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Alternate History General Discussion

it's 1940 but everyone still uses airships and has primitive helicopters instead of fixed wing planes in any significant numbers, for example
Why! WHY! Why do people see fast dramatic cool planes and then go "But what if instead of using the exciting technology, we used giant lumbering gasbags instead? Wouldn't that be cool?" NO. No it would not!
 
Why! WHY! Why do people see fast dramatic cool planes and then go "But what if instead of using the exciting technology, we used giant lumbering gasbags instead? Wouldn't that be cool?" NO. No it would not!

Even though I made a post about it, it's still frankly mystifying to me why there are so few heavier than air VTOL craft in alternate history. You've got so many types and yet everyone goes for the blimps instead.
 
Why! WHY! Why do people see fast dramatic cool planes and then go "But what if instead of using the exciting technology, we used giant lumbering gasbags instead? Wouldn't that be cool?" NO. No it would not!

I think mostly 'easy way to distinguish TTL from OTL'. Clearly, airplanes are superior to airships, but if you want a simple distinction, it's hard to top zeppelins bombing the foundries of northeast France.
 
I think mostly 'easy way to distinguish TTL from OTL'. Clearly, airplanes are superior to airships, but if you want a simple distinction, it's hard to top zeppelins bombing the foundries of northeast France.

It's a lot of individual elements that I think add together.

It is, as you say, a very striking visual difference, an instant method of communicating this is a world not quite our own. Fritz Leiber's "Catch That Zeppelin!" from 1975 has the protagonist seeing a zeppelin moored at the Empire State Building as the thing that tells him he's left his universe for another.

They're a modern piece of technology that's still almost exclusively confined to the past, so you're saying something different by a 2022 London under the shadow of zeppelins than you are by a 2022 London crowded with horse-drawn cabs.

They were classy and refined, embossed with the upper class aesthetic of a great ocean liner, in a way that early airplanes manifestly were not and really still aren't. If Fritz Leiber is any indication, the zeppelin from another world was introduced as an AH institution when they were still in the living memory of people writing about them, something they would remember with wonder and nostalgia from childhood even if they never flew on one personally.

There's also the aura of The Road Not Taken about them, how they were once The Future and The Coming Thing, with it all undone in a great, single tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster. I say aura because obviously there were lots of terrible accidents and technical problems with them in general, but the fixing on a single point appeals to the AH impulse to change a small thing and see large differences flow from it.

EDIT: Further, there's the identification of them with Germany. Obviously they were hardly alone in developing the technology or pursuing it for military ends, to the point that the Hindenburg is fifth on the list of deadliest airship crashes, behind the USS Akron, one French and two different British disasters, but the fact I'm saying the word 'zeppelin' in a conversation written in English and you all know what I mean makes the point. Germany being on the losing end of the two greatest wars of the 20th century, when 'what if the other side won x war' is the oldest and most basic form of alternate history speculation, slots them in very neatly as something from That Other World.
 
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I think mostly 'easy way to distinguish TTL from OTL'. Clearly, airplanes are superior to airships, but if you want a simple distinction, it's hard to top zeppelins bombing the foundries of northeast France.
I prefer pizza balls from Michigan street vendors and Reed Richards being turned into human spaghetti by overpowered vaguely Eastern European women on a crusade for imaginary children. Now those are evocative, powerful images.
 
There’s plenty of underutilized images out there:

French kings getting crowned in the 20th century under tv cameras

two pre-Dreadnoughts meeting in the middle of the ocean and slugging it out

Two elderly gentlemen in a Damascan park playing chess and grousing over what damn fool modernist thing the Caliph is trying to pull now

Stirling engines and other alternatives to steam and diesel

pneumatic tubes

China split up into multiple ethnic states

Literally any surviving independent Native American polity (excepting Mesoamerican - it’s been done enough)

Rams on warships being used, or even boardings

A normal-sounding South America where the wildest thing that has happened is Brazil keeping the monarchy or Peru-Bolivian Confederation, and not the continent either being static or falling under the thrall of whatever bugnuts crazy ideology the author wants to fetishize/cast as pure evil

Little German principalities shooting at each other in the modern era

More animals in warfare (pigeon guided munitions is a sufficiently nutty way to start)

The Mughal Empire not collapsing until much later


Luxury submarines a la Jules Verne

Medieval concepts like hidage or weregild surviving in some way

Nuesantra establishing an empire across Oceania

Communal meal cooking and sharing being more popular in Western society

France’s birth rate not tanking in the 19th Century and bigger waves of French immigration

Independent North African polities surviving

Seaplanes being a common form of international travel, with commercial tenders/aircraft carriers in the middle of the ocean for them
 
I've always wanted to, in a setting with time/dimensional travel make one where an ISOT munchkin and his empire are the villains of the piece. (And yes, I know Guns of the South kind of already did this)

I do intend to do something like that, but there's some tough choices to be made. GOTS worked as well as it did because, at the time, one could still portray Lee as a misguided rather than evil man - one who had to grapple with the implications of the CSA victory AND the judgement of his own descendants. A crazy-awesome William Walker character can overcome the 'this guy isn't remotely sympathetic' aspects, but more grounded types cannot.

Even if these people have a genuine cause - the guy who helped the Nazis in 'The Foresight War' did it because his son had been killed by the Russians, in East Germany - they're still helping history's bad guys and they have to grapple with the implications of that. (In that book, the hero blows up Hitler in a suicide bombing.)


Of course, you could have Churchill (et al) grappling with a Third Reich that seems to have taken a jump into the future and only reveal, at the end, that Hitler had help from Neo-Fascists of 2030 or whenever.
 
I think mostly 'easy way to distinguish TTL from OTL'. Clearly, airplanes are superior to airships, but if you want a simple distinction, it's hard to top zeppelins bombing the foundries of northeast France.

And it's probably harder to get across "different planes" to most people and have them go "ah, alternative developments" and not "scifi tech"
 
Laurent Binet, who wrote HHhH about the history of assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, produced an AH book about the Incan conquest of Europe a few years back. @Aznavour mentioned it in this thread, at the time, but couldn't afford to buy it.

I have also not bought it, though I intend to, once I get paid for July.

But one of my favourite sci-fi and fantasy reviewers, Abigail Nussbaum, has read it and reviewed it here.

It's a typically incisive review but I really liked the opening paragraph 'Technically, Civilizations—which imagines a world where the social and economic collapse that had devastated the Inca empire around the time of Columbus's arrival in the Americas doesn't occur, and instead it's the Inca who colonize Europe—is an alternate history, maybe even science fiction. But the narrative's tone is removed, relating its events like a historical lecture—albeit one with a wry, slightly mocking tone—interspersed with journal excerpts, letters, official documents, and even bits of poetry. There are no real characters, just historical figures, more important for their influence on events than for their psychology, and although the narrator occasionally makes personal asides, their identity and reasons for laying out this history remain opaque. I'm much more comfortable describing Civilizations as a work of creative nonfiction than science fiction, but whichever shelf you end up putting it on, it's a delightful, engrossing read.'

Which is fascinating for the way that Abigail clearly thinks of AH as not being that, whereas that's an accurate description of most of the AH I have read.
 
And it's probably harder to get across "different planes" to most people and have them go "ah, alternative developments" and not "scifi tech"

VTOLs (and for that matter, alternative 'normal' aircraft) come in three categories: Looking like normal aircraft, looking like slightly different-shaped aircraft, and looking like sci-fi contraptions. The first two don't really strike most non-enthusiasts as "alternate", and the tone of the third is obvious.

Just think of it from a story perspective. An airship is like this napkinwaffe monstrosity in that you can set things in it and have a different experience and timeframe from an actual OTL airliner. Whereas a Vietnam War story where the characters ride into battle in one of the many goofy VTOL designs (and there were a lot) is still going to be a lot like a Vietnam War story where they ride in a humble, ubiquitous-in-OTL UH-1.
 
Now I want to do a Jesuit maritime space filling empire that consists of all of OTL Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, New Guinea, Borneo, the Philippines, and Taiwan. At least. And maybe some possessions on the Asian mainland.
I just talked to Arturo Sosa, the Father General of the Jesuits, and he sent me this picture of himself as a response:
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I was at a B&B in St Ives yesterday morning.

The landlady was a touch odd- a proud Polish patriot who wanted to ask my actor sister if she'd seen any of Roman Polanski's movies. Of course, he doesn't live in Poland any more, he lives in America.

Um.

The thing is though, we got to talking, and out of nowhere she begins opening up to us- and she disappears from the room and returns with something she wants us to see:

Her grandmother's passport, issued to the grandmother when she was abducted from her village near Krakow and pressed into domestic service in Dusseldorf. The passport attests to her blonde hair and blue eyes- this was important, of course, to her future duties as a mother of Aryan children.

She was seventeen.

The grandmother spent a few weeks as a maid to a doctor's family and the nanny of his children, and then escaped. She apparently walked back to Poland, travelling only at night, drinking from roadside puddles when she could find nothing else.

She returned to her home village to find, obviously, that the Gestapo had already ransacked her mother's house. She spent the rest of the war in a neighbour's cellar, eating one meal a day if she was lucky. She used the passport, at times, as a diary- it was the only paper she had. The back of it was filled with pages of spidery Polish.

After the war she married an abusive drunk, and while her son was doing his service in the Polish army in the sixties he was told that his mother had been found dead by her sowing machine- cause of death not determined.

The landlady had never met her grandmother, but she looked the spitting image.

Anyway, after that we got treated to an explanation that COVID isn't real, and also that unlike the cowardly Ukrainians the Poles never fled as refugees anywhere during the war. Once again: um.

My broader point though is that once again I was reflecting on how uncomfortable I'm becoming with Nazi victory timelines. I know that we brush all manner of implied atrocities under the map in this game- slavery in the ancient world for one, and I like to think I've made my position on whitewashing imperialism in alternate history pretty clear.

But again and again we return to the Third Reich victorious, in scenario after scenario. And we think about who would be the next Fuhrer, or what the Panzers of the 1960s would look like, or if the environment would be even more fucked up than up timeline by stupid mega engineering projects.

I don't even want to talk about the camps or the killings generally right now.

Instead, I keep thinking about that passport and how most Nazi victory timelines never really grapple with millions of those passports, swastikas stamped by women's photos, saying they're ready for slavery and rape.

I don't... I don't have an interesting conclusion here. It's just that it's been troubling me.
 
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My broader point though is that once again I was reflecting on how uncomfortable I'm becoming with Nazi victory timelines. I know that we brush all manner of implied atrocities under the map in this game- slavery in the ancient world for one, and I like to think I've made my position on whitewashing imperialism in alternate history pretty clear.

But again and again we return to the Third Reich victorious, in scenario after scenario. And we think about who would be the next Fuhrer, or what the Panzers of the 1960s would look like, or if the environment would be even more fucked up than up timeline by stupid mega engineering projects.

I don't even want to talk about the camps or the killings generally right now.

Instead, I keep thinking about that passport and how most Nazi victory timelines never really grapple with millions of those passports, swastikas stamped by women's photos, saying they're ready for slavery and rape.

I don't... I don't have an interesting conclusion here. It's just that it's been troubling me.

I don't blame you. It's easy (and usually lazy) to get caught up in the superficial nuts and bolts of a Victorious Reich - tanks and Welthauptstadt Germania and Breitspurbahn. As someone who's written a few works in that kind of timeline, I tried to dig deeper and explore the uglier aspects of those worlds. (Admittedly, I was probably too tame by drawing on late-era Soviet Union as my template).
 
I think the issue is that even significantly smaller scale murder, slavery and sexual assault is really fucking difficult to imagine on the scale of real life.

Like, let’s take something like Bloody Sunday. Here we see members of a military of an objective democracy firing into a crowd, and killing 14 people. 14 people with lives, ambitions, feelings, ideals, destroyed for no real reason.

Thinking about that alone, those 14 people’s life being torn from them, their futures being taken away is unfathomable to me. It hurts me to think about.

I’m not one to play with scale, I think it’s gauche. But if I can’t fathom the deaths of 14 people, I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the industrial slaughter of six million people for nothing, absolutely nothing more than a fake revenge fantasy on behalf of a dictatorship that’s built up everything around the eradication of people they consider lesser.

The answer’s obvious, then, one could say, and that’s to do absolutely nothing with it. But, and here’s the thing that separates the nazis from the other recent grand massacres of history, the Killing Fields to the Cultural Revolution to the Indonesian Mass Slaughters, and that’s that World War II happened. The forces of the Axis fought the forces of the Allies, and lost, in a six-year global conflict.

The Nazis hold cultural cachet of being “The Most Evil Regime In History”. People like to mention how the Soviets and PRC don’t have the same reputation even though Stalin killed way more people etc etc, but that’s very simple to me, and that’s because that we in “the west” fought a total war against the nazis and won. That’s not something that is easily forgotten.

This cachet easily represents a question for a lot of AH people:
“What if the Bad Guys won?”
To start, it’s very easy to see why people don’t mention the Shoah, or the Slavery or literally everything else, and that’s because they assume it’s implicit, and that’s what makes them the bad people who should not win under any circumstances. So, they treat Nazi Germany as just any other country. Political changes, usually. Who would take power after Hitler dies? Hmmm.

I can understand being uncomfortable with it, God knows I am. But for the layman, especially the layman with absolutely no connection to the vile crimes of the Nazis beyond “They committed a genocide and that’s bad” rather than trying to interpret the pure scale, what you’re left with is people treating the country like you would any other country.

You mileage may vary, god knows mine does.
 
I want to note that my point overall here is not meant to dismiss any of the points above other than the point about laziness. There’s a tendency to mix up laziness and ignorance as being the same thing as opposed to being closely associated. I think that especially for new people getting into althist, there’s a real knowledge gap - I still don’t know shit about economics, for example, or the auto industry, despite what I’m really interested in being the Cold War in which both of things are vital for a complete understanding.

Again, there’s an attractiveness to acting “what if the bad guys won”, especially if you’re ignorant as to what that would mean on a grand scale. People here forget that history is hard, and at times very tedious, and there is a real feeling that people just want to jump into it.

I’d say what people need is a kind of disclaimer. Put something up somewhere saying “here’s what you should consider morally, and if for looking into when portraying these specific regimes and events, without being condescending”, but also without whitewashing.
 
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What @SenatorChickpea and @Kimkatya have said - both insightful comments - got me thinking, and I have some scattered thoughts.

If I could make newbies to AH read anything, I'd give them this piece by rvbomally on the Alternate History Weekly Update. It's a piercing piece about how so many AH conventions by their nature put an emotional distance between the writer and the immense human suffering they write about second-hand, and how that makes the act of writing AH a less emotionally taxing experience.

The most relevant bit:

Worldbuilding Detaches Authors and Readers
The old chestnut about one death being a tragedy, a million being a statistic, is doubtless true. The human brain has trouble comprehending such large numbers of people, so it thinks of them in inhuman abstractions. The larger the number, the more difficult it is to empathize with a person, because they become part of an amorphous group.

Mitro and SpanishSpy discuss the worldbuilding in 1984 as a feature which attracts alternate historians to the work. I agree, but I will take this thesis a step further: worldbuilding also allows alternate historians to write about dystopian settings with greater emotional ease. As nonsensical as it may be, the story of Winston Smith is far more tragic than the story of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. This is because Winston Smith is a man who we come to know, and who is mercilessly destroyed by the system, body and soul. While we know this is happening to countless people throughout the world of 1984, we are concerned with Winston because we know him. The others may as well be nonexistent, vaporized as the Party intends.

Alternate historians who go straight for the worldbuilding have a much easier time writing a dystopia. They do not have to agonize over the tragedy of the Last Man in Europe, as Orwell did. A paragraph describing nuclear annihilation, or the genocide of an ethnic group, can suffice to give the audience the necessary information without the emotional pathos. Indeed, a simple bullet point can suffice.

While detachment is of little consequence when writing fiction, it becomes a problem in the study of actual history. Good historians understand this, hence the popularity of using works such as Anne Frank's diary in education about historical atrocities. Six million Jews perishing in the Holocaust is just a number, while Anne Frank was a person.

I knew rvbomally for a while, and we talked a fair bit for a period. One of the things we bonded over was that by sheer coincidence we are both Filipinos.

As a child, my Filipino grandparents would tell me stories about the Japanese occupation that they lived through as a child. They told me of spies manning the halo-halo carts. They told me of a relative who witnessed a bombing raid, and my great-grandfather who was a resistance fighter.

They told me of how, of all the Japanese troops there, the Korean troops were the most ruthless.

They told me of witnessing Japanese soldiers who would grab a baby out of their mother's arms, fling them in the air, and skewer them with a bayonet for target practice.


They told me of a fourteen-year-old girl, a relative, who was married off to a forty-something Filipino man so that she would not be taken and made into a comfort woman. I have several cousins resulting from that union.

There's an attitude towards large-scale suffering in AH that gets more ghoulish the more I think about it; it hits me hard, because half my family is from a country that was ripped apart by war in living (but fading) memory. Wars of conquest do not merely change the colors on a map; nay, they kill. They rape. They burn. They destroy.

What ends up happening is that you get works that come off as being 'edgy' in the way that gratuitous use of rape is 'edgy' - it provides shock value, but demonstrates no interest on the part of the writer to actually reckon with the awful things they write about. They want to provoke a reaction in the reader and then whisk them on to the next plot development. It results in a writing culture of callousness, of detachment. It results in a writing culture in which people are numbers, not people. It is a culture that tells Anne Frank and Solomon Northrup and Malala Yousafzai that their stories are far less important than the caliber of the bullets that shot their loved ones.

There is, however, a room for AH about these subjects, but it is AH that really bothers to reckon with the human cost of war and imperialism. I think Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies, for its flaws, does this particularly well, as it focuses on Jews in hiding in a victorious Nazi Germany undergoing civil unrest. Their fears and their anxieties - but also their joys - are very real in the context of the novel.

It is rarer, but more detached writing can do it too; I think Jon Kacer's Festung Europa got the emotions just right. In this category, though, the best in my opinion is of all things an SCP article, which remains one of the most potent AH narratives I have ever read.

If you're anything like me, you're tearing up at that ending.

That emotion, that willingness to tackle head-on the awfulness about which we write, is something we need all the more.
 
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