- Location
- Visiting BWBs.
"A series of bridge games interrupted by occasional vignettes of the Soviet Union-style collapse of a victorious Third Reich" sums it up pretty well.This is one of the ones I keep meaning to get round to, the premise is a strong one indeed, but 'uninteresting love story' sounds a problem if it's a big chunk of the story
The novel version of In The Presence Of Mine Enemies is the archetypal example of Ambrose Bierce's adage that a novel is a short story padded.The short story was vastly superior, imo.
I think this is a challenge for AH authors and one I have reflected upon more as I have aged and found that the divergence in the culture now often interests me more than different maps or different victors in a battle. It can be a real challenge to say 'look here is this different culture stuff' unless you end up with the explanatory dialogue which is so easy to fall into. I have had readers complain that the cultural differences are not 'real' alternate history. However, I am on the side of Grey Wolf in How to Write Alternate History (2013) in seeing interest and pleasure, indeed, in exploring things like music, games, sports (as we have seen here recently), art, architecture, food, etc. Though I recognise for a lot of consumers of our work, for them if it is not big battles then it is not AH.In mild defense of bridge such scenes do show that while the "future" for Nazis, and while some tech is advanced (the massive jumbo screen tv on the Volkshalle, or a outpost on the moon) for most part culture has stagnated. People sit around and play cards cause, I took it as, there is nothing else to do, and you are expected to engage in such activities.
I think this is a challenge for AH authors and one I have reflected upon more as I have aged and found that the divergence in the culture now often interests me more than different maps or different victors in a battle. It can be a real challenge to say 'look here is this different culture stuff' unless you end up with the explanatory dialogue which is so easy to fall into. I have had readers complain that the cultural differences are not 'real' alternate history. However, I am on the side of Grey Wolf in How to Write Alternate History (2013) in seeing interest and pleasure, indeed, in exploring things like music, games, sports (as we have seen here recently), art, architecture, food, etc. Though I recognise for a lot of consumers of our work, for them if it is not big battles then it is not AH.
I think this is particularly a challenge with things like a Nazi or Confederate victory because, yes, their victory would have brought about big, horrendous differences, but the culture of both was old-fashioned. The author to show this best is, perhaps, Stephen Fry with Making History (1996) and he pulls this off by having one person aware of how things were in our timeline and focusing particularly on the impact on gay people, interestingly, not simply under Nazis but 'second hand' through the 'reflected oppression' of US society in a world where Nazi culture is so predominant.
Fenwick I am glad you brought out this point about the bridge (not simply because I like featuring card games in my novels) because it reminds us that the mundane can be an indicator of the divergence as much as the big sweeping stuff and an author who feels they have an intelligent audience will include these indicators without having big signposts pointing to them.
For me Man in the High Castle had a better example in the cop helping change a tire. He did the work himself. He shared a meal with the driver. And... just kinda shrugged at the ash falling to the ground from the "burdens on the state" being burnt in the distance.Yes, the 'mundane' evil is often the worst. There is an interesting bit in Schindler's List (1993) after Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) looks to try to convince the camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) that there is power in not taking a life. However, Goeth is unconvinced as we see when he takes a pot-shot at Itzhak as he walks away, though misses. The sense that such life or death decisions have come down to the same level of whether Goeth has a cup of coffee or not, seems to really emphasise just how evil he is.