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Alternate History General Discussion

More generally I absolutely concur with Liam - much AH, and indeed much historical writing in general, reduces very human things to mere evidence to be used in theses. It renders the whole exercise feeling very sterile. Human beings are more than just pawns to politicians; that's one of the reasons I write my vignettes the way I do. I choose stories based on what makes me react emotionally, and I find it is much more compelling to write - certainly more compelling to read.

You have a great choice of words. First "Trinkets" and now "sterile".
 
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Something I’ve been thinking about is how the AH stories about Ceausescu and his communist regime still being in power after ‘89 are the product of a idea-that of an semi invincible Ceausescu and Romania managing to become the North Korea of Eastern Europe.

Don’t get me wrong though,I don’t come into this hating these kinds of stories. Far from it,they are often some of the best and fun pieces of AH writing in Romanian-almost all written by flawed human people. Cristian Tudor Popescu is often really tremendous as a editor and has the worst hot takes half of the times,but as a writer he’s genuinely good. Dead Time is a genuinely good script for an AH movie where Ceausescu manages to hang on to power by brutally destroying all the protesters and holy shit it’s really good you guys

Like,CTP manages very well to make an atmospheric movie,full of suspense and it’s just so good at imagining how the regime would evolve into the Nineties,with more and more shortages,the Securitate trying every possible to somehow keep the regime from falling apart and Ceausescu backing Milosevic and Saddam and being more and more nationalistic,to the point where it’s hinted that unionism in Moldova is tainted by him and the propaganda that the regime creates of an United Greater Romania after 1991.

Likewise,Adrian Cioroianu and Iulian Comanescu wrote really fun vignettes where they imagined how the figures of modern Romania that were created by the fall of communism would be in a world where it didn’t fell in Romania. They all however suffer from the fact that realistically Ceausescu couldn’t have continued after 1989. Even he managed somehow to put down the revolution,the regime cannot survive beyond 1991-1992 for four main reasons:

1. The regime was genuinely on its last breath and without external help it would have crumbled soon via massive riots.

2. Ceausescu was by ‘89 suffering from various illnesses and by ‘91 he would have most likely died of diabetes or some other disease.

3. He’s gonna come to blows soon with Hungary as his nationalist rhetoric will intensify even more and that might lead to international sanctions or even a war,neither being things that his regime can survive.

4. His only successor was his son Nicu,a drunk playboy who didn’t really believe in communism or anything at all,preferred profiting from his parents who forced him to a higher spotlight that he didn’t want and wasn’t really liked by the important people in the party. Even if he does successfully become Secretary General,he doesn’t have a plan to deal with anything and by ‘91 is suffering from various liver diseases due to his alcohol addiction. He either resigns at some point during ‘93-‘95 and lets democracy happen or dies in ‘96 due to his alcoholism without an heir and the regime just collapses.

Again,like I said in the beginning,it’s not the writers fault for not knowing this. They wrote them before these kind of things were common knowledge and the idea of Ceausescu going on and on and on seemed plausible to a lot of Romanians since there wasn’t any real opposition to him and the Revolution of ‘89 was something that people still can’t properly process. For years they were raised that Ceausescu and the Party can’t be opposed and the Securitate knows everything.Ceausescu’s power seemed to be a thing that would last forever and most got used to it since well they couldn’t stop him.

And then out of the sudden his power just fades away.

So yeah,these stories are clearly influenced by how big Ceausescu’s presence was in the lives of ordinary Romanians and how he never truly left even after all these years in the minds of a lot of people. They aren’t plausible stories about the regime surviving but they are good stories about the regime surviving. And that’s more important in fiction.

Still,it would be interesting to write/read a story about Ceausescu managing to survive only for a little longer til he falls in Autumn ‘90/Spring ‘91.
 
Something I’ve been thinking about is how the AH stories about Ceausescu and his communist regime still being in power after ‘89 are the product of a idea-that of an semi invincible Ceausescu and Romania managing to become the North Korea of Eastern Europe.

Don’t get me wrong though,I don’t come into this hating these kinds of stories. Far from it,they are often some of the best and fun pieces of AH writing in Romanian-almost all written by flawed human people.

I've considered having the "Surviving Ceausescu with Romania as the European North Korea" divergence for some of my own stories (both a bandied-around Smithtown and a draft where they served as opponents in various technothrillers), but I've always approached it as soft AH for the sake of a story where I'd readily concede all plausibility issues.

Not surprised that the subject is so common in AH made by Romanians themselves.
 
Today's Revolutions made me really want a timeline where World War II is between a SPD-led Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union. The debate between Revisionist and Orthodox Marxism will be settled not by internal debate but by TANKS.

Actually, are there any "Weimar survives" timelines around?
 
So I just mentioned this in the story ideas thread;
Walking around Nottingham today, I remember how much the pharmacy chain Boots is to the City and I realised you could have a fun story in which Nottingham becomes this Bournville style city owned by the Boots Corporation with support of the Liberal Government (as James Boot was a prominent Liberal supporter).

The idea being that it’s set in the 1940s as the Radicalism of Socialism and the Beveridge Plan collide with the Old School Radicalism of the Boots owned City of Nottingham as tensions mount etc. Maybe do it as a murder mystery.
And it made me wonder, are there any like small scale Alternate History’s about the history of a City or something in which the operations of that city are changed but the world carries on as normal style thing?

Would be fun to parse an alternate history for a city and the consequences.
 
So I just mentioned this in the story ideas thread;

And it made me wonder, are there any like small scale Alternate History’s about the history of a City or something in which the operations of that city are changed but the world carries on as normal style thing?

Would be fun to parse an alternate history for a city and the consequences.

@Alex Richards?
 
So I just mentioned this in the story ideas thread;

And it made me wonder, are there any like small scale Alternate History’s about the history of a City or something in which the operations of that city are changed but the world carries on as normal style thing?

Would be fun to parse an alternate history for a city and the consequences.

Ah yes, Progress by Endeavour.

aka: Probably the world's most parochial AH.

I really should bring it over here properly.
 
Can anybody recommend any China Reforms after 1989 threads or TLs? It's way outside my normal wheelhouse, but I suddenly thought a well-done TL using a Tiananmen PoD as a catalyst for China opening up would be interesting.
 
Can anybody recommend any China Reforms after 1989 threads or TLs? It's way outside my normal wheelhouse, but I suddenly thought a well-done TL using a Tiananmen PoD as a catalyst for China opening up would be interesting.

A Song was heard in China? Though the author was redoing it to reflect the issues of post-communist countries like Hungary last time I checked.
 
Speaking of Communist Countries, they’re probably the hardest to predict leaderships for, given how half the time the leadership would fall onto ‘fellow who seems incredibly non threatening and ran some engineering works who becomes leader when the original potential leader is killed’.

Essentially Communist AltHist is a game of musical chairs and the leader is usually the last one standing after purges etc.
 
I'm wondering if there's a noticeable skew towards space filling empires among North American authors (from a continent that does have three sprawling "SFEs") and balkanization among European authors (A continent that does have many small countries on it)
 
One thing which I never understood is why the younger writers of AH - 17 and younger - tend to mainly get involved into Anglospheric politics post-1945 and not into more mainstream areas of AH, like the World Wars and the Civil War and the like. Why get into the minutia of conventions and primaries and polls and the like when you can just write about Rommel's Montreal campaign or something.
 
One thing which I never understood is why the younger writers of AH - 17 and younger - tend to mainly get involved into Anglospheric politics post-1945 and not into more mainstream areas of AH, like the World Wars and the Civil War and the like.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because:

-A lingering, possibly subconscious sense that the classics are overdone (which is arguably true) and often inaccurate (which is true a lot of the time).
-Wiki-plucking being more suited to the "make a list of election results and such" type of ultra-broad-and-ultra-shallow TL than the details of a military campaign.
-Just bandwagon following, where they're doing it because that's what everyone else is doing.
 
In fact all post-1945 US politics TLs are boring. It's always the same stuff over and over. Primary happens, guy gets nominated, defeats incumbent, oops economy is bad, loses re-election, good guy wins two terms, his successor not as good, gets into war against communists/jihadists/anti-US dictator that becomes insurgency, new guy becomes president and he is a moderate within his party, Cold War, some cranks run but they don't get much support, party splits that end up getting fixed after one or two election cycles etc. The dystopias are all the same as well - just have McCarthyist paranoia turn America into a Pinochet-esque dictatorship. There is very little vision in these TLs
 
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