Ok, unlike the Iceland Review Scale, this is mostly serious. I've found two main "types" of alternate history, based on the authors priorities. Neither is necessarily good or bad, although I must admit to preferring "story-first" alternate history myself. What I think differentiates them is that they approach the nature of the divergences in completely different ways.
_ _ _
The first is Story-First AH. Almost all mainstream published AH is story first. Here the divergence itself is just a means to an end, and is used as the backdrop for a story that the author wants to tell. So Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies, while a bad book, is a good example of story-first AH. Which is to say, the backdrop is of a victorious Nazi Germany, the plot is an allegory for the end of the USSR, and all the background (which, if I remember correctly, involved the classic wunderwaffe out of nowhere) is treated as just a handwaved afterthought. It need not be implausible or contrived, just playing second fiddle to the story.
The second is Divergence-First AH. This tends to appear on the internet, where the focus on how the world is changed is the story in and of itself. So you get lots of descriptions of various events, but there's less of an effort, if any at all, towards a conventional narrative, plot, and characters. So the "classic" dystopian Walt Disney TL "A World Of Laughter, A World of Tears" is a good enough example of a divergence-first AH. (It's also one of the better ones in terms of actually having characters at all), and the bulk of AH.com TLs themselves are divergence-first.
_ _ _
Story-first and divergence-first have issues that I feel are exacerbated by the environment they exist in. Story-first is less concerned with the nuts and bolts of the divergence, and in terms of the commercially published versions, aims for a wide audience of more than just history fans. So it tends to involve big things like WW2 and the ACW (hence my snarky definition of "Nazi Confederates Take Over The World") because those are what more people are familiar with than whether Herschel Walker was traded or not, or if Robert Moses got to build even more super-expressways through NYC. I would say that Turtledove's worse novels (again, In The Presence of Mine Enemies) are what happens when story-first reaches excess.
Divergence-first, on the other hand, tends to be written by and for a more niche crowd. So being less concerned (if at all) with the nuts and bolts of the story means that a reader who isn't already into the subject isn't likely to be interested. This of course is acknowledged. But what also can happen is that when an implausible or author-forced event does occur in a particularly dry divergence-first tale, there's no narrative or characters to cushion it, and it just stays there. To be fair, total cause and effect is likely outright impossible and certainly impractical, in no small part due to the "fiction has to make sense, real life doesn't" effect. But if the appearance of it cannot be created, then it just comes across, at least to me, as a bunch of things. My snarky definition of divergence-first is "What about the thing?"
But that's me being overly critical. A good story-first AH tells well, a good story. A good divergence-first AH creates an interesting world.
And of course, they're not monolithic. There's blending between the two (in the form of narrative vignettes in divergence-first or infodumps in story-first for one example), and subgroups with their own quirks. But I think it's still a very good general guideline.
Thoughts?
_ _ _
The first is Story-First AH. Almost all mainstream published AH is story first. Here the divergence itself is just a means to an end, and is used as the backdrop for a story that the author wants to tell. So Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies, while a bad book, is a good example of story-first AH. Which is to say, the backdrop is of a victorious Nazi Germany, the plot is an allegory for the end of the USSR, and all the background (which, if I remember correctly, involved the classic wunderwaffe out of nowhere) is treated as just a handwaved afterthought. It need not be implausible or contrived, just playing second fiddle to the story.
The second is Divergence-First AH. This tends to appear on the internet, where the focus on how the world is changed is the story in and of itself. So you get lots of descriptions of various events, but there's less of an effort, if any at all, towards a conventional narrative, plot, and characters. So the "classic" dystopian Walt Disney TL "A World Of Laughter, A World of Tears" is a good enough example of a divergence-first AH. (It's also one of the better ones in terms of actually having characters at all), and the bulk of AH.com TLs themselves are divergence-first.
_ _ _
Story-first and divergence-first have issues that I feel are exacerbated by the environment they exist in. Story-first is less concerned with the nuts and bolts of the divergence, and in terms of the commercially published versions, aims for a wide audience of more than just history fans. So it tends to involve big things like WW2 and the ACW (hence my snarky definition of "Nazi Confederates Take Over The World") because those are what more people are familiar with than whether Herschel Walker was traded or not, or if Robert Moses got to build even more super-expressways through NYC. I would say that Turtledove's worse novels (again, In The Presence of Mine Enemies) are what happens when story-first reaches excess.
Divergence-first, on the other hand, tends to be written by and for a more niche crowd. So being less concerned (if at all) with the nuts and bolts of the story means that a reader who isn't already into the subject isn't likely to be interested. This of course is acknowledged. But what also can happen is that when an implausible or author-forced event does occur in a particularly dry divergence-first tale, there's no narrative or characters to cushion it, and it just stays there. To be fair, total cause and effect is likely outright impossible and certainly impractical, in no small part due to the "fiction has to make sense, real life doesn't" effect. But if the appearance of it cannot be created, then it just comes across, at least to me, as a bunch of things. My snarky definition of divergence-first is "What about the thing?"
But that's me being overly critical. A good story-first AH tells well, a good story. A good divergence-first AH creates an interesting world.
And of course, they're not monolithic. There's blending between the two (in the form of narrative vignettes in divergence-first or infodumps in story-first for one example), and subgroups with their own quirks. But I think it's still a very good general guideline.
Thoughts?