Warning: lots of rambling and spoilers for a AH over a decade old.
Once upon a time, in ye olden days of the Internet, before Disney, Google and Facebook began to buy everything, before TLIADs, before the Shuffling of Decks, before SealionPress, Polibrit AHs had their own sites, and one might find works such as the classic Thaxted (Site also included a Baruch Spinoza AH, of all things) Ed Thomas' A Shot Heard Around the World and, of course, What if Gordon Banks had Played.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071212170442/http://www.btinternet.com/~chief.gnome/
Premise and PoD are simple enough, what develops within the AH is not, as it mostly deals with the prospect of the famous and infamous Enoch Powell becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the absolutely worst possible of all times: the 1970s.
As a AH work, there are a lot of things WIGBHP does right, some it does less right, (The bits about America, with Reagan in the 70s and Ted Kennedy in 1980, are kinda weak IMO, but maybe that's just me) but perhaps the allure of the piece is not only the strength of its premise and how it delivers on it, but just how thouroughly shit hits the fan for the UK, as Powell deals with The Troubles.
Much like a similarly soft-dystopic piece, the popular A World of Laughter, A World of Tears, we see a country given to a thouroughly dangerous man (Walt Disney, Enoch Powell) and we see said nation slowly tear itself apart, and the fragility of the country's institutions and post-war peace are exposed and broken, a fact that didn't quite came to mind until I saw Peter's post on For All Time and the negative influence it had on the genre.
Both A World of Laughter and Gordon Banks, I feel, more than once fall prey to the temptation of going for the more dystopic or interesting possible result of any given action undertaken by "the protagonist". As such we have things like a literal Nazi being a US Senator a stone's throw away from the presidency, only to be taken down by Roy Cohn of all people, while the other has things like Britain invading Ireland, the UK thouroughly cleansing Ulster of Catholics, a coup, a blown-up parliament and Queen, a UK that is a pariah nation into the 21st Century -for some reason-, a minister being murdered by a MI-5 Assassin to keep the Irish War going on, Enoch Powell living in exile in Rhodesia while Thatcher and the rest rot in jail and a transitional government that includes John Lennon, of all people. It's quite a ride.
The attractive is obvious, and comes from the same reason Invasion Literature is so popular in the Anglo-Saxon world: these countries were never under Nazi or Soviet occupation, nor so thouroughly devastated during a war as continental Europe (although parts of Britain come close, thanks to German aviation).
But what do you think? Does Gordon Banks stray too much into dystopia, or does the execution, as well as the fact that it's Enoch Powell we're talking about make some of the seemingly less "plausible" events seem like natural results of entrusting the entire nation to such a man?
Once upon a time, in ye olden days of the Internet, before Disney, Google and Facebook began to buy everything, before TLIADs, before the Shuffling of Decks, before SealionPress, Polibrit AHs had their own sites, and one might find works such as the classic Thaxted (Site also included a Baruch Spinoza AH, of all things) Ed Thomas' A Shot Heard Around the World and, of course, What if Gordon Banks had Played.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071212170442/http://www.btinternet.com/~chief.gnome/
Premise and PoD are simple enough, what develops within the AH is not, as it mostly deals with the prospect of the famous and infamous Enoch Powell becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the absolutely worst possible of all times: the 1970s.
As a AH work, there are a lot of things WIGBHP does right, some it does less right, (The bits about America, with Reagan in the 70s and Ted Kennedy in 1980, are kinda weak IMO, but maybe that's just me) but perhaps the allure of the piece is not only the strength of its premise and how it delivers on it, but just how thouroughly shit hits the fan for the UK, as Powell deals with The Troubles.
Much like a similarly soft-dystopic piece, the popular A World of Laughter, A World of Tears, we see a country given to a thouroughly dangerous man (Walt Disney, Enoch Powell) and we see said nation slowly tear itself apart, and the fragility of the country's institutions and post-war peace are exposed and broken, a fact that didn't quite came to mind until I saw Peter's post on For All Time and the negative influence it had on the genre.
That's exactly my feeling. Everything bad in contemporary AH is a sloppy attempt at FaTing. For All Time is interesting because it addresses just how much had to be done to create the orderly and prosperous postwar world, but most people miss the theme in favor of the atrocity porn. Things like the mass cannibalism and nuclear weapons being used constantly aren't really the highlight, they're the payoff for a whole series of plausibly unpleasant events.
Both A World of Laughter and Gordon Banks, I feel, more than once fall prey to the temptation of going for the more dystopic or interesting possible result of any given action undertaken by "the protagonist". As such we have things like a literal Nazi being a US Senator a stone's throw away from the presidency, only to be taken down by Roy Cohn of all people, while the other has things like Britain invading Ireland, the UK thouroughly cleansing Ulster of Catholics, a coup, a blown-up parliament and Queen, a UK that is a pariah nation into the 21st Century -for some reason-, a minister being murdered by a MI-5 Assassin to keep the Irish War going on, Enoch Powell living in exile in Rhodesia while Thatcher and the rest rot in jail and a transitional government that includes John Lennon, of all people. It's quite a ride.
The attractive is obvious, and comes from the same reason Invasion Literature is so popular in the Anglo-Saxon world: these countries were never under Nazi or Soviet occupation, nor so thouroughly devastated during a war as continental Europe (although parts of Britain come close, thanks to German aviation).
But what do you think? Does Gordon Banks stray too much into dystopia, or does the execution, as well as the fact that it's Enoch Powell we're talking about make some of the seemingly less "plausible" events seem like natural results of entrusting the entire nation to such a man?
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