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Alternate History General Discussion

Semi-random question: Are there any "President Henry Wallace" AH timelines or books out there that don't revolve around his term(s) being a disaster, in one way or another? I say "semi-random" because I just recently found and read through this link (which has just been made into a book, too, apparently), and while it may have been intended as ironic and/or "grimdark" on a certain level, it made me reflect on how much AH is out there that really bashes the idea of Wallace as President, and wonder if there's anything that presents it in a different way--critical where necessary (like with the sanitized USSR tour), but not painting him as a Communist plant/stooge, etc., and trying to realistically/plausibly picture what his Presidency might look like.
 
Is that a real trend in kid's stories versus one book, that the lead has no prejudice at the start? When I was the target demographic, if a story was meant to be about bigotry or a real conflict, you did have leads who were prejudiced or fell into prejudice and the consequences were what the story was about.
Isn't a big part of Pyjamas' problem that the author knew the square root of sod all about the Holocaust? I'm sure it was that book where the author said they'd grown up in Norn, and extrapolated from their own childhood, wanting to write a book about children divided by fences and walls. But, as horrible as elements of Norn during the Troubles could be, it wasn't the fucking Holocaust.

That's not a general problem for YA novels, unless it's been replayed massively. That's a problem with this particular novel, and all the people who went gaga for it.
 
Isn't a big part of Pyjamas' problem that the author knew the square root of sod all about the Holocaust? I'm sure it was that book where the author said they'd grown up in Norn, and extrapolated from their own childhood, wanting to write a book about children divided by fences and walls. But, as horrible as elements of Norn during the Troubles could be, it wasn't the fucking Holocaust.

......but.... why didn't he write about the Troubles?! YA writers have done that, we did Under Goliath in Year 8 and everything!!
 
......but.... why didn't he write about the Troubles?! YA writers have done that, we did Under Goliath in Year 8 and everything!!
I misremembered slightly, he's from the Republic. But Norn was a big inspiration. The Holocaust Studies Centre tells teachers to avoid it like the plague, suggesting other titles like Night instead.

Boyne claims Pyjamas is a fable, so can't be inaccurate. It can't misrepresent the Holocaust, as he's using it as dressing for a fable. Meaning that there are only anachronisms. But, if you want to write a fable about division, maybe you shouldn't be using the industrial murder of over six million people as your window dressing in order to score some cheap emotional heat?

Also, this.
Screenshot_20220723-215134_Chrome.jpg

And he then wrote a book about a boy coming to terms with having a trans sibling. It was not universally well-received.
 
found and read through this link (which has just been made into a book, too, apparently),
Like honestly that timeline is really right wing like it falls into the woke Rommel trope and presents a wholly view of positive colonialism with people like Patrice Lumumba made into villains. Yes it does do the bare minimum of “yes fascism and racism is bad” but immediately turns around and says “but the commies and Arabs are worse!”. While reading it’s almost impossible not to get the impression the author believes that might makes right and diplomacy and such is cowardly. The actual AH aspects are either comedically asinine(The Soviet Union collapses because they do such a cringe fail job at faking the moon landing everyone loses faith in communism),inaccurate (Patton becomes president despite hating public speaking and showing no interest in that), or offensive (Israeli prime minister Anne Frank,Jackie Robinson gets lynched). So to answer the question Wallace is a Soviet stooge who (iirc) commits suicide because the author is mad he didn’t spend the rest of his life advocating for killing.
 
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Like honestly that timeline is really right wing like it falls into the woke Rommel trope and presents a wholly view of positive colonialism with people like Patrice Lumumba made into villains. Yes it does do the bare minimum of “yes fascism and racism is bad” but immediately turns around and says “but the commies and Arabs are worse!”. While reading it’s almost impossible not to get the impression the author believes that might makes right and diplomacy and such is cowardly. The actual AH aspects are either comedically asinine(The Soviet Union collapses because they do such a cringe fail job at faking the moon landing everyone loses faith in communism),inaccurate (Patton becomes president despite hating public speaking and showing no interest in it), or offensive (Israeli prime minister Anne Frank,Jackie Robinson gets lynched). So to answer the question Wallace is a Soviet stooge who (iirc) commits suicide because the author is mad he didn’t spend the rest of his life advocating for killing.

Yep, I got the sense almost right off the bat that the author was a Mussolini apologist at best (esp. when he essentially violates all laws of physics and logic trying to twist Fascism away from Nazism, in order to have Il Duce become leader of a separate bloc) and a right-winger in general. Needless to say, I'm not going near this one again, and might even be tempted to one day write (collaboratively or solo) a TL or story that plausibly explores a Wallace Presidency.
 
Unfortunately, at least in the internet AH space, I think For All Time starting its horrors by making Wallace president was a big influence on the later depictions of the person. Can't think of any "good/decent Henry Wallace" ones off the top of my head.

I found a list of Wallace TLs and ideas at "The Other Place", but am reluctant to parse through them for that very (depressing) reason. FaT still has a certain level of "WUT"-based interest for me, but otherwise, yeah, it's become a bit too grimdark for me, for the Wallace reasons and others.
 
I feel like I have read a President Wallace story, and it feels like it would have been in one of those anthologies like Alternate Presidents, but it isn't anywhere I can find it.

Which is frustrating, but it might be for the best since the story I'm remembering was very critical of him and his naivete.
 
Unfortunately, at least in the internet AH space, I think For All Time starting its horrors by making Wallace president was a big influence on the later depictions of the person. Can't think of any "good/decent Henry Wallace" ones off the top of my head.

Henry Wallace doesn't seem like someone who was good at being a politician. He had poor relations with most of the decision makers in the Democratic Party and did a lot to anger conservatives with his stances on the New Deal, communism, and segregation. He didn't even get along with people within the Roosevelt administration and got into such a feud with other members of the Board of Economic Warfare that Roosevelt ended up shutting it down and transferring its powers to a different organization.
 
I have this maniacal plan for an AH where Austria's aviation industry is massively boosted compared to OTLs.

It's a soft divergence so you could probably pick a million holes in it, but basically it takes advantage of Austrias (as unfortunately shown in the Russo Ukrainian War) post 1991 ties to Russia. Got the idea from a serious plan to build the MiG-110 STOL transport in Austria for western use.

Basically Austria acts as the assembler for export Soviet/Russian designs with western engines/avionics. There's both practical economic/political reasons for this and PR reasons: Better to build in a country with a stereotype of high quality than in one with a stereotype of low quality.
 
Good post on a wargaming blog about some (soft) AH wargames. It had this line that made me think of the similar issues with academic historians.

The majority of historical wargames go to great lengths to avoid being categorized as “alternate history.”
 
An idea I've had for a thing which I don't know if it's plausible is Tukhachevsky as leader of URSS making a deal with Poland in a no WW2 world over dividing the Baltics-the Soviets get Estonia,the Poles Lithuania and Latvia is divided equally between them.

I know it doesn't really have legs per and Tuka is the more impulsive type that would have just started the Baltics consequences be damned but it's kinda stuck in my head and I kinda want an answer to it.
 
I know it doesn't really have legs per and Tuka is the more impulsive type that would have just started the Baltics consequences be damned but it's kinda stuck in my head and I kinda want an answer to it.

I dunno, I think he'd just grab all the Baltics and not bother with the headache if he could.

The thing I know about Tukhachevsky (which isn't relevant to this direct question) is that he loved technologies he clearly didn't understand. It got to the point where you could look at some of his proposals (ie, Leonid Kurchevsky's EVERYTHING MUST BE RECOILLESS), say they came from the mind of Mike "AEROGAVIN" Sparks, and people would believe it.
 
Given all the timelines about government politicking, are there any prominent examples of an AH focused on the IOC, FIFA, or other big international sporting bodies? It seems like there'd be plenty of sleaze and sauce in such subject matter to keep readers entertained.
EA’s FIFA Leadership series already did that in the unintentional AH category. I remember playing the Wii version back in the day, where your Miis got to pick which dictatorship got a World Cup! I chose China for the 2014 World Cup, with all of my stadiums being built in Xinjiang. After a generous bribe to my totally legit Swiss bank account. Strangely enough, it also netted me a few Disney movies starring Lionel Messi, too.
 
An idea I've had for a thing which I don't know if it's plausible is Tukhachevsky as leader of URSS making a deal with Poland in a no WW2 world over dividing the Baltics-the Soviets get Estonia,the Poles Lithuania and Latvia is divided equally between them.
You would need to give him a different career path early on, the USSR had multiple institutional safeguards against what it considered "Bonapartism".

An amusing detail about Tukhachevsky is that he and De Gaulle knew each other from their time as POWs.
 
You would need to give him a different career path early on, the USSR had multiple institutional safeguards against what it considered "Bonapartism".

An amusing detail about Tukhachevsky is that he and De Gaulle knew each other from their time as POWs.
Basically what I thought of is Stalin getting assassinated in 1935 by Anna Orlova like he nearly did OTL and Tukhachevsky ending up as leader by default due everyone else important already being purged or sidelined and thus no one can really stop him.

It doesn’t necessarily has to be him,it’s just that I don’t know who could take over at this stage.
 
Given all the timelines about government politicking, are there any prominent examples of an AH focused on the IOC, FIFA, or other big international sporting bodies? It seems like there'd be plenty of sleaze and sauce in such subject matter to keep readers entertained.

No, usually you don't find stuff like that in TLs. Guess they'll rather write "oh, there was a big corruption scandal" (and I can't remember concrete examples of that either) than making up details, or adapting an OTL scandal.

Interesting maybe, but depressing as well.
 
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