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Alternate History General Discussion

Coiler said:
(Also while I don't expect Walton to be a nuclear targeting expert, I have to raise an objection to the Hackettian city-for-city trade. The rivet counter in me thinks it'd make more sense if it was close to a decade earlier and the ability to deploy more than a few nukes at a time in practice just wasn't physically there).
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I enjoy Walton's writing (though I bounced a bit off My Real Children), but despite her using AH as background in several of her works, she uses it as a narrative world building convenience, rather than appearing to care very much for the plausibility or logic of it.
 
Iopgod said:
I enjoy Walton's writing (though I bounced a bit off My Real Children), but despite her using AH as background in several of her works, she uses it as a narrative world building convenience, rather than appearing to care very much for the plausibility or logic of it.
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Oh I wasn't expecting hard AH. In fact, something like that in a soft AH where you know it's just a plot setup is a lot more forgivable than in something like Hackett's THE TRUE STORY OF THE WAR THAT COULD BE MIGHT HAVE BEEN
 
Coiler said:
Oh I wasn't expecting hard AH. In fact, something like that in a soft AH where you know it's just a plot setup is a lot more forgivable than in something like Hackett's THE TRUE STORY OF THE WAR THAT COULD BE MIGHT HAVE BEEN
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I do find it irritating when I come across something I know quite well in books (a city as a setting, or an activity I do as a hobby, or some bit of (alternate) history I am familiar with) and they get... not necessarily "big" things wrong (though that can also be irritating), but the small details which probably don't matter but which just seem... off. "To get from in front of that building in that scene to that park in the next scene, in the time implied between the scenes, the character who is in both would have had to run at about 30mph for 5 mins".

The one I still remember most in Walton's work is in Ha'penny (a detective story set in an explicit AH soon after the UK and Germany made peace in 1940 or so), where one of the characters, an MP, refers to going to London to "caucus" with his party.
 
I have been ridiculed on some circles for refusing timeline suggestions such as Japan remaining a democracy after WWI or a Henry Wallace presidency in favour of my particular writing style.
But I have branched out lately as shown by my Hemuid Empire TL.
 
Alternate Internet services


- Enron wanted to launch a movie on demand service with Blockbuster, they even had a 20 year deal. It obviously got cancelled when that whole Enron thing happened. Definitely the funniest way to do Blockbuster as Netflix

- The famous Demae Channel on The Nintendo Wii. A Japan only feature that would people to order food from their Nintendo Wii. Have seen it used in a scenarios where SARS is bad as COVID

- StageIt is a music live streaming site found by Evan Lowenstein(one half of Evan and Jaron and Kevin Spacey's manager and roommate). It has featured never archived live performances by Howie D,John Oates, Bowling for Soup, Blood on The Dance Floor, and professional chef Art Smith. Would be neat as a alt Spotify or in a pandemic 2010s tl

- Spreecast was a videotelephony platform that allowed up to 4 people to make a private or public video call. It ,of course, had celebrity guests such as Milly Cyrus, One Direction, Randi Zuckerberg,and Anderson Cooper. At the time it was speculated to be a good tool for live interviews and OnlyFans type shit.

- PercasTV (30:00 - 47:00) was a very early Sony owned streaming service on the Vaio PCG-GT1 (a duel laptop-camcorder) where you could livestream events six years before Justin.tv. There's not much known about it on the English-speaking web but the video linked speculates it had time slotted public channels you could pay a fee to use like public access television and invite only private broadcasts. definitely the one I'm most interested in, maybe just for the fact we know near to nothing about it and it's such an artificial of the Y2K era
 
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I am considering to write a TL about a modernizing Qajar Shah during the 19th century, who would enact limited reforms and compare himself to the likes of Cyrus – something similar to Mohammed Reza in the 20th century, but carried out more carefully.
I'm thinking of stuff like the gradual abolition of slavery, a European-style military organization, introducing railways and the telegraph depending on the decade, and siding with Britain against Russia during the Great Game.
I still need to do more research, in order to come up with a realistic TL.
 
NotDavidSoslan said:
I am considering to write a TL about a modernizing Qajar Shah during the 19th century, who would enact limited reforms and compare himself to the likes of Cyrus – something similar to Mohammed Reza in the 20th century, but carried out more carefully.
I'm thinking of stuff like the gradual abolition of slavery, a European-style military organization, introducing railways and the telegraph depending on the decade, and siding with Britain against Russia during the Great Game.
I still need to do more research, in order to come up with a realistic TL.
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Doing my research on Wikipedia, I found out about Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, who was also a reformer, although his reforms were more limited than what I'm planning for my TL, and he was eventually assassinated due to giving foreigners too many concessions.
 
Bolt451 said:
It's weird writing a TL with an aim rather than seeing how the cards fall.
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I think it depends what you're doing, I think.

Some decent timelines start, explicitly or not, as alternate history challenges. Or you want to write a timeline where a particular person becomes head of government, then you decide your POD(s) to at least get them to that point and see how the cards fall.

Most famously, of course
anthonyjwells said:
The second was to try and get a plausible far-right Britain. As people have said, all the choices were deliberately stacked to lead to a far-right takeover. It wasn't a story where I had a POD and pondered what the most likely outcome was, it was whether I could get the cards to fall in a way that produced a plausible path to a far-right government
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I find stories like WIGBHP enjoyable seeing how well known figures act in very different circumstances
 
So I made a thing, based on the Battle Order website style.

sovmrbtr1jpeg.jpg

Making this was surprisingly fun and interesting, as was coming up with the in-universe controversy behind it (a tug of war between traditionalists who only know in and out conscripts and munchkins who demanded basically that the squad be able to do dismounted LRRPs that lasted days unassisted). Also: BULLPUPS.
 
Loriori said:
Finding flaws in John Titor posts is low hanging fruit but I recently learned that United States Central Command is located in Tampa, a city that survived the Titor nuclear war. With that and Omaha being the new capital really wonder if the author did like any research at all, he (likely) was from Florida, this stuff is on maps!
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John Titor? Oh man, whatever happened to that guy?

Lemme check….

…oh? He was arrested for Jan 6th chicanery and is a Proud Boy. Oh dear.
 
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