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Alternate History General Discussion

I'll third the disappointment at The Final Countdown ending.

Then again, if it had ended with the Kido Butai getting thrashed, we'd probably be complaining about the obvious use of stock footage and "they're obviously just setting off pyrotechnics on the deck of an LPD".

Well, what are the implications? What happens next?

Chris
 
This is more historical fiction in general, but it just feels like very few stories about history actually explore the era it was in. It just feels like very surface level exploration and an excuse to be buddy-buddy with some cool historical figure.
 
Well, what are the implications? What happens next?

Chris
With the filmmakers reliant on USN cooperation, perhaps something like a quick end to WW2, rally the west against the Communists afterward, and the world is a better place, yay.

With a different eye, squashing the KB leads to some brief anti-Japanese operations but the US never gets drawn into the European War and that ends in stalemate or Nazi victory.

Or Nimitz squashes the KB, but then crosses paths with a Japanese submarine which somehow gets close enough to stick some fish in her and she's a goner.

Or the strike package itself goes ahead, the time storm sucks Nimitz back to her normal present, and the captain has a whole bunch of missing aircraft and aviators to explain while somebody smart wonders if the strike package remained in a separate timeline.
 
This is more historical fiction in general, but it just feels like very few stories about history actually explore the era it was in. It just feels like very surface level exploration and an excuse to be buddy-buddy with some cool historical figure.

This is exactly the problem that Barry Sadler's (yes, the Ballad of the Green Berets guy) Casca series had. The first book was his origin story and was fairly well done. The second book has him taking advantage of his immortality to become a ruler in pre-Colombian North America. After that, it's just a plodding unambituous mess of "Casca appears in theme park version of ______. Casca meets name dropped historical figures in that time. Casca utterly fails to take advantage of his origin or life experience and just goes through. Author, who may or may not be Sadler personally, frequently makes gigantic historical inaccuracies."
 
This is also the problem with more Man Who Came Early-type stories. It's an interesting story, a dark and sobering one about the gulf of time and ideas that separate us from the past, but as a time travel adventure piece, necessarily its not very good, because the adventure is a failure and he dies miserably.


It is probably way too 'internet AH' but I think it would be interesting to address time travel failures as lost/secret histories. Uptime genealogist tries to look into the mysterious WW2 disappearance of his grandfather, ends up finding passages from Edda fragments written by downtimer contemporaries that make him convinced his grandfather was a time traveler.
 
I swear, there has to be something in alternate history, maybe something that unlocks a secret compartment in your mind, because my god, some of the most left-leaning, anti-imperialist, generally anti-war folks I know suddenly turn into belligerent nationalists blowing the trumpets of war.

Suddenly, people are talking about setting up puppet states and exploiting the hell out of them with no sense of irony or self-awareness.
 
I swear, there has to be something in alternate history, maybe something that unlocks a secret compartment in your mind, because my god, some of the most left-leaning, anti-imperialist, generally anti-war folks I know suddenly turn into belligerent nationalists blowing the trumpets of war.

Suddenly, people are talking about setting up puppet states and exploiting the hell out of them with no sense of irony or self-awareness.

It's the strategy game mindset which pops up consistently in AH.
 
It's the strategy game mindset which pops up consistently in AH.

I want to be defensive and say that it might be because the people know it's not real, so they can indulge their dirtier fantasies. It's like someone who's nonviolent and good natured in real life having fun with virtual murder and mayhem in a GTA or Postal game.
 
I wrote a chapter about my ISOT protagonists breaking out their first aid kit to treat a burn victim and somebody commented to the effect that it would be less future-tech to turn over to the legitimate government authorities to reverse-engineer.

That sounds like an interesting book - link?

Chris
 
I swear, there has to be something in alternate history, maybe something that unlocks a secret compartment in your mind, because my god, some of the most left-leaning, anti-imperialist, generally anti-war folks I know suddenly turn into belligerent nationalists blowing the trumpets of war.

Suddenly, people are talking about setting up puppet states and exploiting the hell out of them with no sense of irony or self-awareness.
There's a fellow in Alternate History Online (which, full disclosure, I moderate) who is a very liberal, progressive Frenchman who will slam America for any number of crimes but dissemble about France doing similar, and yet have the gall to call himself antinationalist.

There was a conversation about if any other European country could have done something like the Holocaust - he vicariously denied the possibility that France could ever do so. I and others brought up the Dreyfus affair, to which he responded that, somehow, said affair demonstrates how France is less antisemitic than other European countries. There may or may not have been bad takes about Vichy too.
 
There's a fellow in Alternate History Online (which, full disclosure, I moderate) who is a very liberal, progressive Frenchman who will slam America for any number of crimes but dissemble about France doing similar, and yet have the gall to call himself antinationalist.

There was a conversation about if any other European country could have done something like the Holocaust - he vicariously denied the possibility that France could ever do so. I and others brought up the Dreyfus affair, to which he responded that, somehow, said affair demonstrates how France is less antisemitic than other European countries. There may or may not have been bad takes about Vichy too.

While I get what you say, we should remember the whole Dreyfus affair revolved around French society being very divided and actually resulted in secularism. Also, not all Anti-Dreyfusards were anti-Semitic.
 
While I get what you say, we should remember the whole Dreyfus affair revolved around French society being very divided and actually resulted in secularism.

Of course there's no way selectively-applied secularism could possibly be another form of religious discrimination.


Forgive me if I'm not super convinced by one source I can't read and two other sources that make the same blank claim you made without actually naming anyone who was merely concerned with ethics in military trial journalism.
 

Reading one of the links, it’s a review of one of the other links (a book), and this review states that this claim is unsubstantiated in the book.

048EE032-C0E4-438E-9100-7933DC498F97.jpeg

The other link, a book itself, has this snippet which I do not find convincing at all:

6A820ECA-1E6F-4726-96D6-5D1DE690EC7B.jpeg
 
Of course there's no way selectively-applied secularism could possibly be another form of religious discrimination.

My point about secularism was that there was enough opposition to Dreyfus's treatment to lead to the introduction of secularism.

Forgive me if I'm not super convinced by one source I can't read and two other sources that make the same blank claim you made without actually naming anyone who was merely concerned with ethics in military trial journalism.


Reading one of the links, it’s a review of one of the other links (a book), and this review states that this claim is unsubstantiated in the book.

View attachment 43650

The other link, a book itself, has this snippet which I do not find convincing at all:

View attachment 43649

I must admit I hesitated in making that remark as it was merely based on that book's statement.
 
There's a fellow in Alternate History Online (which, full disclosure, I moderate) who is a very liberal, progressive Frenchman who will slam America for any number of crimes but dissemble about France doing similar, and yet have the gall to call himself antinationalist.

There was a conversation about if any other European country could have done something like the Holocaust - he vicariously denied the possibility that France could ever do so. I and others brought up the Dreyfus affair, to which he responded that, somehow, said affair demonstrates how France is less antisemitic than other European countries. There may or may not have been bad takes about Vichy too.

BTW, here is a thread at the other place about France or Russia carrying out an Holocaust equivalent, https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/ahc-france-russia-perpetrate-the-holocaust.471889/.
 
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