Alternate History General Discussion

[Charles EP M.]

The 'in this genre' point is a really good one. Also the "if one likes them" part, because I'm not really into romance books but I do like old-school comics, so I'm not going to get any real enjoyment from romance books that meet their internal Sturgeon's Bar but somebody who does like them will, while not getting much out of my Hibernia reprint of The Indestructible Man. "The same cliffhanger keeps happening and getting resolved," they would correctly say.

And in online AH's case, we've got the size and niche part, but also that we're mostly hobbiests online and not professionals so writing ability varies a lot.

 

[Time Enough]

I’ll go on record to say that Yiddish Policemen’s Union is the best Alternate History novel I’ve read for the simple reason that world and it’s characters have stuck with me in a way that others haven’t.

Though the world is incredibly fucking wacky when you think about it (Manchurian Astronauts are something else).

 

[Neal]

I wonder why no one has written something on Separated at Birth by Ephraim ben Raphael.

Overall he fulfills his goals of 1)making a semiplausible version of the Draka 2)Have it fail after it trying to conquer the world

But there are times where he quickly runs into things like whitewashing Situationist China, the Israel-equivalent (excusing its crimes under Drakian collaboration as water under the bridge) etc.

 

[Gary Oswald]

I'm not going to look down on anyone having fun with their Draka stories, but it does seem odd to me that there's so many stories about the Draka, when the Draka are really really dull as a concept.

There is a lot of really interesting AH stories to tell and I don't understand why our community is so obsessed with retelling an uninteresting one.

But part of that is bitterness about the fact that African AH is my jam and the Draka stories tend to be set in Africa without any actual interest in that continent.

 

[RyanF]

But part of that is bitterness about the fact that African AH is my jam and the Draka stories tend to be set in Africa without any actual interest in that continent.

It's a continent-wide tutorial level for the edgy villain protagonists in both the original works and a lot of derivatives.

 

[Coiler]

To me every single Draka fix fic has the square peg problem. They're trying to turn a very soft, very pulpy, and to be frank very shallow setting into a harder one.

It's basically taking the Palace of The Soviets and trying to make it "sensible" by shortening the Lenin statue and moving it from the top of the building to the front.

 

[Japhy]

I wonder why no one has written something on Separated at Birth by Ephraim ben Raphael.

You always could.

 

[Neal]

The TL is the first to feature British Algeria, British Vietnam and British Indonesia

 

[Elektronaut]

I'm not going to look down on anyone having fun with their Draka stories, but it does seem odd to me that there's so many stories about the Draka, when the Draka are really really dull as a concept.

That's a relief to hear. I just thought my continual refusal to read most of the alt hist canon was because I was an idle refusenik. It's good to know I actually have taste.

 

[Coiler]

It was an interesting feeling to read the original Draka books and come across as going "so, uh, all the hubub was about this?"

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

The TL is the first to feature British Algeria, British Vietnam and British Indonesia

The first TL to feature nations colonized by European powers IOTL colonized by a different European power? Earthshattering.

 

[Neal]

The first TL to feature nations colonized by European powers IOTL colonized by a different European power? Earthshattering.

The Separateverse features a superBritish Empire (to get the Drakians to take over Africa from the British) because TTL’s Napoleonic period lasts longer and the Brits are able to expand into all of SE Asia, Africa etc.

Basically the first TL where the Brits grab all the colonial marbles while mainland Europe is distracted

 

[napoleon IV]

I'm not going to look down on anyone having fun with their Draka stories, but it does seem odd to me that there's so many stories about the Draka, when the Draka are really really dull as a concept.

There is a lot of really interesting AH stories to tell and I don't understand why our community is so obsessed with retelling an uninteresting one.

But part of that is bitterness about the fact that African AH is my jam and the Draka stories tend to be set in Africa without any actual interest in that continent.

It's supposed to be "What if an evil empire was victorious?" but I'm not quite sure why we need that when there are a million Nazi German Wins TLs.

 

[varyar]

It's supposed to be "What if an evil empire was victorious?" but I'm not quite sure why we need that when there are a million Nazi German Wins TLs.

To be fair to a man who doesn't deserve it, back in the late 80s/early 90s the AH landscape was a little different.

 

[Coiler]

One of the biggest literary problems with the original Draka books is that there's no "Winston Smith" type of character. It's either lurid "plantation sleaze" or seeing the absolute top-of-the-top Citizens who, when not fighting with their awesome decade-ahead weapons are living in mega-mansions and enjoying a sleazy paradise with either their serfs (men) or each other (women).

 

[varyar]

One of the biggest literary problems with the original Draka books is that there's no "Winston Smith" type of character. It's either lurid "plantation sleaze" or seeing the absolute top-of-the-top Citizens who, when not fighting with their awesome decade-ahead weapons are living in mega-mansions and enjoying a sleazy paradise with either their serfs (men) or each other (women).

Don't forget the utterly incompetent and/or total failures that are the non-Draka characters.

 

[Charles EP M.]

To be fair to a man who doesn't deserve it, back in the late 80s/early 90s the AH landscape was a little different.

Yeah, the Draka books came out at the exact point where there wasn't much other AH on bookshelves but this was, stayed in print when he did other books, was around and mass market in the early internet days when fandoms are being established, and as @Coiler says, full of masses and masses of lurid sleaze. (And a bunch of the readers may have got it in their formative teen years) Sleaze sells. If we tagged an SLP book "Alt1970s Reverse Harem Miniluv Dark Romance" and the cover had people implying they had little clothes, it'd outsell everything else.

 

[Neal]

Has anyone read Tripartite Alliance Earth by Randy McDonald?

TTL has more multinational associations (the CNA for the former US-NAm, the SAC (with modernized Quechua, Guarani and Aymara as coofficial languages,the EC (dominated by the FrancoGerman combine which itself is 2 kingdoms, 1 republic), the EAC, the SACU etc.)

and a LoN dominated by medium sized nations (Mexico, Japan, Egypt, Brazil, the EC, Korea) after the US, both Russias, India, China were blasted during WW3

 

[Neal]

Also this might be controversial but there is an unfilled space of a “slow collapse of civilization due to climate change and climate-induced mass migrations everywhere” TL to be written, where Southern Europe (the nondesertified bits) a few centuries from *now speaks Romance-derived languages but is genetically 30% Arabic without looking racist

 

[Gary Oswald]

Main reason I haven't written a “slow collapse of civilization due to climate change and climate-induced mass migrations" timeline is there's a good possibility that I'm going to live through that so it doesn't really work as escapism.