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Alternate History General Discussion

I’m beginning to understand why there isn’t more 20th Century Middle Eastern based Alternate History because the minute you go ‘What If Nasser was assassinated in 1954?’ you open a box of all sorts of different ideas, people and events related and now changed due to this.

I can now see why @SpanishSpy read a number of books to talk about Israeli-Palestine conflict for the Alternate History podcast.
When reading about Israel and Palestine I quickly decided I needed overviews of both Jewish and Arab history, going back millennia, just to establish the mentality of the historical actors involved.

I also found I needed a decent understanding of British and Ottoman politics circa World War I, as well as smatterings of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian politics. You also need to have a decent understanding of the Lebanese Civil War. Some American politics in regards to the Middle East also helps.

I'm probably forgetting something.
 
Inkling Press' Tales From Alternate Earths III is out this morning on Kindle and paperback. Among the stories in it is one by me, Hitchcock's Titanic, which I'm happy to see has found a home at last. Hope everyone will consider picking up a copy, especially with some of the other stories in the anthology besides mine.

Thank-you for reminding me - I reviewed the first two (for the SLP Blog I think) and I need to review this one in turn. Apart from SLP, Inkling Press are the only AH-focused publisher I know of in the industry
 
Thank-you for reminding me - I reviewed the first two (for the SLP Blog I think) and I need to review this one in turn. Apart from SLP, Inkling Press are the only AH-focused publisher I know of in the industry

Somewhat of a sister publication to us, really given how much we share writers. At this level, I think everyone's rooting for each other and collaborating. @Brent A. Harris, one of their co-founders, had a story in our last anthology and has been interviewed for the blog, etc.

Delighted by the bunch of writers he managed to get for the third anthology, too. There's some genuine big names among them. I know me and Brent chatted privately about his desire for authors with major labels to pitch for him and it seems to have paid off.

Will snap it up as soon as possible.
 
Everything is a huge can of worms with a lot of mutual dependencies and it's a bit hard to predict what, say, Nasser or Saddam Hussein might have done in different circumstances in the way you can guess how a Western democracy or the Soviet Union might have reacted to a Communist Iran or whatever. The other question is what type of story you want to tell about the Middle East. I outlined a sort of alternate history travel guide back in 2007 with a POD of no Iran-Iraq war and Iraq being an Egypt-style military oligarchy but with oil money, but that was a very 2007 story that no one would necessarily care about now. Most stories you could tell with a post-48 POD would be very politically fraught, to put it mildly.
When reading about Israel and Palestine I quickly decided I needed overviews of both Jewish and Arab history, going back millennia, just to establish the mentality of the historical actors involved.

I also found I needed a decent understanding of British and Ottoman politics circa World War I, as well as smatterings of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian politics. You also need to have a decent understanding of the Lebanese Civil War. Some American politics in regards to the Middle East also helps.

I'm probably forgetting something.
It’s kind of why what I’m planning to do with my story will be awhile a way yet, cleaving through the morass of the Middle Eastern Cold War is hard enough before Alternate History comes to play.

Though one of the things I found was the general ‘Israel as a Soviet ally’ idea is a bit basic but relatively easy to solve (essentially pushing Stalin out of the picture in the Mid 40s and have a West that is more hostile to them).

But stuff like ‘What If No Nasser’ or if ‘Qasim’s Iraq Survives’ leads to a whole set of worms and more occurring.
 
I think what author Carlos Acevado calls "Boxrec History" is very close to what I and @SpanishSpy call "Trinketization".

I started writing about boxing in 2007 mostly to read about the fighters I was interested in, boxers from the past who had been neglected or given spotty attention. A lot of what I had read had been in the vein of what I call “Boxrec History,” which is often just a series of names, dates and places. There’s very little research done, not much interpretation, no context and they’re more or less artless, that is, devoid of style. It’s amazing how someone can make Jack Dempsey or Aaron Pryor or Floyd Patterson boring, but, I guess where there’s a will, there’s a way.

(Bolding added by me)

I was instantly reminded of the longstanding complaints about internet AH, how much this reminded me of them, how he (successfully) tried to counter it in his own book by showing the context and personalities that went into the fights and fighters, and how it's (even) worse when applied to something that's supposedly a work of fiction and can't even give details about an actual event.
 
Are there any past/present European footballers (by which I mean people who play football/soccer in Europe, they don't have to be from there natively) with the raw athleticism and skill attributes to be a high-level American Football player at a position besides kicker?
 
Are there any past/present European footballers (by which I mean people who play football/soccer in Europe, they don't have to be from there natively) with the raw athleticism and skill attributes to be a high-level American Football player at a position besides kicker?
Association football tend not to make the same level of statistical data publicly available as their American football counterparts, so it's hard to be certain. The issue is that the skill set required is quite different. Even ignoring the foot/hand dichotomy, the heavy, often explosive contact seen in NFL is something that puts particular strain on the body that footballers don't suffer. In fact, even rugby players who try to transition to NFL struggle around this element of the game, as it's far less controlled than tackling in rugby. Most couldn't. You don't get many footballers who weigh 20 stone, can run the 100m in sub eleven seconds, and jump 32". You don't get many who's get up after being hit by such a lad, either.

That being said, I'm sure there are some who could have made such a switch. The number depends on when you want them to move. The earlier they shift codes, the more time they spend training for the specific skills they now need. An 18 year old with the athleticism to succeed is a 21 year old with an outside chance, and a 25 year old with no hope.

Do you want them to have something of a career in both?
 
You don't get many footballers who weigh 20 stone, can run the 100m in sub eleven seconds, and jump 32". You don't get many who's get up after being hit by such a lad, either.

That's basically what I thought. The real interesting question is how many talented baseball players are lurking in non-baseball (or even cricket) countries because that sport's skill set doesn't have an obvious physical marker like size or height.
 
Somewhat of a sister publication to us, really given how much we share writers. At this level, I think everyone's rooting for each other and collaborating. @Brent A. Harris, one of their co-founders, had a story in our last anthology and has been interviewed for the blog, etc.

Delighted by the bunch of writers he managed to get for the third anthology, too. There's some genuine big names among them. I know me and Brent chatted privately about his desire for authors with major labels to pitch for him and it seems to have paid off.

Will snap it up as soon as possible.

Thanks! And I think I have another story publishing with SLP under the theme of American Folklore with a twist. This reminds me, I need to be more vigorous in checking the forums for submission calls.
 
I think that's down to the same narrative necessity as in other genres - unless you're telling a story about failing, the detective has to work out whodunnit, the sports hero has to score, the lovers have to get together - and it now has to apply to historical figures. Teddy Roosevelt has to be assumed to be good at hunting down Jack the Ripper or Redchapel can't be a satisfying story about Teddy Roosevelt hunting down Jack the Ripper. (Not the one Mike Resnick wants to write, anyway)
 
Teddy Roosevelt has to be assumed to be good at hunting down Jack the Ripper or Redchapel can't be a satisfying story about Teddy Roosevelt hunting down Jack the Ripper. (Not the one Mike Resnick wants to write, anyway)
First off, how the fuck am I just learning about this now.

Secondly, Kim Newman's Anno Dracula (at least in the first book, which is more of a detective story than later books) has a nice subversion of the idea that the heroes/main characters have to be hyper-competent, with the main leads only realizing the identity of Jack (capturing TTL's Jack the Ripper is the main mystery of the plot) and confronting him near the end of the book despite a subtle clue being given fairly early on.
 
In alternate history, the question of competency never seems to be raised. People just assume a good amount of it from people who, historically, bumbled quite a lot on many things.
I think that some of this is down to writing episodically for online fora. Authors might worry about complaints if certain characters are given the idiot ball to hold. "Why would they do such an obviously self-defeating thing?" they cry.

This is where footnotes of "this is OTL" can be handy. EdT and @Thande both use them very effectively. I remember some readers of what became Fortress Europe being incensed when a convoy run into Singapore after Pearl Harbor was found to be non-combat loaded. I think this led to vital supplies being lost in an air raid, as they were still on the ships. Howls of derision. Why would a UK that's been at war for two whiole years not insist on combat loading? Until Calbear showed it was OTL. The two years of war having little impact on supply runs from India to Singapore.

Or, "Why would Mussolini simultaneously attack Greece and the British Empire less than a week after reinstating leave? Implausible!"; "Why would Louis XV's government give up all those gains so readily at this preposterous Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle? This needs a rewrite." and "You've lost me here. The Rhineland, Anchluss, all made sense. The fall of Poland was fine, as you had the Soviets stab them in the back. Norway was a stretch, because three pedalos, two z-boats and the Twins shouldn't be able to catch the entire RN on the hop, but I let it slide. This though, takes the biscuit. France and Belgium decide the Ardennes is impassible to tanks and guess which fuhrer has told his tankers to go racing through that very same Ardennes. All causing France to collapse utterly in six weeks? Nah."
 
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I think that's down to the same narrative necessity as in other genres - unless you're telling a story about failing, the detective has to work out whodunnit, the sports hero has to score, the lovers have to get together - and it now has to apply to historical figures. Teddy Roosevelt has to be assumed to be good at hunting down Jack the Ripper or Redchapel can't be a satisfying story about Teddy Roosevelt hunting down Jack the Ripper. (Not the one Mike Resnick wants to write, anyway)

As I remember it, the collection I first read that story in, The Other Teddy Roosevelts, there is a story about him where he takes the Rough Riders off to filibuster in the Congo Free State to liberate the people from King Leopold, and while they do win the military campaign, everything after that is just a series of bewildering failures.

The one that I most remember is that he promises the inhabitants of the new republic democracy and industrial development, and when he goes to a particular town to check on the progress some time later, they thank him for the democracies. By which, of course, they mean the freight cars on the new railroad, which they feel will make it much easier to travel some miles up the line and attack their ancestral rivals in another town and steal their livestock. That's what he meant when he promised them democracy, right?
 
Christ, there's a dystopia to be written about Teddy Roosevelt in charge of central Africa.

Broadly, though, I think there's a tendency in online history societies to think that politics and society can be approached with a strategy guide, as if it's a game where you keep up with the latest 'metas.'

I think the idea of 'steam engine time' is a useful one: when it's time for steam engines, there will be steam engines. Just as the industrial revolution didn't happen in the ancient world or Song China despite many of the pre-conditions being present, so too will many very gifted generals and politicians not make the 'correct' choices even if they were suggested to them.

That's because in large part, competence is a: socially defined, so some tactics that would seem no-brainers to us wouldn't play well culturally or politically. Secondly, competence is not about having a few key people with the right ideas. Systemic change takes time, and it's deeply unsexy.

That's a problem for fiction. If you were a team of Time Travelling Turtledoves with a desire to modernise the French military, what would be more useful to send back to France, a team of logistics experts from 2021 with some modern shipping containers, a few cargo helicopters and some portable transistor radios, or a hundred of the legion's best commandos armed to the the teeth?

Now, what would make a more exciting story?
 
Broadly, though, I think there's a tendency in online history societies to think that politics and society can be approached with a strategy guide, as if it's a game where you keep up with the latest 'metas.'

I kind of liken it to telling basketball players in 1980 to shoot three pointers at James Harden rates. However good the modern analytics are (and they're based on simple 3>2), they're based on two literal generations of players knowing what the line is and training for it.

Have the most talented players try tossing lots of threes early on and they'll just miss constantly.

Although in general about the competence issues, I think a big part of it in online AH is just that it's written in a format where you frequently have to look at it solely in terms of plausibility. The literary elements are either tiny or not present at all. It's a reason why I'm not exactly eager to review TLs on my blog, because I find these nitpicky arguments so dreary.
 
Although in general about the competence issues, I think a big part of it in online AH is just that it's written in a format where you frequently have to look at it solely in terms of plausibility. The literary elements are either tiny or not present at all. It's a reason why I'm not exactly eager to review TLs on my blog, because I find these nitpicky arguments so dreary.

I almost wonder whether it's the other way round. It's a lot easier to justify someone's apparent idiocy in text by taking a slightly omniscient narrator view and going 'yeah this is a stupid decision, but here's why they did it' whereas in a strict narrative you've either got to have a lot of character buildup for this (which may be a problem if they're an essentially minor character who only briefly interact with your main plot), or you end up leaning into stereotypes because everyone understands 'the idiot who got the job because of connections' in a couple of paragraphs, whereas 'the actually very competent general who does innovate in tactics but fundamentally just doesn't understand the capabilities of the new weapon until they've actually seen it in practice and oh god now they've made a horrendous mistake that was obvious in retrospect' essentially requires that they be a main viewpoint character to build up to it.
 
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