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Alternate History General Discussion

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 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 part of the problem - and it unquestionably is a problem (maybe it always was) - is simply that a depressingly high proportion (for my taste, anyway) of AH simply ignores the human aspect of the history.

There is a large proportion of AH that focuses on the worldbuilding to the point where the inhabitants of that world are simply part of the background. We get to see the big decisions, and the nuts and bolts and the cool kit and the clever in-jokes (there was a period where I lost track of how many times Richard Nixon appeared as a used car salesman) and so on, but there is not a single character present.

We'll get to see, for example, Rommel casting aside the constraints of logistics with a large dose of handwavium, and conquers Egypt and the Middle East and etc. In such timelines, we never get to see what sweeping flanking moves in the desert means for those doing it.

I must declare an interest (as Parliamentarians might say). I'm firmly in the Narrative camp of AH. Without a Plot and Characters, worldbuilding is essentially wanking away building the equivalent of a Lego model. Worse, because a lot of the Lego figures have more personality than many AH characters.

In my opinion, 1984 is a great example of how it should be done. One gets to see the world through the eyes of a character. We see the individuals that make up the world. It's not just moving blocks about on a map.

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

Of course, this starts to move into the issue of why we are writing and reading. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I'm writing and reading (especially reading), I am doing so principally to entertain or be entertained. Which can include serious unpleasantness. Perhaps it is my life experiences speaking here, but I don't particularly need detailed descriptions of atrocities. I've seen them for real, the attempted genocide of Bangladesh Independence, the insanity that was the Lebanese Civil War, the game of Prod-a-Prod played by the IRA in Belfast. I'm not going to describe details of these, and I certainly don't need to read imagined descriptions of these by someone who hasn't a clue what is involved.

But, evoking an emotional response is at the heart of writing. If a writer can't get a strong emotional response from the reader, one has to question whether the book was worth writing.

It's complicated. You show me someone who says there is an easy answer to the issue, and I'll show you someone who hasn't grasped the issue in the first place.

I was reflecting on how uncomfortable I'm becoming with Nazi victory timelines.

Returning to this. I'm uncomfortable with Nazi victory timelines simply because, in many cases, the author seems to be not too far from presenting the unspoken view: "And it would have been a good thing." There was one egregious example I recently proofread. I'm obviously not in a position to discuss the details of the work (the proofreader's requirement to keep schtum about the work they've proofread), but there was a strong sense of Wehraboo about the work.

It feeds back to the commonplace casual acceptance of the pernicious myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht".

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but there is a tendency to dehumanise AH in favour of History, in the same way that a lot of 1960s and 1970s SF dehumanised the SF works in favour of Science, and a lot of Fantasy dehumanises that genre (if one can dehumanise elves and orcs and dwarves and so on) in favour of Mythology.

God knows, my own work is meaningless drivel, but at least I will stick by my principles of having them filled with people.

Even if the people are Ravens or Snowmen.

(And that was my proudest moment as a writer - when I got people crying over the death of a snowman. The Snowman, eat your heart out.)
 
As an addendum to this, it's perhaps interesting to note that I am currently on my bete noire of historical fiction in Nitpicker's. Specifically, Scorched Earth policies. Very few fictions do more than mention the word, with nary a thought about the implications for the local population of destroying anything an advancing enemy might use.
 
I like @SpanishSpy's word use in the scorchingly negative Republic of Virginia review: "Moving pieces on a [setting, in this case Virginia] shaped board" for this kind of soulless, drab exposition AH.

But I also think it's important to note how much written AH doesn't have that issue. The Iceland Scale that I thought applied to almost all conventional WWIII stories ended up applying to almost none. Kirov is about 70% literally a description of someone playing a video game, and it still has developed characters, including my favorite antagonist in all of alternate history. Robert Conroy's pop-AH may be executed badly, but it still sincerely tries to show different viewpoint characters, and not just in conference rooms. Likewise for Harry Turtledove, who either succeeds or fails while still trying.

The key point I think is audience appeal. A normal reader is far more interested in a relatable person staggering through the desert than an exposition statement about how Rommel drove all the way to Amman. This brings me back to Gary's point about how a reviewer seemed surprised at the lack of conventional characters in Binet's book-for a normal reader, yes it is an unconventional layout and a big change that won't be for everyone.
 
But I also think it's important to note how much written AH doesn't have that issue.

I presume you are talking about published AH, rather than the TLs one encounters on fora such as this and AH. My experience suggests (and I would need to check to confirm) that AH in Proper Books understands character/plot/setting, while a lot of Forum AH is basically Expository History Book that just happens to be an Alternate History.
 
On the other hand, it's also quite useful to have an omniscient narrator who actually knows about the big picture and can tell the readers a bit about it. That's already easier to say than doing it.

Just think about it: Would you use daily dialogues of ordinary people today to teach people what Covid-19 was? Could people learn from that?
 
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Just think about it: Would you use daily dialogues of ordinary people today to teach people what Covid-19 was? Could eople learn from that?

That's actually very easy to get across through normal dialogue. Just have someone be sick and say it reminded them of surviving COVID. You could do a similar thing for 1918/any other big illness issue.
 
Not that, sheesh! What kind the disease is, how you should fight it, such things.

That's my point: When people are in the middle of a big thing happening, they often don't understand the whole thing.

No one understands the 'whole' of any global event. Fauci doesn't understand the 'whole' COVID thing. Nurses who walked away from the NHS after the latest pointless death was too much for them don't understand the whole thing. I guarantee you that historians a century from now with access to reams of data won't understand the whole thing.

'What kind the disease is, how you should fight it, such things.': all that stuff you can deal with at a personal level- hell, just imagine a recurring scene with the updated public health advice, every time a bit inaccurate, every time telling you about what people thought was going on, every time giving you some sense of whether or not people were taking things seirously.
 
No one understands the 'whole' of any global event.

Don't say such things, if you please. That reminds me too much of people who say "Well, nobody fully understands this alleged Global Warming". It is possible to recognize what's important, even if we aren't omniscient.

And don't tell me "What's important is totally relative/subjective". With relativism, you can justify everything. Hopefully you can see where that leads.
 
Don't say such things, if you please. That reminds me too much of people who say "Well, nobody fully understands this alleged Global Warming". It is possible to recognize what's important, even if we aren't omniscient.

And don't tell me "What's important is totally relative/subjective". With relativism, you can justify everything. Hopefully you can see where that leads.

This is insulting, absurd, and completely unserious.
 
  1. I am serious.
  2. I have heard the pseudo-reason "Nobody understands the whole of anything" too often to seriously dislike it. That's why I'd prefer if people stopped using it.
  3. You didn't call anything relative/subjective, I'm willing to admit that. I just wrote it to avoid someone would say that.
 
Don't say such things, if you please. That reminds me too much of people who say "Well, nobody fully understands this alleged Global Warming". It is possible to recognize what's important, even if we aren't omniscient.

We can all recognise the basic important things of how covid and the prominent variants spread, but after that you've got the specific impact on different age groups and pre-existing conditions, you have which methods of containment/control work and when they don't work, you have which vaccine worked better when and why, you have why each individual nation followed (or didn't) the specific methods they did and at what time, how different places got hit differently, how pre-existing domestic issues and international ones affected what happened where, the specific impact on industries or services...

Individual people are only going to be able to understand and grasp so much (which is why you'd have multiple historians writing about different parts of it)
 
Just think about it: Would you use daily dialogues of ordinary people today to teach people what Covid-19 was? Could people learn from that?

All the history books I had when going through the Virginia public school system had personal accounts to make history feel more real.

Here's a good twitter thread on the subject specifically in regards to the Holocaust:



As Liam said in a good comment on Simon Schama:

Come now, Citizens may be Edmund Burke with added art history, but one thing it does superbly is the sense of the personal.
I think of it as a bit like The Guns of August or The Sleepwalkers: historiographically dodgy, but the writing is absolutely top notch and all three authors understand that humans think in anecdotes.

Many historians sneer at anecdotes. I understand why. They're not data. They easily deceive. They're too neat.

But however much we may wish otherwise, humans think in terms of stories. One of the single best ways to get them to understand big events is to tell them lots of little ones that stick in their mind, that shape how they think.

Whether you're Tuchman telling the story 'World War One was all Germany's fault!' or Chris Clark telling the story 'World War One was Serbia's Fault, and if it wasn't it was Everyone's and if it was Everyone's it especially wasn't Germany's!,' or, yes, Schama telling the story 'Even the early part of the French Revolution was an avoidable tragedy that made things worse off,' you can get people to believe if you wrap it in little tales.

What a good personal anecdote does is to make the somewhat idiosyncratic bits of any given event and hammer in the reality of it to someone far removed from it. History is not merely the stuff of textbooks; it happened to real people.

Using the Holocaust as an example: read the diary of Anne Frank and you'll see a real young girl's hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears, her character and her friends and her family and the world she knew. The Holocaust annihilated that by killing her.

Now multiply that annihilation by six million and you'll begin to grasp the utter enormity of this crime.
 
What a good personal anecdote does is to make the somewhat idiosyncratic bits of any given event and hammer in the reality of it to someone far removed from it. History is not merely the stuff of textbooks; it happened to real people.

Using the Holocaust as an example: read the diary of Anne Frank and you'll see a real young girl's hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears, her character and her friends and her family and the world she knew. The Holocaust annihilated that by killing her.

Now multiply that annihilation by six million and you'll begin to grasp the utter enormity of this crime.

Indeed and quite so.

There are clever people who will say that an anecdote is a single data point, and therefore not indicative of any great truth.

Which is perfectly true in so far as it goes. I have bored people with anecdotes of my past life and, were one to take them seriously, one would conclude that one good way to meet a suitable life-partner is to go into a warzone and get badly wounded. I understand that this is not commonplace.

But what an anecdote does is bring events to life in exactly the manner you describe. It's something I tried to do in HCI, my tale in Building a Better Future. Everyone knows the Big Pushes on the Western Front in WWI involved heavy casualties. That's what the term HCI means (and was used by generals explaining to politicians what was involved: Heavy Casualties Inevitable). Everyone knows that the British Army took 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Somme (roughly the equivalent of removing Gosport, Hampshire from the map). There's 60,000 tragedies right there, usually remembered as just a number.
 
Here's a good twitter thread on the subject specifically in regards to the Holocaust:



Is that a real trend in kid's stories versus one book, that the lead has no prejudice at the start? When I was the target demographic, if a story was meant to be about bigotry or a real conflict, you did have leads who were prejudiced or fell into prejudice and the consequences were what the story was about.

(Though I have before seen people angry in the YA Community TM that a story follows a Bad Person who needs to stop being bad, so if it is a trend it's not just going to be down to parents wanting sanitisation)
 
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