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Alternate History General Discussion

My rule of thumb with alternate terminologies is that they should be something that a reader would still find intuitive. In one of my projects, I substituted the military ranks of "general" with "Grand Colonel" and "Corpsmaster", both of which have an obvious meaning.

I quite liked the alternate timeline nasty-sounding terms in Doctor Who: Inferno like Brigade Leader and Section Leader, and then I learned these weren't alternate terminologies but translations of SS ranks.

One of the Lethbridge-Stewart novels set in the Inferno timeline invents the term Column Leader as equivalent of colonel, which sounds nice and invocative.
 
Timeline in a Week, meaning a short timeline that is supposed to be completed in a week but in practice often lasts a couple of weeks.

Thanks! I had been out of the AH community for a few years and I take it that was a more recent development.
 
Thanks! I had been out of the AH community for a few years and I take it that was a more recent development.
There's also TLIAD (timeline in a day) and TLIAM (timeline in a month). At least one person has done TLIAPOT (timeline in a period of time) but I'm not clear about how that differs from a regular timeline.
 
Timeline in a Week, meaning a short timeline that is supposed to be completed in a week but in practice often lasts a couple of weeks.

Yeah, it was mostly a reaction to kind of mega projects like look to the west which go on for decades becoming the standard. Its like no this is a short thing with a set end that Im writing in a set time period and is somewhat less serious in terms of research. I think its a much better model than the mega timelines.

My first timeline stalled because I was too ambitious and I didnt know where to go with it, whereas if you give yourself the outline of 15 updates covering these things in 8 days, it gets done. Which is what my 4 completed timelines have been.
 
Yeah, it was mostly a reaction to kind of mega projects like look to the west which go on for decades becoming the standard. Its like no this is a short thing with a set end that Im writing in a set time period and is somewhat less serious in terms of research. I think its a much better model than the mega timelines.

My first timeline stalled because I was too ambitious and I didnt know where to go with it, whereas if you give yourself the outline of 15 updates covering these things in 8 days, it gets done. Which is what my 4 completed timelines have been.
I like TLIAD precisely because the D could stand for day or for decade, and with me it's always the latter.
 
The TLIAX nomenclature is really a holdover from AH.com where the most common format of narrative TL where these multi-year epics such as Decades of Darkness or Look to the West. It was evocative of a certain thing: a limited number of entries, a particular focus, a list as TL, the style of a smug Wikipedia article. Could almost be considered the online AH equivalent of the miniseries.

I don't think we need the appellation here, but it's as evocative of a certain style as "A Hammer Film Production" was to British horror films. So it remains.
 
There's also TLIAD (timeline in a day) and TLIAM (timeline in a month). At least one person has done TLIAPOT (timeline in a period of time) but I'm not clear about how that differs from a regular timeline.
I never liked the variations of terms. I know that people want to be exacting here but I do remember when I did Bombard the Headquarters someone did a whole response when it was over that I had let everyone down by going for TLIAD when it should have been titled TLIAM, ignoring that the format is as Ryan says, sort of a tag of it being a compact and focused work more then anything.
 
Recently I acquired and read Argentina’s sole piece of counterfactual history literature, Marcos Victoria’s 1967 Buenos Ayres City: una Ucronía.

The first is a parodic take on Graham Greene and some of the more fanciful fantasies reactionaries had about what Argentina should have been, either as an English rather than a Spanish colony, or as a proper free market economy.

PoD is of course set during the English Invasions of 1806-07, and in this world it was the second one that took, turning poor backwards Argentina into the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata/Viceroyalty of the Silver River, an economic superpower with 50 million inhabitants and Britain’s last colony, a super Hong Kong of sorts that, in spite of being the best country in the world with statistics that’d make Switzerland cry with envy, is on the verge of revolution.

Indeed, while the power of the Free Market and Protestant Work Ethics (and properly white immigrants) have created a super utopia, the country’s still ripe for conspiracy and revolution, besieged by domestic conspirators and a ridiculous Legitimate Government in Exile, a parody of a Banana Republic set in the Malvinas in 1940 (same year the Chileans used to pilfer Tierra del Fuego from the British, because you need treacherous Chileans somewhere) used as a smokescreen by the real conspiracy. That the author, writing in 1967, would have accidentally predicted a May of 68 Insurrection but gotten the country wrong is of course one of those funny coincidences one couldn’t help but chuckle at.

In any case, our protagonist/narrator, a nosy and obtuse American journalist sent to report on the situation, meet colorful side-characters and try to get a boring romantic subplot started, gets kicked out of the country before the revolution starts, so that plot points is left hanging, although in any case the plot itself is an excuse to explore this world and get a laugh or two.

For one, everyone speaks a weird form of broken English that’s half a Spanish sentence and half an English sentence, while at the same time using proper English as the official language and Spanish as a private one. Places are of course renamed in terribly literal fashion, and I have to wonder how much was intentional given the parodic bent of the work (Mar del Plata, Tigre, Flores and La Plata become Silver Sea, Tiger, Flowers and Silver City, for instance, while the city and province of Buenos Aires become Buenos Ayres City and New Scotland, respectively). At least it avoids some other egregious ones (Julio A. Roca becomes Jules de la Rocque rather than Julius Rock, as I’ve seen done in online AH covering the same POD and subject)

Argentineans are as arrogant as in real life, except this world gives them cause for it, what with its country specifically designed to be the opposite of the real one, from its thriving economy to first class education to clean streets to quiet peaceful nights with no drunks roaming the streets and excellent utility services which even have the president of the phone company show up in person to apologize if you happen to have bad reception. And of course, no mention of Football, despite it being an English cultural import. I do wonder if that one was deliberate or an oversight.


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Why not?

It’s either as accurate as sources and authorial effort/intent allow, or it’s not, in which case it’s just deviating in terms of motivation or characterization or the development of certain events while the larger historical facts remain the same.

For instance, I wouldn’t count Milady de Winter arranging for Buckingham’s murder or the musketeers trying and failing to save Charles I as properly country factual history.
 
Where do you draw the line between "historical fiction" and "AH"? It's not an easy one to make.
I base it on author intent. If the author intended it to be actual history, then it was. Even if there's errors in research, it's still historical fiction. If the world is meant to have changed from actual history, then it's an alternate history.

This doesn't help those who subscribe to the Death of the Author model, of course.
 
Where do you draw the line between "historical fiction" and "AH"?

Just a blunt "is it intentionally saying The History Is Different", really. If I write about the late 1960s IRA learning about a sunken U-boat with Nazi gold on it and they go on a heist to get it to fund operations, that's something that never happened but it's not about anything being different. If I write about the late 1960s IRA learning about a sunken U-boat with Nazi gold on it, they heist it, and then there's a series of much bigger IRA actions due to the gold and it's clearly distorting the real Troubles, then I've written an alternate history because my focus is on what the heist leads to.

(Either way the story is, of course, called Green, White, and Gold)
 
Small question, just what exactly makes it so that British colonization "good"? I mean, a hell of a lot of fiction I read, and the one that was just posted a while ago makes it seem as if being occupied by the people from that rainy little land would leave good institutions and all that. What makes that so?
 
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