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The Borders of Genre: The Glorification of Fascism Within Alternate History

I think another part of the problem is that, well, there's a reason Nazi victories are so popular, isn't there? A lot of people want to read them. Part of that is that people want to read AH about stuff they already more or less know about, or think they do, part of it is that people seem to actively like dystopian fiction, part of it is that people don't really price the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery into the settings of those books - but there is a genuine demand for these things in a way that there just isn't, for now, for our more specialist stuff - I'm not trying to be a snob about this, but I do think most SLP content is very much for people who already like alternate history in a way that The Man In The High Castle or TL-191 isn't.

Not convinced on that.

I mean you're right obviously, it is a bigger audience. But ultimately if you are chasing that audience then you will lose other audiences because you're seen as the nazi victory guy.

And thats kind of the point of the essay. That the genre's reputation comes from the audience it has chased and cultivated.
 
The Man in High Castle the book is an interesting case, since it is ultimately an early deconstruction of the genre, complete with characters realizing they must be fictional in the last few pages. It's also more interested in the feel of such a world than the nuts and bolts -- Dick's universe is a grubby, worn-out place, with the Nazis' byzantine maneuvers in book having the feel of a coke addict in the middle of a binge.
 
Not convinced on that.

I mean you're right obviously, it is a bigger audience. But ultimately if you are chasing that audience then you will lose other audiences because you're seen as the nazi victory guy.

And thats kind of the point of the essay. That the genre's reputation comes from the audience it has chased and cultivated.
Well, I'm sort of saying that not chasing that audience is not enough - even if SLP doesn't publish that stuff, someone will, and I suspect that as long as those books are around and have a large audience to chase they will be the 'public face' of AH.
 
I think another part of the problem is that, well, there's a reason Nazi victories are so popular, isn't there? A lot of people want to read them. Part of that is that people want to read AH about stuff they already more or less know about, or think they do

This is definitely one of the big reasons ConfedeNazis Win is a big seller, the readers know a bit and have an idea of what that'd involve if the opposite happened. What's the big TV AH that's not this? A show opening with Soviets on the moon. Some better selling AH books covered on site are Hilary Clinton not marrying Bill and Regency romances except Napoleon won. Any challenge to Evil Won is likely equally broad, easy-to-get ideas

EDIT: Noughts & Crosses is another, "Africa colonises Europe and race relations flip"

It's also more interested in the feel of such a world than the nuts and bolts -- Dick's universe is a grubby, worn-out place, with the Nazis' byzantine maneuvers in book having the feel of a coke addict in the middle of a binge.

Yeah, we very rarely see the Nazis or their fancy works, IIRC we just see a very fast plane and the main Nazi is an angry unpleasant spy who puts you off before you even know. The world is grey and shitty and scared and everone knows about horrible things, the space race just has dark jokes about how Germany will go to Mars and think it's full of Jews rather than anyone being impressed.
 
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Any challenge to Evil Won is likely equally broad, easy-to-get ideas

I'll second this and note that more subtle AHs (or works that could be easily considered AH) are very frequently not packaged as alternate history at all. There just isn't that much commercial motivation to do so.
 
Wolfram: I think another part of the problem is that, well, there's a reason Nazi victories are so popular, isn't there? A lot of people want to read them. Part of that is that people want to read AH about stuff they already more or less know about, or think they do, part of it is that people seem to actively like dystopian fiction, part of it is that people don't really price the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery into the settings of those books - but there is a genuine demand for these things in a way that there just isn't, for now, for our more specialist stuff - I'm not trying to be a snob about this, but I do think most SLP content is very much for people who already like alternate history in a way that The Man In The High Castle or TL-191 isn't.

Sorry running into challenges with multi-quotes.

I agree. I have friends who read a lot of science fiction and fantasy but tend to stay away from alternate history because they feel that they know insufficient of the genuine history to see the differences and in their view enjoy the book. I would argue though a good AH novel is still a good novel and readers should not feel obliged to spot every last divergence. However, I do think this is why a German or Confederate victory is so popular because in general it is almost immediately comprehensible to a wider slice of the book buying/movie watching public. Though perhaps unsurprisingly the Confederate alternatives are far less common in the UK. However, as time passes - my parents in their 80s were only children during the Second World War, maybe even that assumption no longer holds true. I have been told one reason why the Fatherland (1994) movie did not get a general cinema release was that US test audiences apparently struggled to see that it was an alternate history rather than a portrayal of 1960s East Germany.

One problem is that History as a subject has never been neutral, but in the past 30 years has really been 'weaponised' for governments and groups to make political statements. Perhaps in 1978 someone could have read SS-GB as a piece of interesting, kind of science fiction without even connecting into the extreme right attitudes even vocally expressed then. What we have seen in the past 20+ years is the use of AH by people with a political axe to grind, especially in the USA, so removing it from the kind of uses it was put towards in the past to stimulate debate and indeed entertain. The Chinese government's banning of time travel and alternate history output in 2011, I feel marks the signifier of this situation becoming crystalised. This has stepped up even further with the 'culture war' especially, though not exclusively, in English-speaking countries. What would have once been seen as conspiracy theories and a distortion of history - interesting piece in today's The Guardian Books section on a particular aspect of this - but in the mainstream media, means that unfortunately what was once seen as reserved for intellectual debate/entertainment is now seen sometimes as a raw material for making contemporary political points.

Yes, we sit outside this context in what we do. However, our outputs and those of other AH media producers cannot be divorced from that context and to some degree even if the content itself has not altered from 1978 or 1992 the context into which it goes and what people feel they see in it/can draw from it has shifted greatly.
 
The Man in High Castle the book is an interesting case, since it is ultimately an early deconstruction of the genre, complete with characters realizing they must be fictional in the last few pages. It's also more interested in the feel of such a world than the nuts and bolts -- Dick's universe is a grubby, worn-out place, with the Nazis' byzantine maneuvers in book having the feel of a coke addict in the middle of a binge.

Which is why I think you've got a very good case for 'yeah actually Amazon's take on this actually is a massive problem.' It's one thing having a relatively straight adaptation of Fatherland or SS-GB when that's based on a book from 30 years ago, it's another thing entirely to essentially create an entirely original storyline and have that shift the focus onto the Nazi characters.
 
I'm also thinking that part of the problem is that to create a 'realistic' Nazi victory, they have to be Notzis. And, as we all know, a lot (some say too much) of AH hangs on plausibility.

So the Nazis win by employing 'sensible' strategic measures (and a large degree of futher luck/hand-wavium), competent leadership and the like. Which immeadiately makes them not the actual Nazis, but something adjacent, but still evil.

Making them competent to get the desired scenario, well that has to be seen as glamorising them, because they're 'better'* than RL.

* - this word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
 
I'm also thinking that part of the problem is that to create a 'realistic' Nazi victory, they have to be Notzis. And, as we all know, a lot (some say too much) of AH hangs on plausibility.

So the Nazis win by employing 'sensible' strategic measures (and a large degree of futher luck/hand-wavium), competent leadership and the like. Which immeadiately makes them not the actual Nazis, but something adjacent, but still evil.

Making them competent to get the desired scenario, well that has to be seen as glamorising them, because they're 'better'* than RL.

* - this word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

This is probably why Fatherland only spent a few paragraphs explaining how the Nazis won. (And even that was pretty weak; the Nazis discover Enigma and starve the UK into surrender, conquer the Caucasus oil fields and threaten America with a conventional proto-ICBM exploded near Manhattan? Yikes.)
 
I'm also thinking that part of the problem is that to create a 'realistic' Nazi victory, they have to be Notzis. And, as we all know, a lot (some say too much) of AH hangs on plausibility.

So the Nazis win by employing 'sensible' strategic measures (and a large degree of futher luck/hand-wavium), competent leadership and the like. Which immeadiately makes them not the actual Nazis, but something adjacent, but still evil.

Making them competent to get the desired scenario, well that has to be seen as glamorising them, because they're 'better'* than RL.

* - this word is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Of course, that's something that Fatherland and SS-GB (the novels, at least) do well. Deighton never explains how Sealion works, and rightly doesn't care. Harris lays out the victory in a couple of paragraphs, heavily flavoured with Nazi propaganda so we're not sure how accurate it is, and gets on with it.

In Harris's case the book works because the setting is squalid, nasty, tasteless- and worryingly normal. It's a shitter 1960s, but a recognisable 1960s, and much of the unpleasant power of the book is the implication that the world outside of the Reich is just prepared to hold their nose and normalise relations as we did with Stalinist Russia or Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge. There's no glorification, but apart from Speer's ludicrous architecture in Germania there's not many of the tropes of the successful Reich in terms of military might or technical achievement- it's a very dull world, built upon millions of corpses.

In SS-GB's case, it's very much an interrogation of post-war British triumphalism- the resistance are heroic, but they're ruthless. The protagonist is a collaborator, even if he eventually switches sides like a Vichy gendarme. It's very much taking on the myth that the British were made of different stuff than the Europeans.

Compare that to the sheer grandeur of the new Amazon series, or for that matter the film adaptations of those two works.

Actually, maybe that's part of the problem: is there, put bluntly, a qualitative impact of seeing a swastika flying victorious that dwarfs that of the written word?
 
Actually, maybe that's part of the problem: is there, put bluntly, a qualitative impact of seeing a swastika flying victorious that dwarfs that of the written word?

I think it's an unintentional overlap with the priorities. Visual media is supposed to look impressive, so I don't blame the creators for making a spectacular wunderland, even if it goes against the tone of the source. Which goes back to the Truffaut Effect mentioned in the original article. Which is easier for advertising: A giant Volkshalle and space station or a bunch of ugly grey concrete blocks filmed on location in the former East Germany?
 
Yeah, we very rarely see the Nazis or their fancy works, IIRC we just see a very fast plane and the main Nazi is an angry unpleasant spy who puts you off before you even know. The world is grey and shitty and scared and everone knows about horrible things, the space race just has dark jokes about how Germany will go to Mars and think it's full of Jews rather than anyone being impressed.

Wegener in the book is an enigma who presents the news that the Japanese need to hope the obviously awful candidate for Fuhrer wins because the alternative wants to blow up the planet. He's arguably a deconstruction of the heroic mole, because all Wegener has to offer from his lifetime of moral compromises is 'hope we can keep things at the present stable level of awful'.
 
I think it's an unintentional overlap with the priorities. Visual media is supposed to look impressive, so I don't blame the creators for making a spectacular wunderland, even if it goes against the tone of the source. Which goes back to the Truffaut Effect mentioned in the original article. Which is easier for advertising: A giant Volkshalle and space station or a bunch of ugly grey concrete blocks filmed on location in the former East Germany?

Yes, when I was a History teacher/lecturer in the 1990s I remember an academic who taught German history telling me that even for factual books publishers advised that putting a swastika on the front cover would boost sales 10%.
 
Of course, that's something that Fatherland and SS-GB (the novels, at least) do well. Deighton never explains how Sealion works, and rightly doesn't care. Harris lays out the victory in a couple of paragraphs, heavily flavoured with Nazi propaganda so we're not sure how accurate it is, and gets on with it.

In Harris's case the book works because the setting is squalid, nasty, tasteless- and worryingly normal. It's a shitter 1960s, but a recognisable 1960s, and much of the unpleasant power of the book is the implication that the world outside of the Reich is just prepared to hold their nose and normalise relations as we did with Stalinist Russia or Maoist China or the Khmer Rouge. There's no glorification, but apart from Speer's ludicrous architecture in Germania there's not many of the tropes of the successful Reich in terms of military might or technical achievement- it's a very dull world, built upon millions of corpses.

In SS-GB's case, it's very much an interrogation of post-war British triumphalism- the resistance are heroic, but they're ruthless. The protagonist is a collaborator, even if he eventually switches sides like a Vichy gendarme. It's very much taking on the myth that the British were made of different stuff than the Europeans.

Compare that to the sheer grandeur of the new Amazon series, or for that matter the film adaptations of those two works.

Actually, maybe that's part of the problem: is there, put bluntly, a qualitative impact of seeing a swastika flying victorious that dwarfs that of the written word?

I think on that anti-triumphalist line Deighton was walking the same path that Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo were emphasising right from the title of It Happened Here (1964). Even when I was a boy/young ma there remained a sense that Britain would never have collaborated and would never have had a dictatorship, a line laid out by George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). In the 1960s-70s such attitudes were increasingly challenged in the UK and not only do we have Brownlow and Mollo, but series like The Guardians (1971) and 1990 (1977-78) which, while packaged as near-future societal science fiction, were in effect also challenging that British exceptionalism/triumphalism that the UK was exempt from dictatorship.
 
I have several thoughts - this comment is probably unformed but this prompted several things in my head at once.

Firstly: I think there's an inherent tension between AH as entertainment and AH as a reflection of historical truth. What make things readable and what make things true are often two very different things. I think others are right to say that this gets even starker in visual media - there needs to be an ooomph to draw the viewer in. Furthermore, in fiction generally, you can't take a whole book to explain the myriad factors that led to a big event, so there's an inherent simplification thereto.

Secondly: I for one quite enjoyed The Man in the High Castle show, as problematic as some aspects of it are. I quite liked that it actually bothered to show how callous Imperial Japan was (as a Filipino-American I'm something of a stickler on this subject). More generally, it nails the dissonance of living in an authoritarian state - it's completely normal feeling until it isn't. That's what I think made John Smith, and Rufus Sewell's portrayal thereof, so compelling. He's a fully fledged human being with likes and loves and a family - and he still engages in mass murder.

This is something I find in a lot of liberal media critiques that irks me - this accusation that all portrayals of evil people with human qualities makes them good. This ends up distancing the writer from human evil, with this unpleasant implication that the writer, and those like the writer, could never be like the evil person.

I'm from the Washington DC area. I went to school with the children of war profiteers - and the fact that said profiteers are named 'Raytheon' or 'Lockheed Martin' rather than small operations run out of a cave in Afghanistan does not make that not the case. The older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that the economy of this entire area is based on murdering Middle Eastern children, and the complacency of the people here becomes more unnerving. These are people who will (rightly) bash red states for cruel laws about transgender children and abortion, but not blink about the missile factories. I have cherished friends here, and beloved restaurants, and wonderful dance venues, and lovely parks - and it's all possible because of bloody murder. Exploring this particular dissonance is something I think a lot of Nazi victory works do very well (Fatherland is the gold standard, and @varyar's In and Out of the Reich does it well too).

These critiques, I find, end up being apologia for the crimes of Allied powers - "surely we [the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, etc.] could never be so awful as them! [Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan]" They imply some sort of fundamental separation, one that I, as someone with family in a third-world country, just can't accept. The Nazis were inspired by the British Raj and the conquest of the American West among other things; indeed, the latter has only a few rivals in being the closest OTL event to a successful Generalplan Ost. Indeed I've found it useful to conceive of Nazism as a potpourri of every bad thing in the Western world from about 1600 onward.

We don't like to think of the Allied powers, those valiant destroyers of fascism, as locking up Japanese-Americans under false pretenses, or knowingly raining napalm on cities made of wood, or starving three million Bengalis out of racism, or killing hundreds of thousands of their own people by blowing a dam along the Yellow River, or raping every woman in Berlin between the ages of eight and eighty, or departing the Crimean Tatars under false pretenses. There are many other such examples.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that the societies most of us live in - First World countries with European cultural backgrounds - are the societies that the Nazis and Imperial Japan took much inspiration from (see much of the Meiji Restoration for the latter). In other words, in many of these works, one of the implicit messages is that we are nowhere nearly as different as the people in these scenarios as we would like to believe. We could all be complicit in evil; several of us already are.

I think that Axis victories, when done well, are useful in exploring these historical themes, and the emotions related to them (I think in many readers/viewers the primary emotion is not 'this is cool!' but 'this is fascinating in a horrible sort of way' - and I think the latter can be used to historically responsible effect if you do it right - they're like horror movies in that regard). The above is why I'm skeptical of calls to do away with them entirely, because I think that when done well they serve a useful purpose. As I've said in reviews, some things are easier to see in a mirror.
 
Wegener in the book is an enigma who presents the news that the Japanese need to hope the obviously awful candidate for Fuhrer wins because the alternative wants to blow up the planet.

Dick said he gave up writing a sequel because he couldn't stand the idea of trying to write scenes with or about Heydrich, there was no way he was going to try and think like Heydrich might think.

Actually, maybe that's part of the problem: is there, put bluntly, a qualitative impact of seeing a swastika flying victorious that dwarfs that of the written word?

I think not just that @Coiler 's right that a visual medium needs to show the visuals (and needs to be marketed in a way a book cover doesn't), but also in some cases these days it's a budget thing. Prestige TV wants you to know it spent MONEY!!!, streaming giants really want you to know it, and a big budget film wants you to go "I must see this in a cinema", and that means creating a world that shows money. If you didn't have big sacks of cash, you'd have to rely on different tricks. Parabolic's theatre shows depicted Nazi-ruled Britain with a lot of fake posters, for example, triumphantly calling for more young heroes to join the Waffen-SS UK's division and snarling about the Jewish-ruled Americans who want to bomb you. Works really well in immersive theatre, would work really well in old-school TV adaptations or a low budget film, would have people go "booooo you're not prestige" if it was the latest primetime adult drama because we're trained to expect millions spent.
 
I have several thoughts - this comment is probably unformed but this prompted several things in my head at once.

Firstly: I think there's an inherent tension between AH as entertainment and AH as a reflection of historical truth. What make things readable and what make things true are often two very different things. I think others are right to say that this gets even starker in visual media - there needs to be an ooomph to draw the viewer in. Furthermore, in fiction generally, you can't take a whole book to explain the myriad factors that led to a big event, so there's an inherent simplification thereto.

Secondly: I for one quite enjoyed The Man in the High Castle show, as problematic as some aspects of it are. I quite liked that it actually bothered to show how callous Imperial Japan was (as a Filipino-American I'm something of a stickler on this subject). More generally, it nails the dissonance of living in an authoritarian state - it's completely normal feeling until it isn't. That's what I think made John Smith, and Rufus Sewell's portrayal thereof, so compelling. He's a fully fledged human being with likes and loves and a family - and he still engages in mass murder.

This is something I find in a lot of liberal media critiques that irks me - this accusation that all portrayals of evil people with human qualities makes them good. This ends up distancing the writer from human evil, with this unpleasant implication that the writer, and those like the writer, could never be like the evil person.

I'm from the Washington DC area. I went to school with the children of war profiteers - and the fact that said profiteers are named 'Raytheon' or 'Lockheed Martin' rather than small operations run out of a cave in Afghanistan does not make that not the case. The older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that the economy of this entire area is based on murdering Middle Eastern children, and the complacency of the people here becomes more unnerving. These are people who will (rightly) bash red states for cruel laws about transgender children and abortion, but not blink about the missile factories. I have cherished friends here, and beloved restaurants, and wonderful dance venues, and lovely parks - and it's all possible because of bloody murder. Exploring this particular dissonance is something I think a lot of Nazi victory works do very well (Fatherland is the gold standard, and @varyar's In and Out of the Reich does it well too).

These critiques, I find, end up being apologia for the crimes of Allied powers - "surely we [the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, etc.] could never be so awful as them! [Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan]" They imply some sort of fundamental separation, one that I, as someone with family in a third-world country, just can't accept. The Nazis were inspired by the British Raj and the conquest of the American West among other things; indeed, the latter has only a few rivals in being the closest OTL event to a successful Generalplan Ost. Indeed I've found it useful to conceive of Nazism as a potpourri of every bad thing in the Western world from about 1600 onward.

We don't like to think of the Allied powers, those valiant destroyers of fascism, as locking up Japanese-Americans under false pretenses, or knowingly raining napalm on cities made of wood, or starving three million Bengalis out of racism, or killing hundreds of thousands of their own people by blowing a dam along the Yellow River, or raping every woman in Berlin between the ages of eight and eighty, or departing the Crimean Tatars under false pretenses. There are many other such examples.

I think it needs to be acknowledged that the societies most of us live in - First World countries with European cultural backgrounds - are the societies that the Nazis and Imperial Japan took much inspiration from (see much of the Meiji Restoration for the latter). In other words, in many of these works, one of the implicit messages is that we are nowhere nearly as different as the people in these scenarios as we would like to believe. We could all be complicit in evil; several of us already are.

I think that Axis victories, when done well, are useful in exploring these historical themes, and the emotions related to them (I think in many readers/viewers the primary emotion is not 'this is cool!' but 'this is fascinating in a horrible sort of way' - and I think the latter can be used to historically responsible effect if you do it right - they're like horror movies in that regard). The above is why I'm skeptical of calls to do away with them entirely, because I think that when done well they serve a useful purpose. As I've said in reviews, some things are easier to see in a mirror.

Thank you for articulating this better than I could!
 
This is something I find in a lot of liberal media critiques that irks me - this accusation that all portrayals of evil people with human qualities makes them good. This ends up distancing the writer from human evil, with this unpleasant implication that the writer, and those like the writer, could never be like the evil person.

I think sometimes you get fans going "no no this character can't be that bad because they have human qualities!", but that's not inherently the work's fault. That's people tricking themselves.

Like, back with Secret Army/Kessler, our man Kessler loves his daughter and she loves him. They're still both Nazis complicit in trying to kill people so they can get away with doing more Nazism and are steeped in blood, they're still the antagonists being pursued by the daughter of his victims.
 
This is something I find in a lot of liberal media critiques that irks me - this accusation that all portrayals of evil people with human qualities makes them good. This ends up distancing the writer from human evil, with this unpleasant implication that the writer, and those like the writer, could never be like the evil person.
It's a good point, but conversely, a lot of fiction falls into the trap of making evil look cool. I'm reminded of a famous quote by Simone Weil: "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating." That goes doubly for historically real evil presented in a fictional setting.
 
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