• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Alternate History General Discussion

There's actually a Stephen Baxter short story - "The Twelveth Album" which discusses an additional Beatles album that comes out in 1971. The big advantage in that specific case is that all the Beatles actually wrote songs so all Baxter needs to do is discuss how they would have played these songs - John sings Paul's "Maybe I'm Amazed" is the specific big change he gives.

The thing with "adding" for music and art in general is that you're effectively saying that something you've come up with is better than or at least on the same level as what the artist originally came up with. It's not just a question of being an "accomplished musician" - with a bit of work and time I could probably do a decent-ish cover of a lot of the Beatles output (and a few others), but writing something that is plausibly "what John Lennon would have written" is insane!

Yes, exactly. Making up what they might have otherwise done is just a task that really falls beyond the writer's ability, unless you're going to brush over it or show it without showing it, just telling us they keep making great music without digging into any of the details, and if you're going to do that why are we here?

Thinking back, though, to the point about AH by subtraction, I could swear that I did read a Beatles AH story, I dunno, ages ago? where they go on in some fashion, or maybe they never really caught fight on a world-wide scale, so the story is about their faded glory as a middle-aged band playing to a moderately-sized crowd of people who stamp and cheer for them, but head out once the concert is over because the babysitter has to be home by ten, that kind of situation, and so the music they play is what they made, but viewed through this lens of weariness and cynicism about it that changes how it's thought of. Maybe it was a different band, I hate that I can't remember.
 
At least if it's a fake band you can gesture towards whatever real music you like and the reader can go "I too like this", but coming up with AH albums a real guy, yeah, that seems doomed. Almost as difficult as trying to write a writer character who you've said is a Very Good Writer.

When you put it like that, yes. Was it your vignette I remember reading, Tony Blair as the King of Punk, as related to the reader by a man in a filthy raincoat at the back of a club?

That one was me, yeah. Good to know that one worked out, though the absolute hardest was trying to do Sunny Jim with its meeting of real Tories without seeming (I'd hope) crass or 'off'.
 
At least if it's a fake band you can gesture towards whatever real music you like and the reader can go "I too like this", but coming up with AH albums a real guy, yeah, that seems doomed. Almost as difficult as trying to write a writer character who you've said is a Very Good Writer.

This is why so many writers are tempted to write about writers, they at least know something about the subject.
 
Personally, I want to make an Blairpunk althist where S Club 7 are all still together but they're older, even more miserable than irl, and playing to a crowd that has forgotten them "for the brave boys fighting for democracy in Iran" in London.

Maybe call it "Bring It All Back To You" or something.
 
Personally, I want to make an Blairpunk althist where S Club 7 are all still together but they're older, even more miserable than irl, and playing to a crowd that has forgotten them "for the brave boys fighting for democracy in Iran" in London.

Maybe call it "Bring It All Back To You" or something.

Get SMTV Live into it and you have my money
 
I have a likely controversial opinion regarding the namesake of this forum, which is that with a good amount of good luck on their part and poor luck on the British's part, the Germans could get the bulk of the first wave ashore. I'm not saying the operation could actually succeed (in fact, it's actually bad long-term for the Germans since the more troops they land in Britain the more they have to supply and the more will be trapped there once the RN slams the door), and I know the most likely outcome is just them getting crushed in the channel.

But, especially if I could also see the out-of-universe dramatic reasons for it in a story, I could accept a Sea Lion where the British initially drop the ball and a large number of Germans do succeed in landing. (The famous Sandhurst wargame let the first wave get across mostly intact on purpose so there'd be a substantive ground element to game out at all).
 
Oddly enough I don't think I know many World War 2 AH's (as in PoD between 1937-ish and 1945) that aren't "Nazis win", particularly not long form stuff. The only ones I can remember really reading is a Lord Halifax one that didn't get very far, and that Stalin SI; I know there's also the Blunted Sickle that has an OTL-ish WWII without France falling but I haven't read it and I think it has an earlier PoD. Bunch of stuff with post-WW2 PoDs, obviously Nazis win stuff, and even some alternative WW2 or no WW2 stories, but never a "D-Day fails" or "Barbarossa stalls out early" or whatever.
 
Oddly enough I don't think I know many World War 2 AH's (as in PoD between 1937-ish and 1945) that aren't "Nazis win", particularly not long form stuff.

There's The Big One, which has a POD of Halifax taking control.

(And that's not surprising, having "the other side wins" is a lot more dramatic and marketable than "the side that already won wins more quickly/easily")
 
There's The Big One, which has a POD of Halifax taking control.

(And that's not surprising, having "the other side wins" is a lot more dramatic and marketable than "the side that already won wins more quickly/easily")

But there's not even much "the other side still loses but it takes longer". Make it even more "darkest before the dawn" than OTL was isn't marketable?
Festung Europa I guess falls under that, forgot about that one.
 
Make it even more "darkest before the dawn" than OTL was isn't marketable?

There's a few "NAZIS INVADE BRITAIN AND WE FIGHT BACK" stories, self-published, on the kindle market. Does feel that should be more of a market. "WW2 has another front or an altered front but is still WW2" I can see being more of a niche, I might buy Churchill Invades The Balkans but what does a casual reader think? (Moscow Option is nodding at the idea that the Axis could be about to win for a bit)
 
(And that's not surprising, having "the other side wins" is a lot more dramatic and marketable than "the side that already won wins more quickly/easily")
This. The self-published AH e-book market isn't large, but even a casual perusal of the titles suggests that the majority of the titles are concerned with changing the outcome of big, well-known moments in history. I'd like to think that readers of Nazis win WW2 or Confederacy winds independence mostly aren't secret neo-Nazis or Lost Causers (though I could be wrong). But there's a larger market in big, obvious changes in history, and a much smaller if any market in "well, the details change a bit but the Allies or Union still wins."
 
(And that's not surprising, having "the other side wins" is a lot more dramatic and marketable than "the side that already won wins more quickly/easily")

For that to work, the readers have to be into the story of how things go differently, not just how they come out, and there aren't as many arenas where enough people are interested in that on its own. There's a Civil War trilogy (Gettysburg, Grant Comes East, and Never Call Retreat) where the Confederacy wins the battle of Gettysburg (at a different nearby town due to different battlefield maneuvers), and Lee goes so far as to capture Baltimore and march on Washington. That's a fine way to explain Confederate victory in the war, it's how Bring the Jubilee did it. But here, victory becomes disaster when Washington is too strongly defended to take and the Union armies fall on Lee from every side, trapping him against the Potomac and forcing the surrender of his whole army, which brings the war to an earlier end.

If you're concerned with outcomes, the only interesting thing about the trilogy is 'okay so what are the implications of an earlier Confederate defeat,' which isn't an uninteresting topic, certainly, but generally not as interesting as their simply winning instead. You have to be enough of a student of the Civil War to be interested in the personalities of the war, the what-ifs of specific battles, the age-old all-night bull sessions over who really was the best general of the Civil War, and so on to get into this story.
 
I can see why a trilogy about that got made: What If Lee ATTACKED WASHINGTON? Then the drama even if the same side wins is "what if this really bad thing happened?" but there's only so many times & places that will hit a mainstream audience (What If Lee Attacked Oneanda, New York? isn't much of a draw)
 
Back
Top