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Alternate History General Discussion

In fact all post-1945 US politics TLs are boring. It's always the same stuff over and over.

This kind of feels like how I would have talked about conventional WW3 TLs two or three years ago. They're always the same stuff over and over. Supervillain Soviets start a war that doesn't go immediately nuclear, there's just a bunch of jumbled vignettes, there is little vision.

While both of these critiques are accurate, for me in hindsight it's felt kind of unhealthy to focus on what's still a very small internet subculture where severe Sturgeonism (that most of the entries will be low, in this case very low, quality) is inevitable. I'd rather look for candles than curse the darkness.

What I do find interesting is that Agent Lavender has essentially the exact opposite approach to these TLs in nearly every way. Yes, it's much better researched. But instead of a seemingly small divergence (different candidate) that leads to big changes, it has a big divergence (the Wilson conspiracy was true) that leads to comparably small changes. It's the feeling where looking at one small but detailed part of a world makes it look big, but looking at a giant robotic infodump just makes it feel small and bland.
 
In fact all post-1945 US politics TLs are boring. It's always the same stuff over and over. Primary happens, guy gets nominated, defeats incumbent, oops economy is bad, loses re-election, good guy wins two terms, his successor not as good, gets into war against communists/jihadists/anti-US dictator that becomes insurgency, new guy becomes president and he is a moderate within his party, Cold War, some cranks run but they don't get much support, party splits that end up getting fixed after one or two election cycles etc. The dystopias are all the same as well - just have McCarthyist paranoia turn America into a Pinochet-esque dictatorship. There is very little vision in these TLs

There's little room for anything more, unless one goes really extreme.

Chris
 
There's nothing really stopping a post-45 US political timeline from doing an Agent Lavender* with a presidential conspiracy theory, or doing a Deck Shuffle (in fact I'm sure that one's been done), or redoing You Always Had It So Good to be about a dynasty/party/trend (eternal Kennedies!!), or doing A Greater Britain with someone, or something like Many A Hero Untold where events** have the US going through political issues that it avoided but others didn't.

* Our Man On The Hill by @M_Kresal successfully does the 'secret communist' plot for a secret history of McCarthy

** dear boy, events
 
Supervillain Soviets start a war that doesn't go immediately nuclear
That does remind that there’s always like, the same four Soviet’s who get in charge because who doesn’t want to see Beria takeover for the forty fifth time.
It's the feeling where looking at one small but detailed part of a world makes it look big, but looking at a giant robotic infodump just makes it feel small and bland.
I found that my attempt at doing a political timeline bored me because having an obscure politician become leader whilst fun means you either do big infodumps or try and get into topics that barely interest you.

If I was to do a political timeline again it would either be a collaboration (so the things that enthuse me I can write and the bits that I don’t can be written by someone else) or a story about a fictional character reacting to a political world (and probably be focused on a small different event and exploring the world from there).
A Greater Britain with someone
Rexford Tugwell would work pretty decently.
 
In fact all post-1945 US politics TLs are boring. It's always the same stuff over and over. Primary happens, guy gets nominated, defeats incumbent, oops economy is bad, loses re-election, good guy wins two terms, his successor not as good, gets into war against communists/jihadists/anti-US dictator that becomes insurgency, new guy becomes president and he is a moderate within his party, Cold War, some cranks run but they don't get much support, party splits that end up getting fixed after one or two election cycles etc. The dystopias are all the same as well - just have McCarthyist paranoia turn America into a Pinochet-esque dictatorship. There is very little vision in these TLs

I get this feeling with a lot of internet and self-published AH. I can't help but think AH is now in a similar position that science fiction was by the late 1950s. This was the time when the John W. Campbell-promoted consensus of sparse prose, flat characters, and devotion to hard science at the expense of storytelling was beginning to wear itself out. The reaction to this was the New Wave science fiction of the 1960s-70s, which focused the human element more (notably, it brought in a lot of sixties counterculture ideas, most well-known of these being its take on sexuality, into science fiction). It made a lot of old-guard SF writers mad but it laid the ground for what came after it, most obviously cyberpunk, but its reverberations are felt today.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that AH needs its own 'New Wave.' It needs to center the human element more and care just a tad less about historical plausibility. This genre is more than just lists of dates and wikibox TLs - a lot can be done with it if you're willing to really probe what the genre can do. I've tried to do this in my own writing - Utterly Without Redeeming Social Value (in my signature) was my attempt at a 'New Wave AH' story. In the professionally published world, P. Djeli Clark seems to be moving the genre beyond its traditional limits.

I also wonder if some of this is because so much online AH is written by history nerds who experience humanity more through media (and a relatively narrow selection thereof) than through living life (I'm afraid this sounds mean of me but I can't find a better way of phrasing it). Compare this with what Hayao Miyazaki said about the anime industry:

If you don't spend time watching real people, you can't do this, because you've never seen it. Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people… It's produced by humans who can't stand looking at other humans. And that's why the industry is full of otaku!

I can certainly vouch that my writing is better now that I've lived more, especially with all the interaction I got when I became a dancer. I was one of those 'AH otaku' before that, and my writing is better now than it was five to eight years ago.

Long story short, I think that AH needs new, diverse influences in it or it'll fade into irrelevance. Without this, the work produced can feel very sterile.
 
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There's nothing really stopping a post-45 US political timeline from doing an Agent Lavender* with a presidential conspiracy theory...

* Our Man On The Hill by @M_Kresal successfully does the 'secret communist' plot for a secret history of McCarthy

It's funny because A. I almost didn't write Our Man on the Hill at all after the idea struck me because I was convinced it had either been done already and/or that it was utterly ridiculous (my best friend dissuaded me out of the latter notion). Also, B. I didn't learn about Agent Lavender until I started looking for a publisher and nearly didn't pitch it to SLP at all for fearing it might seem like I was treading on someone's toes. Thankfully, I dissuaded myself of that notion, too. Though looking at a large number of AH stuff out there, especially the ACW and WWII stuff, clearly it's not a concern many others seem to have!


I'm becoming more and more convinced that AH needs its own 'New Wave.' It needs to center the human element more and care just a tad less about historical plausibility. This genre is more than just lists of dates and wikibox TLs - a lot can be done with it if you're willing to really probe what the genre can do. I've tried to do this in my own writing - Utterly Without Redeeming Social Value (in my signature) was my attempt at a 'New Wave AH' story. In the profesionally published world, P. Djeli Clark seems to be moving the genre beyond its traditional limits.

Long story short, I think that AH needs new, diverse influences in it or it'll fade into irrelevance. Without this, the work produced can feel very sterile.

I think there's some definite truth to what you're saying there, @SpanishSpy. That and people needing to realize there's more to AH than ACW and WWII being played over and over and over again. There are other time periods and events that deserve not only the attention to detail but also having that human element brought out in them, as you say. How to get there is the question.
 
Sea Lion Press itself, as I understand it, was always an attempt to move towards the "narrative" and away from the "lists and wikiboxes" style of AH. Arguably it hasn't yet succeeded to the extent perhaps hoped initially but as a community we're a lot more focused on "the story" now than AH.com/the subset that would become SLP were in say 2015/16. And it's a lot easier to get the "human element" involved in a story than in a simple list.
 
I've just done a proper old fashioned list and wikibox timeline and like I think it's an interesting essay that posits a potential political and historical setting but its not a story.

But then I don't think everything has to be a story, I think there's merit in essays, in just chatting about potentials and history. I wouldn't sell this but within these communities I got good feeback.

My take was this is the background for a story, the way Tolkien's notes are. And that I should write an actual narrative with that background if I want to write a thing.

I think there's often a very black and white thinking about this. That 'this would be a bad book, therefore this is worthless as an intellectual fun exercise'. Whereas my take is much more that it's a fun way of getting your thoughts about history in order and geeking out with fellow nerds and has value as that.

If I do write my novel, the fact I can refer to 50,000 words of notes and have been thinking about the world, will make that background society appear lived in and rich even if I focus my actual words on the characters and plot because I've thought about it and that'll come through in throwaway remarks.
 
Unlike the Science Fiction genre in the '60's I don't think the Alternate History genre has anywhere near the number of authors needed to actually generate a 'New Wave'

the genre is too niche to evolve
 
Does anyone have an idea of what the dominant themes for Alt Hist stories/ timelines are in the AH community in Australia and New Zealand? Or in the university graduate community for English-speaking universities in Asia? (I'm presuming that predominantly a majority of AH writers will have some background in history and wide reading/ internet study, though not necessarily having studied History or Politics formally at university.)

The current publishing industry enthusiasm for the topics of WW 2 (predominantly its European rather than Asian dimension) and the American Civil War is probably driven by the statistical predominance of the UK and US markets in their sales, and/or of other communities brought up in the American-led media cultural world and of British and American writers as well as readers - possibly a larger involvement by other areas of the Anglosphere might slowly decrease this preponderence?

I can't help thinking of the way that most (US-made and US-financed) sci-fi films featuring 'alien invasions' or 'monsters on the rampage' or 'robots from the future on a killer mission' seems to imagine that the 'outside threats' are bound to concentrate their targets on the US, and usually on California rather than Washington and New York- preferably near the film-companies' bases around LA or San Francisco. So that shooting the film is cheaper and the Californian teenage audience feel that it's all more relevant to them? Trying out a film set somewhere else on the planet would be a change: put plausibility or experimenting with something new ahead of the revenue statistics for once.

The Japanese film industry is strong enough to have lots of films set there, and the Chinese are starting the same sort of trajectory; the Indian cultural focus is also more local; but in the UK film industry there is still a lot of 'playing to the cliches' of what the average US viewer is expected to want, eg Richard Curtis-style 'quirky toffs' and 'Sloane Rangers' plus obligatory snow at Christmas even in London (which is just not correct weather info - I have not experienced any snow in SE England on Christmas Day since 1970 ). This lack of large-scale experimentation is all too frequent, and we see the effects in a lot of publishing too. More cultural and geographical diversity and wider ideas are needed, and arguably in Alt Hist too. Perhaps less blunt commercialism and more teaching more non-US history courses in US universities, and more non-twentieth century courses in UK history, would be a helpful start for this sort of development.

In terms of students' interests and what they automatically tend to get involved in, I noted as an undergraduate in the late 1970s at the University of London that the vast majority of students then (and boys in particular) did Modern History, less did medieval (most of them being from private schools), and only a few did Ancient History - and on my Byzantine course, at the country's top Byz studies centre, there was only one other boy. I suspect that this problem continues, given the way the current school History curriculum has developed and the background of the people who frame it. So we're not on a level playing-field for developing knowledge of and interest in pre-C19th areas of history. At least the internet has broadened access to the alternatives...
 
Unlike the Science Fiction genre in the '60's I don't think the Alternate History genre has anywhere near the number of authors needed to actually generate a 'New Wave'

That is a problem. Where are more authors going to come from? The AO3 ones seem happy staying at AO3 and might not want to crossover with the AH forums (and AFAIK the AH forums aren't crossposting on AO3 either). As @heraclius says, more people from that aren't from Britain or North America would help, even just other parts of the anglosphere - I think @Jared 's Alternate Australias had some entirely new-to-AH authors, for example, and Natasja Rose's Emu War satire read really different to a lot of AH vignettes.
 
Furthermore, I'm not convinced there is a strong desire within the AH community for such a New Wave focusing on story over the history.

Mmm, I'd say yes and no on this.

I think in terms of published books, there is quite a lot of story over history takes. Partly because that's where you see writers from outside the genre write their AH book, the majority of AH which actually sells significant copies is stuff written by outsiders. Even on an amateur level, it's often thriller or historical fiction writers trying something new rather than people who are Alternate Historians first and writers second, like I am. But even from within this small community, Sea Lion Press is like half and half on this whereas ten years ago it was all dry history with nothing like 'who shall think of england' being written. There has been a drive towards narratives and practicing story writing, the vignette competitions for instance and the decline of old fashioned timelines of the day 1: this happened type.

I agree that the amateur writing community is still mostly history discussion first, stories second but frankly its amateur writing. People should do what makes them happy at that level and not worry about whether it's got widespread appeal. And I like historical discussion so I like the status quo, fine.

But I don't actually think it's that true that the views of amateur writing community are particularly closely reflected among published AH (I think the people who want to write the next 'Plot against america' after watching the tv series aren't often on AH.com arguing about tank sizes) and I do think published AH is increasingly moving away from focuses on the historical (to the extent that it ever was mostly focused on the historical, for that matter. For want of a Nail existed but so did Man in the High Castle)
 
Unlike the Science Fiction genre in the '60's I don't think the Alternate History genre has anywhere near the number of authors needed to actually generate a 'New Wave'

the genre is too niche to evolve

On the other hand, it does draw in readers from other genres.

Guns of the South is a war story, as well as everything else; WorldWar is an alien invasion story; Outlander is a romance story; Island in the Sea of Time is action/adventure; etc, etc.

Chris
 
Mmm, I'd say yes and no on this.

I think in terms of published books, there is quite a lot of story over history takes. Partly because that's where you see writers from outside the genre write their AH book, the majority of AH which actually sells significant copies is stuff written by outsiders. Even on an amateur level, it's often thriller or historical fiction writers trying something new rather than people who are Alternate Historians first and writers second, like I am. But even from within this small community, Sea Lion Press is like half and half on this whereas ten years ago it was all dry history with nothing like 'who shall think of england' being written. There has been a drive towards narratives and practicing story writing, the vignette competitions for instance and the decline of old fashioned timelines of the day 1: this happened type.

I agree that the amateur writing community is still mostly history discussion first, stories second but frankly its amateur writing. People should do what makes them happy at that level and not worry about whether it's got widespread appeal. And I like historical discussion so I like the status quo, fine.

But I don't actually think it's that true that the views of amateur writing community are particularly closely reflected among published AH (I think the people who want to write the next 'Plot against america' after watching the tv series aren't often on AH.com arguing about tank sizes) and I do think published AH is increasingly moving away from focuses on the historical (to the extent that it ever was mostly focused on the historical, for that matter. For want of a Nail existed but so did Man in the High Castle)

I have mixed feelings.

The small reason is that a lot of what you might consider good stories are not always good AH. A story set in a Nazi-occupied England will bend history to make it possible, for example; a story like Guns of the South will probably regard the South as misguided or the evilist of evils.

The bigger reason is that, the further you are from our world, the more explaining you have to do. WW2 and the ACW are quite well known - most people know the basics, even if they don't know the detail. Write a story set in a world where Japan modernized in 1600s and your background will be very different.

Realistically, we need something akin to Harry Potter (in terms of books sold) if AH is to go super-mainstream.

Chris
 
Furthermore, I'm not convinced there is a strong desire within the AH community for such a New Wave focusing on story over the history.

To risk sounding pretentious by invoking an evolutionary metaphor, it'll happen if nature requires or forces it to happen. If you have an ever increasing number of authors pushing in that direction (as @Charles EP M. points out about narrative versus timelines in the SLP stable), then readership may follow simply because that's where the market is going. Or, alternatively, it could be a niche that leads to an evolutionary blind alley. Given the increasingly voiced frustrations with how much ACW and WWII narratives have a hold, there's an argument to be made that we may be approaching something of a tipping point without even realizing it.

That is a problem. Where are more authors going to come from? The AO3 ones seem happy staying at AO3 and might not want to crossover with the AH forums (and AFAIK the AH forums aren't crossposting on AO3 either). As @heraclius says, more people from that aren't from Britain or North America would help, even just other parts of the anglosphere - I think @Jared 's Alternate Australias had some entirely new-to-AH authors, for example, and Natasja Rose's Emu War satire read really different to a lot of AH vignettes.

I think it depends on if authors decide they want to move from online non-paying output to trying to get something paying published. The move from the hobbyist, say, to something more professional. True, I think there will always be people happy to post stuff online and get satisfaction that they're stuff is out there at all. On the other hand, you can't underrate someone saying, "You know what? I want a book with my name on it!" Using myself as an entirely anecdotal example, the entire time I spent writing Our Man on the Hill (and some of my earlier output) I wasn't on here or on any of the other AH forums. Work can happen in a vacuum and I think it's not a bad idea to have places where those not immersed in the forums can go with their work, as well.
 
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For dealing with the whole ‘explaining the world’ problem that comes out of Non-ACW /WW2 settings I’ve found taking inspiration from Terry Pratchett could be helpful, in explaining the world in a dryly humorous fashion that allows you to get the world building done and dusted and as long as you note it down, allows for organic world building.
 
I'm one of the "pessimists" on the breakthrough potential for alternate history. I agree with @Skinny87 in basic terms about it being too niche, but I think it's even "worse" in that it's a bunch of different niches with very little overlap. Especially once you get into, for lack of a better word, "unambiguous" alternate history.

A Turtledove story, another Axis/Confederate story aimed a wide audience that isn't that historically knowledgeable, The Years of Rice and Salt, a tabletop wargame depicting a 1980s conventional WW3, the Hotline Miami computer game, the Wolfenstein games, and a wiki-plucking online TL where Robert S. Kerr becomes president have much different target audiences, and, more importantly, even people who like more of them individually won't see that much (if any) of an inherent connection, any more than Gundam and early Magic: The Gathering are connected simply because they feature giant mechs. And that's before you get into the issues of how any AH aimed at a broad audience needs to be understandable by historical laypeople and how there really isn't that much commercial benefit in labeling something "Alternate History" that isn't obviously so.

But I will end this post on a brighter note and will say that I find it very heartening that more SLP and stuff like @MAC161 's independent AH has gone more to the Axis/Confederate victory well and has been well-received instead of shouted down with "NO THIS IS IMPLAUSIBLE AND OVERDONE!"
 
I think there's often a very black and white thinking about this. That 'this would be a bad book, therefore this is worthless as an intellectual fun exercise'. Whereas my take is much more that it's a fun way of getting your thoughts about history in order and geeking out with fellow nerds and has value as that.

If I do write my novel, the fact I can refer to 50,000 words of notes and have been thinking about the world, will make that background society appear lived in and rich even if I focus my actual words on the characters and plot because I've thought about it and that'll come through in throwaway remarks.

That's true - at the same time, there has to be a degree of flexibility - you have to avoid the 'as you know' trope while somehow getting the idea across.

Maybe what we need is an AH that hits the same notes as Game of Thrones - enough recognizable to draw in the punters, enough different to keep them involved. Perhaps a world where WW1 is delayed 15-20 years ...

Chris
 
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