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Alternate History General Discussion

Everfair has two very nice points in its favour as a story that caught me out a bit, first
the new country allies with German in WW1 to the dismay of the British and Americans because, understandably, the locals go "so that's the side attacking our old enemy Belgium, right?" (And the war's still lost for the Central Powers anyway because Everfair's just extra one country)
And second that at the end, decades again,
there's a reaction against Everfair as-is and while it's clear that's not going to last and the local monarch will have to accept the change, it's just as clear the Anglo-Americans will have to eat things like "actually why should the Official Language be English?" and that the Congolese population has different ideas of what a free utopia looks like
 
I may find a country always doing the smart thing to be annoying, but I have to agree with the others here that, even if its unrealistic, it is damn inspiring and heartwarming seeing a country screwed by history do so much better.

Just an example, but in one of my favorite alternate histories, the ending line of the story, where a socialist Italy becomes a genuine inspiration for a socialist African state that gives the oppressed hope, nearly makes me tear up.

“In August of that year, I stayed for the opening of a new pan-African Project led by Lumumba. It was a good experience to finally see the long demotivated cadres on the continent has something to rally around. This is what I really wanted to see- not the wars, not the fighting, but the promise of a future by the youth. Some were older men in their 40s, but many in were in their 20s, filled with the optimism that I remember leaving to the American war with. The future was theirs to grasp, and they were willing to overcome the obstacles to do so. The UASR had become a beacon for the future of the oppressed. A Torch of Africa, one that was lit in part by the Torch of the Mediterranean”
 
Yeah, I know some of AH fiction is written by creepy fascists but that's sadly true of lots of genres. It's mistaking a common trope ("what if the well-known badides from that well-known war won?") for the writer's fantasy, at which point you need to lock up all those horrible crime writers before they kill again.
 
It's been discussed before on this thread that alternate history often plays the purpose of allowing someone to fantasize about what a wonderful world it would be if their ideology succeeded, with obvious appeal to fascists.

But I think where the issue in alternate history rises is in that it seems a lot of unsavoury elements, including but not limited to fascists, have a large presence in a lot of alternate history spheres (not this one for sure, but others), and they are in practice viewed as acceptable by many people or they are shrugged off, when in reality they should be excluded from those spheres.
 
Coiler said:
A WI that thankfully (with hindsight) did not come to pass: The US believed that Yugoslavia was on the brink of building nuclear weapons.
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That's not really news. Even relatively simple nuclear infrastructure can be used to produce nuclear weapons. The South African program required only $800 million and a peak of 400 expert personnel to build simple gun type uranium bombs (source). Prior to the 1974 Indian nuclear test the major powers even helped supply and subsidize client states with research reactors and highly enriched uranium fuel that could be diverted to weapons production. In a Sum of All Fears scenario in which nuclear material is already available the personnel and resources required are even lower.
 
Delta Force said:
Prior to the 1974 Indian nuclear test the major powers even helped supply and subsidize client states with research reactors and highly enriched uranium fuel that could be diverted to weapons production.
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On a similar note, I've heard (and this would make for a great WI, however soft), that China considered deploying nuclear missiles in Albania.
 
Coiler said:
On a similar note, I've heard (and this would make for a great WI, however soft), that China considered deploying nuclear missiles in Albania.
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I haven't heard about that one, although just about every nuclear weapons state has been involved in a proliferation incident at one point or another. India is the only one that doesn't seem to have anything linking it to proliferation as an exporter.
 
Coiler said:
On a similar note, I've heard (and this would make for a great WI, however soft), that China considered deploying nuclear missiles in Albania.
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“Rumors were spread in 1968 that China invented to deploy its own MRBM’s to Albania,presumably thereby to be able to reach targets in Russia outside the striking range from Sinkiang.Yet even these would have been presumably under Chinese control,thus not constituting “proliferation“ and no confirmation for such rumors is at hand. If one feared a Yugoslav,Western or Moscow oriented takeover of Albania,nuclear weapons might indeed be a valuable deterrent […] Yet the extent of Chinese caution is shown by Peking’s unwillingness to commit openly or confirm any such deployments;unadvertised,such deployments would lack much of the deterrent effect”

-Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,October 1970

So yeah,it isn’t likely at all for this to happen,given that it isn’t characteristic for China under Mao and that Hoxha ran Albania with an iron fist,thus destroying any possibility of someone cooping him and no longer being aligned with China.

Interestingly,it is mentioned the possibility that the successor to Nasser could replace the Soviet advisors with American or Chinese ones and the latter being willing to help Egypt obtain nuclear weapons,though I don’t know if Sadat or any of his rivals cared/had any real relationships with China beyond pleasantries by now.

Still,this does create a possibility where Sadat does this and,idk,the Yom Kippur War gets nuclear from both sides but Sadat and Assad aren’t backed by the Soviets and they’re fucked.

That or Sadat postpones the war indefinitely til Egypt gets nukes,which is more likely but I don’t know that much about this so I can’t say for certain.
 
David Flin said:
Back in the day, that was YWUA. You Wake Up As: That goes way, way back. There were some fictions and games about this in the old fanzine Alarums and Excursions, run by Lee Gold. Every ten issues or so, one of these wretched things would start up. One I remember had the starting point of you waking up and being told you had ten minutes to collect stuff from your house before being transported to a fantasy historical world. One person (an American, but it will become obvious I needn't have specified that) made the claim and described how he would rush around and collect over a score of fully-loaded firearms over various types that were lying around his house, and more ammunition than I could physically carry. That was a slightly different game to SI, but that was in the mid 1980s.

YWUA Hitler was a common trope in A&E, along with Julius Caesar, for some reason.

These were generally as bad as you might imagine.

Professionally, Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions has someone going back from WW2 to become Danske Holger, and it's never been clear to me whether it was the same person or a mind flip.
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There was a period where YWUA seemed to be one of three most common thread types on soc.history.what-if. I wanted to combine all three in one generic thread: "You wake up as <head of a medium-sized political unit> which has been cast back In the Sea of Time and is about to be struck by Giant Meteors."

Never could quite nerve myself up to do it.
 
Major Major said:
There was a period where YWUA seemed to be one of three most common thread types on soc.history.what-if. I wanted to combine all three in one generic thread: "You wake up as <head of a medium-sized political unit> which has been cast back In the Sea of Time and is about to be struck by Giant Meteors."

Never could quite nerve myself up to do it.
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Reminds me a little of my intention at the height of the conventional WW3 boomlet to make a mocking piece where I would repeat the exact same lines and exposition, only changing the names of places, people, and weapons systems to show a point about how interchangeable and shallow the TLs were.

Thankfully, I did not go through with it. Especially after much blogging and finding out that in [the small amount of] actual published fiction on the topic, there are plenty of substantive differences that can be highlighted in non axe-grinding reviews.
 
David Flin said:
I would add that it varied from Power to Power. For example, the Fashoda Crisis (1898) between Britain and France led to a rapprochement between Britain and France, and an agreement on spheres of influence, reducing the potential for conflict between them.

The Bosnian Crisis saw one of the Powers (in this case, Austria-Hungary) learning quite a different lesson. It unilaterally overturned an 1878 agreement and annexed Bosnia. After a lot of bluff and bluster, with A-H and Germany threatening war over the issue, Russia, France, Britain, Ottoman Empire, and Italy reluctantly agreed and leant on Serbia to accept the situation. What AH learned was that it could annex who the hell it liked in the Balkans because no-one wanted a general war. It also taught Italy that AH couldn't be trusted to keep any agreement, and Italy quietly (and without telling anyone) left the AH/Germany club and secretly joined the Britain/France/Russia club.

The Agadir Crisis saw Germany threaten a general war if it didn't get concessions from a French incident in Morocco, initially ignoring French offers to negotiate with Germany (not with Morocco, obviously. Don't be silly). After shilly-shallying, Britain realised that Germany stood to gain a port on the Atlantic. Can't have that, so it backed France. A financial crisis in Germany persuaded it to back down, and accept some territory in the French Congo as compensation.

The lessons being learned were that Powers would bluff and bluster and push things to the edge, but someone would back down at the last minute.

Until they didn't.

If the Sarajevo Crisis hadn't sparked war, it would simply have reinforced that lesson, and another crisis would be along shortly.
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Sorry for the late reply, but Russia had repeatedly agreed over the decades with an Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia. The crisis only came about because of the deluded pan-Slavic intellectuals in both Russia and Serbia. In addition, Austria-Hungary was afraid that the Young Turks would try to reassert sovereignity over Bosnia.
 
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Weird reddit AH.
 
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