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Alternate History General Discussion

To go along with my whining above, I’m not a big fan of Blair TL’s just because it seems fairly redundant, they usually just become ‘And then Blair has us join the Euro and ain’t that nice’.

I would much rather like to see ‘Brown’s New Labour’ or ‘Milburn: The Moderniser’ timelines etc.

Brown lacked Blair's charm and ability to smooth over the contradictions in his politics. There's no guarantee that there'd be a Labour Govt. if Blair isn't involved in some way.

Chris
 
Brown lacked Blair's charm and ability to smooth over the contradictions in his politics. There's no guarantee that there'd be a Labour Govt. if Blair isn't involved in some way.

Chris
I disagree. Brown was a bit grumpy but the Major government was literally imploding by Smith's death. Sure, there might not be a landslide, but Brown was a capable politician as well as a moderniser.
 
Brown lacked Blair's charm and ability to smooth over the contradictions in his politics. There's no guarantee that there'd be a Labour Govt. if Blair isn't involved in some way.

Chris
If Brown was elected in 94’ you would probably still see a Labour Majority in 97’ but Brown’s stubbornness leads to more interesting time in Government.
I disagree. Brown was a bit grumpy but the Major government was literally imploding by Smith's death. Sure, there might not be a landslide, but Brown was a capable politician as well as a moderniser.
Indeed, very similar to Smith in a number of regards and people seem to be fine doing ‘No Smith Death’ TLs.

Generally I think any other Moderniser offers more interesting ideas than another ‘And then Blair takes us into the Euro/Fucks Up Foot and Mouth/Adds a Penny On Income Tax’ TLs I have seen bandied about.
 
There’s something very British Empire about the fact that they could’ve maintained some of the empire by absorbing the parts that wanted through integration into parliament, but racism and fiscal anxiety meant they’d rather just let it disintegrate.

It'd be very ASB for a timeline where the government did integrate them anyway but imagine the story to be told of the UK as pan-ocean nation involving majority-black areas with voting powers you can't ignore.
 
I heard that one of the reasons Britain refused to annex Malta amongst several was that they didn’t want to set the potential precedent that all colonies could be incorporated into the UK.

What potential colonies would’ve wanted this?

Not for the British Empire, but that's what Mba wanted for Gabon. Contrarily to the French West Indies, the shift to départementalisation from colony didn't happen. I believe Jonathan Edelstein's Union Travail Justice explores that scenario.
 
Just a random, recent pondering: How much and what sort of AH is there about John Lennon surviving Mark David Chapman, and what might happen to him, the Beatles and the world afterwards? Per Uchronia.net, I'm familiar with a number of other Beatles-centered stories, and there's one fictional piece that deals with Lennon specifically; anyone have any thoughts on this one, and the broader range of AH surrounding Lennon's murder?
 
Just a random, recent pondering: How much and what sort of AH is there about John Lennon surviving Mark David Chapman, and what might happen to him, the Beatles and the world afterwards? Per Uchronia.net, I'm familiar with a number of other Beatles-centered stories, and there's one fictional piece that deals with Lennon specifically; anyone have any thoughts on this one, and the broader range of AH surrounding Lennon's murder?

There's a Beatles AH novel by Bryce Zabel
 
Just a random, recent pondering: How much and what sort of AH is there about John Lennon surviving Mark David Chapman, and what might happen to him, the Beatles and the world afterwards? Per Uchronia.net, I'm familiar with a number of other Beatles-centered stories, and there's one fictional piece that deals with Lennon specifically; anyone have any thoughts on this one, and the broader range of AH surrounding Lennon's murder?

IIRC someone wrote a vignette on the Old Country where a surviving Lennon goes down a similar path to Morrissey.
 
Music's a hard thing to write about like that, isn't it? Like, if he survived, a large part of what people are going to want to know about is how his career goes, and its hard to really fictionalize that and get it across, as most AH writers are not themselves accomplished musicians capable of putting together a 'Surviving John Lennon demo tape' for the reader to really gel the whole presentation.

It's kind of a part of the fact that a lot of AH is easier by subtraction rather than addition. I can tell you what might happen if some person who lived instead died, because I can subtract them from what's known, but its harder to do the opposite, since you're on much less firm ground there. Like, I think a lot about what it would be like if various lost works of history weren't lost, like, if, say, we found all 142 books of Livy's history of Rome, but how I can I really write about that when we don't know what was in them. I'd have to fabricate it completely, and that runs easily into all of my own biases and ignorance and preconceptions that will make it probably ludicrous for anyone who isn't me to read.
 
Of course, the above is not to say that the only worthwhile kind of alternate history is that which proceeds along the most rigorous academic lines. Sometimes it is enough to say 'what if Ben Franklin was the first US President instead of George Washington' and to play with the idea purely on that basis, without demanding to know who that musket ball doesn't hit when we switch some errant shot to striking George Washington at the Battle of Germantown because we have to take him out of the running somehow.
 
It's kind of a part of the fact that a lot of AH is easier by subtraction rather than addition.

This manifests in an interesting way in internet AH. There it seems most TL writers will use obscure OTL figures instead of OCs, even if it's been so long after the POD that such characters would be easily acceptable.
 
This manifests in an interesting way in internet AH. There it seems most TL writers will use obscure OTL figures instead of OCs, even if it's been so long after the POD that such characters would be easily acceptable.

A lot of people will shy away from anything that looks like they're really fan-fictioning their way through real history. Real people come complete with virtues and flaws and (at least a veneer of) authenticity. As a reader, I'm automatically predisposed to believe Senator George S. Nixon (R-NV) could have done more with his life under the right stimuli than I am in some made-up person being a genius mathematician who settled the Silver Question, brought democracy to Cuba, and wrote a best-selling series of adventure novels under the name John Q. Dangerman.
 
Yeah, that is how it feels - a different drive to the desire to play around with the historical figures. Though that's surely a relatively recent way of doing things, because alternate history stories from the past have made up people to fill various slots (Turtledove doesn't use a real 1930s racist for his American Hitler, for example). I don't know when it started that "OCs" stopped being done. Possibly this is the result of online AH and the trend of 'timelines' and pseudo-histories?

There is actually something I've submitted for SLP that uses original characters as the primary political, media et al figures (except for a few in the background) because it'd have felt awkward to have a prose story with shootouts and schemings and go "this is a real-life CBeebies presenter declaring No Surrender".
 
Yeah, that is how it feels - a different drive to the desire to play around with the historical figures. Though that's surely a relatively recent way of doing things, because alternate history stories from the past have made up people to fill various slots (Turtledove doesn't use a real 1930s racist for his American Hitler, for example). I don't know when it started that "OCs" stopped being done. Possibly this is the result of online AH and the trend of 'timelines' and pseudo-histories?

There is actually something I've submitted for SLP that uses original characters as the primary political, media et al figures (except for a few in the background) because it'd have felt awkward to have a prose story with shootouts and schemings and go "this is a real-life CBeebies presenter declaring No Surrender".

Using real people is definitely something that becomes less comfortable the closer you get to the present, which is something of a paradox since it's harder to just insert made-up people into 1995 than it is to slide them into 1895. Speculating about how real people might have responded to different events is one thing, but using them as a character in a story goes a level beyond that. Clearly you can do it, Curtis Sittenfeld just did with that novel 'WI Hillary doesn't marry Bill Clinton,' but the moment I heard that was even being done it felt wrong to me on a very basic level. I don't know why, it's very arbitrary to say 'Theodore Roosevelt yes, Prince William no' when they're both famous people who I haven't met and who won't read what I write, but there it is.
 
I'm gleefully inconsistent on this, because I'll have no problem writing a real still-alive person into a timeline or going "YEEESSSS!" at AH with John Major in, but that Hillary Clinton book really got my back up because the premise "wouldn't her career/life be so much better without her long-term husband she seems to genuinely love" struck me as fundamentally wrong in a way that John Major, Lad Lad Lad in SLP's Decking The Shuffle doesn't.
 
I'm gleefully inconsistent on this, because I'll have no problem writing a real still-alive person into a timeline or going "YEEESSSS!" at AH with John Major in, but that Hillary Clinton book really got my back up because the premise "wouldn't her career/life be so much better without her long-term husband she seems to genuinely love" struck me as fundamentally wrong in a way that John Major, Lad Lad Lad in SLP's Decking The Shuffle doesn't.

When you put it like that, yes. Was it your vignette I remember reading, Tony Blair as the King of Punk, as related to the reader by a man in a filthy raincoat at the back of a club? That didn't feel wrong, like you'd disrespecting him or used him like a little handpuppet to illustrate your own political proclivities, it was just a good story that happened to have Tony Blair in it.
 
There's actually a Stephen Baxter short story - "The Twelveth Album" which discusses an additional Beatles album that comes out in 1971. The big advantage in that specific case is that all the Beatles actually wrote songs so all Baxter needs to do is discuss how they would have played these songs - John sings Paul's "Maybe I'm Amazed" is the specific big change he gives.

Music's a hard thing to write about like that, isn't it? Like, if he survived, a large part of what people are going to want to know about is how his career goes, and its hard to really fictionalize that and get it across, as most AH writers are not themselves accomplished musicians capable of putting together a 'Surviving John Lennon demo tape' for the reader to really gel the whole presentation.

It's kind of a part of the fact that a lot of AH is easier by subtraction rather than addition. I can tell you what might happen if some person who lived instead died, because I can subtract them from what's known, but its harder to do the opposite, since you're on much less firm ground there. Like, I think a lot about what it would be like if various lost works of history weren't lost, like, if, say, we found all 142 books of Livy's history of Rome, but how I can I really write about that when we don't know what was in them. I'd have to fabricate it completely, and that runs easily into all of my own biases and ignorance and preconceptions that will make it probably ludicrous for anyone who isn't me to read.

The thing with "adding" for music and art in general is that you're effectively saying that something you've come up with is better than or at least on the same level as what the artist originally came up with. It's not just a question of being an "accomplished musician" - with a bit of work and time I could probably do a decent-ish cover of a lot of the Beatles output (and a few others), but writing something that is plausibly "what John Lennon would have written" is insane!
 
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