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Discuss the latest article by @Coiler here
Decades of Darkness began in response to a challenge by (IIRC) Noel Maurer back on soc.history.what-if about creating a plausible Draka. His challenge was to the effect that if looking to create a plausible Draka, rather than having a "mirror" United States, why not start with the actual United States. Using the actual United States as a basis would deal with many of the more challenging implausibilities of the Draka premise (how to attract mass immigration, perpetual conquest from a small population, ignoring tropical diseases, mass logistics, No Fat Draka, etc), since the USA already a large base population, existing desire for expansion, better logistics and natural resources, and the tropical diseases were less bad (though certainly still in existence) in the Americas. The challenge was essentially to have the United States go Draka over much of the New World.Good idea for an article. I remember when I first joined AHcom in 2005, the Draka were still the go-to "high-concept" AH work for many people, despite its problems. I believe @Jared has said that Decades of Darkness began as an attempt to do Stirling's core concept of 'evil (emphasised) America' without having to have his cake and eat it by having two Americas on different continents at once.
With DoD, I thus had that as the general challenge. The other concept I had in mind was "what if the worst aspects of the American Revolution come to the fore, rather than the best ones." Noel deemed the challenge completed in the chapters when Alvar O'Brien started dealing with occupied British Columbia.
The Alvar O'Brien chapters I was referring to were set in the late 1900 decade/early 1910s (I forget the exact years without looking it up). That was the point where the challenge was deemed fulfilled, but it wasn't where the timeline ended.Oh, that's why it stopped where it stopped?
Personally, when I read it through back in the day, I just felt that the point at which you ended it was a very neat, natural ending.
Did you have any idea of where things would have continued to go if you had kept going up until the present?
It's cute that you think @Meadow would actually say no to the most iconic work of early web-produced AH in existence.It's still possible that I will try to clean up DoD and try to get it published (via SLP if it's accepted, or elsewhere if not).
It's more a question of focus than of concern over volume of work required. I find it easier to focus on one big project at a time, rather than having two big projects on the go at once. Smaller projects at once are fine - I've written a couple of dozen short stories in the time I've been prepping LoRaG for publication, not to mention editing the Alternate Australias anthology. But doing two big projects at once, on top of a more than full-time day job, isn't very attractive.It's cute that you think @Meadow would actually say no to the most iconic work of early web-produced AH in existence.
I do get what you mean about it being a substantial amount of work to clean up and I understand that you'd prefer to focus on LORAG for the present - based on my recent experience prepping LTTW volume 4, however, I'd advise not to let the scale of the task grow in your mind and lead you to put it off, because when you come to do it you'll find it's not as big as you feared.