Alternate History General Discussion

[MAC161]

Passage from a bio on Louverture I'm currently (re-)reading: "Had Hippolyte [Louverture's father] landed in South Carolina instead of Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture would have lived through the American Revolution instead of the Haitian Revolution, and history might have unfolded differently."

Presuming that happens, and the personality/figure we know as Toussaint, or some version thereof, still arrives on the scene (likely with a different name, first off; anyone have ideas on such?), I have an image of him joining one of the British Black Loyalist units in South Carolina, choosing to remain in North America after the British withdrawal, maybe trying to set up an independent state in the American South or Southwest, or possibly centered on New Orleans (with covert British support, to weaken the new U.S. by encouraging its slave population to flee or revolt), and perhaps even seeking an alliance with Dessalines or Henri Christophe (either of whom would have the role he did in OTL's Haiti).

Any thoughts on this, or the original POD?

 

[Gary Oswald]

Toussaint as a black loyalist ending up running Freetown is 100% a timeline I'd read, like @MAC161.

 

[Matt]

The premise of the story is that Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. moves to California and marries his Hollywood mistress, and all the Kennedy boys get involved in one kind or another of show business - Bobby Kennedy becomes a producer, and JFK is an actor. He doesn't play Captain Kirk, he plays a separate character who replaces Kirk when Bobby fires basically all the original cast after two or three seasons and replaces them with a proto-TNG ensemble: JFK as an older, more experienced captain who stays up on the ship and controls all away missions by remote observation, Donald Pleasance as an android science officer called REM, Billy Mumy as Dr. McCoy's nephew Wesley, and so on.

Sounds like the greatest Star Trek series of all time.

 

[MAC161]

At a time when a lot of commercial AH seems to wallow in dystopian misery, it's good to remind readers and writers alike how bracing it is to own one's aspirations for a better world. I wouldn't want all AH to be utopian because that would ultimately be as boring as the opposite, and the genre thrives best when it is diverse, but there is something uniquely exciting about showing how, to coin a phrase, another world is possible.

Building on the above quote by @Hendryk, from the "Fire on the Mountain" thread: How does one define "utopian" AH? There are plenty of stories (bona fide AH and honorary) that detail a utopian world, but the question remains, is it such for everyone?

Ex: At times I've considered writing (as I'm sure many authors, good and bad, have also) an AH where Lincoln isn't assassinated and so leads the country through a stronger Reconstruction in his second term, one continuing through his successors until there's true black-white equality in a relatively short period of time, with racism rapidly fading out or on the way to such, limited only to fast-dying-out "fringe" types. An admirable/desirable world/U.S., but it begs the question, what about the Native peoples, still being expelled, massacred and confined to reservations during the period? What about the immigrant population(s), or women? One can make the handwavey argument that with black-white equality assured, these problems would also steadily vanish, leaving only brotherhood and everything else associated with "utopia"; however, it strains credibility narrative-wise, at the very least, IMO.

This is not to disparage "utopian" fiction in general or "Fire on the Mountain" in particular (I in fact loved it), or to argue that dystopian fiction is somehow more realistic from a narrative or "human nature" perspective. I've actually had my fill of the latter fiction, given the past several years, and Bisson's work is a bracing reminder that you can write about pleasant worlds, or at least ones better than your own. It is merely to raise the questions of "Can you write a utopian AH work that fits everyone?" and "If so, when can you set it?" If the answers to these are "No" and "Never", does that mean "utopia" is better confined to the futuristic side of scifi writing? And lastly, if you can write a "fits-all" utopian AH, what might you have to change about humanity to make it work, while keeping it AH?

Thoughts?

 

[Delta Force]

Building on the above quote by @Hendryk, from the "Fire on the Mountain" thread: How does one define "utopian" AH? There are plenty of stories (bona fide AH and honorary) that detail a utopian world, but the question remains, is it such for everyone?

Ex: At times I've considered writing (as I'm sure many authors, good and bad, have also) an AH where Lincoln isn't assassinated and so leads the country through a stronger Reconstruction in his second term, one continuing through his successors until there's true black-white equality in a relatively short period of time, with racism rapidly fading out or on the way to such, limited only to fast-dying-out "fringe" types. An admirable/desirable world/U.S., but it begs the question, what about the Native peoples, still being expelled, massacred and confined to reservations during the period? What about the immigrant population(s), or women? One can make the handwavey argument that with black-white equality assured, these problems would also steadily vanish, leaving only brotherhood and everything else associated with "utopia"; however, it strains credibility narrative-wise, at the very least, IMO.

This is not to disparage "utopian" fiction in general or "Fire on the Mountain" in particular (I in fact loved it), or to argue that dystopian fiction is somehow more realistic from a narrative or "human nature" perspective. I've actually had my fill of the latter fiction, given the past several years, and Bisson's work is a bracing reminder that you can write about pleasant worlds, or at least ones better than your own. It is merely to raise the questions of "Can you write a utopian AH work that fits everyone?" and "If so, when can you set it?" If the answers to these are "No" and "Never", does that mean "utopia" is better confined to the futuristic side of scifi writing? And lastly, if you can write a "fits-all" utopian AH, what might you have to change about humanity to make it work, while keeping it AH?

Thoughts?

Such settings are more interesting in their deconstruction.

The American Civil War and its aftermath provides a good example. Many Union officers who fought against the Confederacy and helped bring about the end of slavery later went on to participate in the Indian Wars.

 

[Von Callay]

This is not to disparage "utopian" fiction in general or "Fire on the Mountain" in particular (I in fact loved it), or to argue that dystopian fiction is somehow more realistic from a narrative or "human nature" perspective. I've actually had my fill of the latter fiction, given the past several years, and Bisson's work is a bracing reminder that you can write about pleasant worlds, or at least ones better than your own. It is merely to raise the questions of "Can you write a utopian AH work that fits everyone?" and "If so, when can you set it?" If the answers to these are "No" and "Never", does that mean "utopia" is better confined to the futuristic side of scifi writing? And lastly, if you can write a "fits-all" utopian AH, what might you have to change about humanity to make it work, while keeping it AH?

Thoughts?

I think you can't really write a true fits-all utopia because people don't all agree about what is and isn't good. Any utopia is premised on certain values and beliefs being the right ones. I don't think it can even really be done that way in the future, since I think people will still disagree about values in the future, and even if they did all agree, they wouldn't necessarily all agree about ways and means, especially when we have to ask what ways and means are realistic and what aren't. Even if I agree with you that you proposed scenario of Lincoln living on to put an end to racial animus in the United States would be a good thing, I would disagree that it was a utopia if he accomplished that end as a tyrant who suspended the Constitution, ruled by decree for twenty years, and conducted murderous purges to make it happen.

 

[napoleon IV]

I think you can't really write a true fits-all utopia because people don't all agree about what is and isn't good. Any utopia is premised on certain values and beliefs being the right ones. I don't think it can even really be done that way in the future, since I think people will still disagree about values in the future, and even if they did all agree, they wouldn't necessarily all agree about ways and means, especially when we have to ask what ways and means are realistic and what aren't. Even if I agree with you that you proposed scenario of Lincoln living on to put an end to racial animus in the United States would be a good thing, I would disagree that it was a utopia if he accomplished that end as a tyrant who suspended the Constitution, ruled by decree for twenty years, and conducted murderous purges to make it happen.

It's worth noting that you also can't write a true fits-all dystopia for the same reason. Now, unlike with utopia you can get broad agreement on what constitutes a dystopia, because there are certain values/beliefs and outcomes that most people would consider bad, but there will always be a small percentage of the population who think that it's a good thing. The most obvious example here is how the ending of The Turner Diaries involves WMDs being used on a massive scale and wiping out most of the world's population, but the book treats this as a good thing.

 

[SpanishSpy]

Building on the above quote by @Hendryk, from the "Fire on the Mountain" thread: How does one define "utopian" AH? There are plenty of stories (bona fide AH and honorary) that detail a utopian world, but the question remains, is it such for everyone?

Ex: At times I've considered writing (as I'm sure many authors, good and bad, have also) an AH where Lincoln isn't assassinated and so leads the country through a stronger Reconstruction in his second term, one continuing through his successors until there's true black-white equality in a relatively short period of time, with racism rapidly fading out or on the way to such, limited only to fast-dying-out "fringe" types. An admirable/desirable world/U.S., but it begs the question, what about the Native peoples, still being expelled, massacred and confined to reservations during the period? What about the immigrant population(s), or women? One can make the handwavey argument that with black-white equality assured, these problems would also steadily vanish, leaving only brotherhood and everything else associated with "utopia"; however, it strains credibility narrative-wise, at the very least, IMO.

This is not to disparage "utopian" fiction in general or "Fire on the Mountain" in particular (I in fact loved it), or to argue that dystopian fiction is somehow more realistic from a narrative or "human nature" perspective. I've actually had my fill of the latter fiction, given the past several years, and Bisson's work is a bracing reminder that you can write about pleasant worlds, or at least ones better than your own. It is merely to raise the questions of "Can you write a utopian AH work that fits everyone?" and "If so, when can you set it?" If the answers to these are "No" and "Never", does that mean "utopia" is better confined to the futuristic side of scifi writing? And lastly, if you can write a "fits-all" utopian AH, what might you have to change about humanity to make it work, while keeping it AH?

Thoughts?

The unpleasant truth, looking at historical attempts at building utopias, is that there is always a human cost. I wrote one article for the SLP blog on this very subject.

 

[napoleon IV]

The unpleasant truth, looking at historical attempts at building utopias, is that there is always a human cost. I wrote one article for the SLP blog on this very subject.

I always have had mixed feelings on utopian stories that acknowledge this fact. On the one hand it is realistic and it's refreshing to see something that isn't just a perfect society, but on the other hand those stories tend to be extremely callous about the human cost. There's this general attitude of "What measure is a life when compared to the progress we made?" which prompts me to think "Yeah, it's very easy to say that when you're not the person who had to die." The obvious example of this is Atlas Shrugged, which features John Galt destroying industrialized civilization outside of Galt's Gulch and killing God knows how many people and Ayn Rand just sort of goes "Well they had it coming for being parasites" (admittedly this is on the extreme end of callousness, since Ayn Rand was actually evil and most utopian fiction writers aren't).

 

[Von Callay]

I always have had mixed feelings on utopian stories that acknowledge this fact. On the one hand it is realistic and it's refreshing to see something that isn't just a perfect society, but on the other hand those stories tend to be extremely callous about the human cost. There's this general attitude of "What measure is a life when compared to the progress we made?" which prompts me to think "Yeah, it's very easy to say that when you're not the person who had to die." The obvious example of this is Atlas Shrugged, which features John Galt destroying industrialized civilization outside of Galt's Gulch and killing God knows how many people and Ayn Rand just sort of goes "Well they had it coming for being parasites" (admittedly this is on the extreme end of callousness, since Ayn Rand was actually evil and most utopian fiction writers aren't).

I suppose that's one of the cross-overs between utopian fiction and the revolutionary idealism that it often comes from. Revolutions in real life almost inevitably have a cost, in human suffering and human lives, that has to be paid, after which the victor generally gets to explain why it was worth it and they were right. From the far side of a big wide river of blood, I can understand people fumbling around for their justifications whether they're good enough or not to a more objective observer, but yeah.

Utopian idealism is still certainly a good element to storytelling, though, even if it isn't ultimately fulfilled because of the obstacles presented by more realistic factors. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a lot of political rhetoric and philosophy to share along with the science fiction action business of staging a revolution on the Moon, but by the end of the novel, the protagonist is lamenting that the libertarian, self-regulated society he fought for (and the book spent a lot of time exploring and defending) doesn't really exist anymore (the legislature has passed a law requiring food vendors to be licensed), and he's thinking of moving away to the new frontier so he doesn't have to put up with it.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

I always have had mixed feelings on utopian stories that acknowledge this fact. On the one hand it is realistic and it's refreshing to see something that isn't just a perfect society, but on the other hand those stories tend to be extremely callous about the human cost. There's this general attitude of "What measure is a life when compared to the progress we made?" which prompts me to think "Yeah, it's very easy to say that when you're not the person who had to die." The obvious example of this is Atlas Shrugged, which features John Galt destroying industrialized civilization outside of Galt's Gulch and killing God knows how many people and Ayn Rand just sort of goes "Well they had it coming for being parasites" (admittedly this is on the extreme end of callousness, since Ayn Rand was actually evil and most utopian fiction writers aren't).

To be fair to Galt, that society was cracking apart well before he started recruiting people to go into hiding and wait for the fall.

Chris

 

[Mark]

When Alison first devised the term, back in 1998 (before some people on this site were born, even), it was indeed intended as a rhetorical device. Basically, it was used as: "ASB grant all this impossible stuff, just for the sake of the argument. Even then ..."

The wiki article is wrong in stating that it was first used to debunk Sealion. That was when the term became entrenched. The first use was in the other AH scenario, a Confederate victory at Gettysburg leading to the capture of Washington DC and thence to a Confederate success in the war. Alison devised the term ASB (Alien Space Bats; AliSon Brooks) and said that even if these magical creatures ensured that the Army of the Potomac was removed from the battlefield, enabling Lee to win Gettysburg without firing a shot or losing a man, he's still not going to be able to overcome the Washington defences without a siege train, with what the troops have in the way of supplies (ammunition, mainly), with supply lines stretching through Pennsylvania, and all the rest. An exercise in pitting the AoNV against the Washington defences was about as one-sided as an Ashes test match (that was as true then as it is now).

Later, ASB were used extensively in Sealion debates. One that sticks in my mind was over a debate as to whether or not drop tanks for the Me109, to give it greater time over Britain, would have made a difference. In this case, ASBs were used to invoke Me109s that used no fuel and could carry infinite supplies of ammunition such that they never needed to return to base. With that granted, Alison then broke down the tasks that the Me109 was required to carry out, the number needed for each task, and compared the total to the number available. There simply weren't enough Me109s to go around, and some tasks would have to be left out, and leaving out any task results in Sealion failing.

She hated with a burning passion the move towards using ASB as a means for generating silly scenarios. She frequently said that she understood how Frankenstein felt on seeing his creation go out of control, and she wished she'd never devised the term. In due course, she accepted that the monster was loose, and she could tolerate the use of silly starting points provided they were then followed through logically. Her mind was changed by a scenario which posited the British isles and New Zealand being swapped in position, and the debate took that premise as given, and followed through on the implications.

She never liked the use of the term to mean: "Anything goes." She had intended it as a rhetorical device to aid analysis rather than as a tool to avoid it. When Stirling was writing Dies The Fire, he had the decency (and good for him) to ask if it was OK to use the term. The term was, by now, public currency, and I gave my permission. John Birmingham, naturally, just used the term.

The term has changed its use over the years, and it's a bit sad that the one thing that Alison is widely remembered for is the one thing she regretted ever doing. That's the way things are, sometimes.

But back in the day, ASBs were used as a debating tool, not as a means of scenario generation. Alas, the bastard things are now a substitute for thought than an aid to it.

Having seen the definition and when it was introduced of ASB I have wondered about two other common tropes in alternate history.

ISOT - I know that comes from Steve Stirling's Nantucket books but was that the first instance of a largish body of people and things moved back in time? Turtledove misplaced a legion into a different earth a few years earlier.

Self Insert (SI) - I suspect is older. You have Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court which is a man transported but a similar story. When was the first use of a person's mind being moved into an historical figure.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

It was by no means the first, but it might have been the first professional version. ISOT (although by a variety of different names) had been going on since about the mid 1990s to my knowledge. Alison (and I) avoided them. They tended to be along the lines of: "What if the Confederate Army of North Virginia were transported from the Battle of Gettysburg to the Battle of Hastings." These then came to the surprising conclusion that an army 50K+ strong armed with weapons with 800 years of technological advance might easily beat an army less than a fifth their number with muscle-powered weapons. They were, almost invariably, pointless exercises, and invariably badly written, generally with one hand.

Gosh. I wonder how they came to that conclusion <grin>

Of course, if this was written by someone who knew the era and suchlike, it might turn into a very interesting story. Yes, the CSA is going to kick Harold and William's behinds ... at least once they work out where they are and what's happened. There’ll be almost no contest at all in the first few battles. Then what?

Well, there were around 75000 confederates at Gettysburg. That’s nice. England of that era is going to have real trouble feeding them, let alone providing any ammunition and suchlike. (By contrast, William’s army has been estimated at somewhere around 13000 at most and their weapons were much simpler.) The ANV would have to go all Lost Regiment and start churning out more gunpowder and bullets in a hurry, otherwise they would run out of supplies very quickly and get slaughtered (as there was quite a lot of resistance to the Normans in OTL and one assumes that might happen here too.) I don’t know if they’d have the expertise they needed on hand and even if they did, they would be building pretty much everything from scratch.

This would ensure that most of their ‘secrets’ would get out very quickly. The locals weren’t fools. Showing them something new would shock them, yes, but they would copy it.

They’d also be very shocking to the locals. Yes, these are confederates. They think they have the right to own slaves, etc, etc. They’re still going to have ideas about freedom and liberty that will shock the locals, even if they do accept slavers and/or the feudal system. They’re not going to support papal supremacy, for example. I suspect there will be a lot of quiet agreements between European factions to band together against the newcomers, even if they can’t fight openly at first.

Done properly, this might be interesting. Done properly …

… Did I just give that more thought that most writers?

Chris

 

[Christian]

I do find that a problem with alternate history that traces a nation's development is that they always seem to do the smart thing, or at least what the author considers a smart thing. This kind of annoys me as, in real life, 9/10, a country would absolutely do the dumb thing more frequently.

 

[ChrisNuttall]

I do find that a problem with alternate history that traces a nation's development is that they always seem to do the smart thing, or at least what the author considers a smart thing. This kind of annoys me as, in real life, 9/10, a country would absolutely do the dumb thing more frequently.

Then people start complaining that you're making them carry the 'idiot ball' instead, even though history has plenty of examples of people doing idiotic things. <sigh>

Chris

 

[Gary Oswald]

As someone 100% guilty of the thing @Christian is complaining about, in my Liberia timeline. I think it's mainly that I don't want to mimic real life.

Like I know what happens if Liberia's leaders keep repeatedly making stupid short sighted greedy decisions and it's a wall of corpses around Monrovia.

If I'm writing about Liberia, I want to write about them choosing better cos like otherwise why bother. You've got to have some hope.

 

[OwenM]

As someone 100% guilty of the thing @Christian is complaining about, in my Liberia timeline. I think it's mainly that I don't want to mimic real life.

Like I know what happens if Liberia's leaders keep repeatedly making stupid short sighted greedy decisions and it's a wall of corpses around Monrovia.

If I'm writing about Liberia, I want to write about them choosing better cos like otherwise why bother. You've got to have some hope.

I think yours was at least more interesting than the typical in that you had cases of them doing the smart thing not mattering because the great powers don't want a black state around doing the smart thing, and towards the end having people who were OTL heroes of particular struggles just being politicians, because the doing the smart thing earlier means those struggles don't need heroes.

 

[Coiler]

I do find that a problem with alternate history that traces a nation's development is that they always seem to do the smart thing, or at least what the author considers a smart thing. This kind of annoys me as, in real life, 9/10, a country would absolutely do the dumb thing more frequently.

I think it's a vastly bigger problem in straight TLs than in traditional narratives where A: There's other content to act as a "cushion", and B: The contrivances can be either justified or understood as supporting the story.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Like one of my favourite AH stories that I've read recently is Everfair which is a story by a non binary African American about a new state being created in the Congo Free State by rebels against Leopold with the aid of british socialists and African American missionaries.

Now there's conflict in that and people being close minded and stupid but ultimately everfair is far more successful, technologically advanced, inclusive and progressive than is realistic. To get there it relies on a lot of people making smart decisions.

But I'd much rather read that than an actual history of the DRC. It feels like if you're going to write AH, you have to have scope for people being better then they were in our OTL or what's the point?

 

[Christian]

"Wait, why did you have Louis XVI reinstate the parlements after Maupeou and his dad went through so much trouble in abolishing it? This is utterly unrealistic, he saw their obstruction while he was growing up! Don't give me that old talk about public pressure, he's the king, he can do what he wants."