For a personal example, I considered both The Sure Bet King and All Union AH, but only really "pushed" the latter. Because "USSR survives and invades Romania" is a lot more understandable and intuitive than "The Asia-facing offshore sportsbooks are mostly centered in Cambodia instead of the Philippines".
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
Does make me come round to AH not existing as a distinct genre. Like Heather Rose Jones' Alpennia books are technically AH but no one's ever called it that, it's romance and historical fiction. Not much overlap in audience with Turtledove either.
- Location
- Over the rainbow
I really need to get that article written up about the different senses of AH...
My own thoughts to the questions:
- How'd I get involved? Just looking around on the internet, basically. Not really much else to say.
- Main interests? I want to say "too many to count". It depends on my mood and current subject of interest. I'd have to say "stuff you can simulate." It's why I at first didn't think too highly of Larry Bond-and then saw the context he operated in where other thriller writers couldn't get the most basic descriptions right. Having some empirical grounding can help, especially since not that many people (understandably) actually do it.
- State of AH? Agree with BKW the most here. It's easier than ever to put niche stuff out there, more and more people know of "what if?", the timelines internet nerds obsess over are tiny in context, and so on. Yes, you get lots of Sturgeonism, but that's inevitable and a small price to pay. Turtledove is basically the only person with wide success who writes what I call "AH As A Genre".
- State of Online AH? Two things. First, it's gotten broad but shallow. You can easily look up Orel Hersheiser's strikeout rate, but it's harder to tell you what that was like in comparison to the league average pitchers at the time. It's easier to look up names for an ORBAT chart/campaign than to see how those units/people would actually perform. Second, it's become a lot more insular. It's not just Paradox games and their quirks/problems, but to me it feels like a lot of TLs just use other TLs as inspiration/sources. This is weirdly the opposite of how mainstream-focused AH [as a setting] has high-profile stuff in everything from the moon landing to royalist romantic comedy novels.
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
I'm at the point where if it ever gets that specific in detail it's just not an engaging work of fiction. I used to be very into AH written in the pseudo history book style where it goes deep into the impact of the POD in every aspect because it was exciting to think about. It's considerably less exciting now so if I do read AH I want a good, focused story set in the changed world. With characters I care about. Not very much of that in the online space.
- Location
- Visiting BWBs.
For me, I agree totally. I view an AH story as firstly a story and secondly about AH. Interesting people doing interesting things in interesting places.
Forbidden Planet has a lot of US books in a particular vein - Baen is part of it but not all - that you barely see in any other UK source. I remember the last time I went to one, they had a ton of Alan Dean Foster books which previously I had only seen electronic versions of on the Kindle store.
Elektronaut
Effectively Stood Down
- Location
- The Legendarium of Gentleman Julius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah I don't know what the situation is in America but Turtledove is gone now from the shelves of Waterstones and library catalogues. I vividly remember there being pretty much the full oeuvre of Turtledove books on display in the Waterstones in Middlesbrough in the late nineties and early 2000s but I went in Newcastle's Waterstones today and they have no Turtledove books.
I feel like there's a clean separation between written AH as a recognisable genre and pop culture AH. Pop culture AH is definitely more prominent than it was twenty-five years ago but written AH as a genre is even more niche than it was back then.
Agreed, that sums it up well.
- Location
- In a van, down by the river.
How would you define the difference between written AH as a recognisable genre and pop culture AH?
Elektronaut
Effectively Stood Down
- Location
- The Legendarium of Gentleman Julius
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What I mean by AH as a recognisable genre is works by writers who primarily write AH and for an AH/Sci fi audience. That kind of thing is definitely not more mainstream than it was in the nineties, and very likely is less mainstream. I suspect the internet and the general atomisation that has gone along with it has played a role here. If you want to read a story about something very specific AH-wise then there is probably someone who has self-published it on Amazon but that definitely works against the genre pushing through into mainstream consciousness.
Pop culture AH would be a diverse net but would cover Paradox games, the Man in the High Castle, 11/12/63, that sort of thing.
I know from experience of the discussions (And the above responses by Burton and Thande are very much par for the course) that a significant number of people my age will cite Turtledove as their gateway drug into AH. People now are absolutely not coming into AH due to published authors, let alone a single author. They're coming into it due to the pop culture stuff - I suspect Paradox games mostly - and the internet.
Sorry if this feels like me pissing in the pool but I think written AH as a recognisable, specific genre of writing for an AH audience - as opposed to something a big name author like Stephen King might dabble in - is currently massively niche. OTOH I think AH as a concept people are attracted to is doing pretty well for itself.
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- Location
- Brussels, Brussels-Capital Region
- Pronouns
- she/they
I think the whole wikibox TL trend kind of exemplifies this. Now, the wikibox is a pretty decent (if flawed) tool for giving you a glimpse into an alternate world, but as someone who came into the AH community as that was taking off (and certainly dabbled in it herself), I think over time form has swallowed up function. It's less about looking at the actual flow of events and more about endlessly draping characters and tropes in slightly different combinations over an increasingly inflexible structure, if that makes sense. And that's one of the faces of online AH now in a way that I'm not sure was the case, idk, 8 years ago.
I'm also not sure online AH has actually become that much more insular. When I came in, people always seemed to be referring back to the same few touchstones - always Turtledove, What If Gordon Banks Had Played, etc. over and over. Now, everything is still self-referential, it's just that the reference pool has changed - arguably gotten shallower as Veej argues.
- Pronouns
- he/him
Yes.
I mean, to take an example of the history-book texts done right, EdT's works actually engage with lots of other texts. Sometimes it's literary allusions- Flashman in Fight and Be Right, Colleen McCullough in The Caesariad, D'Artagnan in The Bloody Man (technically he's a historical character, but the appearance deliberately homages both Dumas and, wonderfully, George Lucas.) But there's also a real engagement with biblical sources, contemporary literature and an ear for the way historic sources sound.
Too often modern scrapbook timelines are referencing earlier scrapbook timelines.
I suspect this is about the insular nature of internet fora - the immediate audience finds a reference to UserHJ's timeline on Nigeria more fun (as in immediate gratification laughs) than weaving in links to Wole Soyinka's works, which sadly, fewer in the immediate audience might have read.
But that comes down to why and for whom something is being written. I don't expect anyone off the forum to read my half page Governors-Protector of Antarctica list, so I entertained myself with stuff like having an unlikely agency named ASB. But that's not serious stuff, it's technically creative writing, but so are my 12 year old son's English homework.
I think the fact that excellent published/publishable works emerge from fora like here, the other place, and so on, doesn't mean the vast majority of works on such fora are written for only the forum audience?
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- Location
- NYC (né Falkirk)
- Pronouns
- he/him
I wonder how much of that is due to the sheer glut of literary science fiction of all forms that made up the contents of bookshelves at the turn of the century. As we've discussed previously it represented a high watermark for spin-offs of the likes of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars but even beyond those recognisable properties think the science fiction paperback was seeing a boom of every type and aimed at all ages. Maybe that rising tide lifted the AH titles along with it.