Recent content by Coiler

More seriously, IOTL basketball seems to have more of a fanbase on the European continent (the Baltics and former Yugoslavia are basketball-crazy, and the big countries have thriving scenes) than in Britain. Wonder what divergences it would take to reverse that and what effects that would have.

Instead of "War Against The Mafia", the first Mack Bolan book is titled "War Against The National Syndicate".

Saw this rant about the third season. Thoughts?

I use the term "alternate and historical but not AH" to describe such works. IE, the author isn't going for a pure reenactment but clearly isn't trying to write an alternate history like one where the outcome of the entire war is different.

I dunno, I think he'd just grab all the Baltics and not bother with the headache if he could. The thing I know about Tukhachevsky (which isn't relevant to this direct question) is that he loved technologies he clearly didn't understand. It got to the point where you could look at some of his...

If you wanted the absolute basics on any never-was Soviet/Russian aircraft project, Unflown Wings is the book for you. The nature of it means basically that all of its authors usual weaknesses are lessened (ie, iffy accuracy matters less when the planes never flew anyway, a slapdash...

I do like the idea of an independent state on the southern end of the subcontinent thematically (even leaving aside plausibility), but wonder if those two are are big enough to really stand up on their own in the long run.

Good post on a wargaming blog about some (soft) AH wargames. It had this line that made me think of the similar issues with academic historians.

I have this maniacal plan for an AH where Austria's aviation industry is massively boosted compared to OTLs. It's a soft divergence so you could probably pick a million holes in it, but basically it takes advantage of Austrias (as unfortunately shown in the Russo Ukrainian War) post 1991 ties...

I actually knew more about the Rif War than I did about a lot of the other Scramble article subjects, so this was particularly interesting.

Reminds me of the real Belyayev fox experiments.

Small nitpick: I'd say less "readers in the general public" and more "readers in the online alternate history community". Most mass-market AH (and ficiton in general) does not go into extreme detail on small divergences.

What if the Mount Erebus New Zealand Air Disaster never happened?

Thinking of a bizarre what-if where Vatican City's team (which exists) is actually a substantive player in UEFA (meaning that they join San Marino and other microstates in being the victims of squash matches in continental qualifiers).

Bringing up Star Wars actually brings me to my favorite acceptability anecdote. See, Kevin J. Anderson (whose reputation among SF fans is about as high as Mike Sparks' among armored vehicle enthusiasts) made a horrible short story about a robot who was onscreen for less than a minute in TESB...