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Alternate History General Discussion

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?
Now I'm tempted to write a story where there's a hundred fully-armed commandos sent through, and their only mission is to buy enough time for the modernisation of the logistics to take effect, knowing that they'll die one by one along the day. Call it The Dirty Hundred.
 
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'

This seems possible - you get a lot of "this book/film/show is implausible, that bit is silly" because it feels silly and Not What I'd Do. I remember a review of the Friday The 13th video game where the reviewer admitted they ended up doing a lot of the obviously daft thing the victims do in those films, because they panicked and weren't thinking straight when the game was scaring them instead of being a cool clinical guy watching a video.
 
I think I'm encountering some of this perspective with my ongoing project. Some of the readership is frustrated at the protagonist's less-than-focused efforts at changing history and the downtimers' often less-than-enthusiastic response to the guy with weird mannerisms, weird stuff, and awkwardly correct (so far) predictions.
 
I think I'm encountering some of this perspective with my ongoing project. Some of the readership is frustrated at the protagonist's less-than-focused efforts at changing history and the downtimers' often less-than-enthusiastic response to the guy with weird mannerisms, weird stuff, and awkwardly correct (so far) predictions.

I know from personal experience that a lot of internet nerds will get on the case of authors who don't have their characters act like unrealistically hypercompetent super-munchkins. Part of the appeal of The Big One was that, in a time when technothrillers were desperately trying to create "threats" through contrivances, it didn't even bother and just had the super-munchkin Americans effortlessly destroy everything.
 
I know from personal experience that a lot of internet nerds will get on the case of authors who don't have their characters act like unrealistically hypercompetent super-munchkins. Part of the appeal of The Big One was that, in a time when technothrillers were desperately trying to create "threats" through contrivances, it didn't even bother and just had the super-munchkin Americans effortlessly destroy everything.
The sooner you dispense with complicated geopolitics and world-building, the sooner your talking bombers can dispense nuclear weapons.
 
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?

The latter, although you could have a lot of fun with the former.

Chris
 
The whole "logisticians go!" theme actually has struck a chord with me (even though I love action cheap thrillers), because I've written and want to write more on making fictional armies and their components, be it in essay or novel format.

(TLDR: getting the equipment is the easy part)
 
It's the traditional "modern military formation goes back in time to a historical conflict and pre-empt a terrible defeat by curb-stomping the bad guys."

Except this time the conflict is near-future invasion of Venezuela, the downtime bad guys are modern NATO, and the curb-stomping is being dished out by a squadron of 22nd century Venezuelan warships.
 
Anyone can use superior knowledge and technology to smash up the place. Why aren't there any stories in which that superior knowledge and technology is used to punish those who started the war or stop it from happening in the first place, something like Citizen Kane with time travel and with all the implications that entails?
 
Anyone can use superior knowledge and technology to smash up the place. Why aren't there any stories in which that superior knowledge and technology is used to punish those who started the war or stop it from happening in the first place, something like Citizen Kane with time travel and with all the implications that entails?

Isn't there basically an entire genre of 'Go back in time, kill Hitler before the war starts, does that actually help?'
 
The opposite must exist somewhere, just like that story in which the Pilot is ISOTed to viking Iceland and accomplishes nothing.

“Richards, what do you see?”

“Eh, seem to be Mongols, sir.”

“Shit, cosplayers.”

“Angry ones, too. They killed Martinez and the other guys on their bathroom break.”

“Well fuck, call in an air strike”

“Communications are down, sir”

“Hmm. Let’s fall back and use artillery. What’s the satellite say?”

“No satellites. Our batteries ran out on most of our phones and equipment”

“Crap, how are we with the artillery?”

“We ran out of fuel this morning, we could just shoot them”

“Great idea, lay down suppression fire”

“Done, but now we’re out of bullets.”

Note: author doesn’t actually know anything about modern military things.
 
The whole "logisticians go!" theme actually has struck a chord with me (even though I love action cheap thrillers), because I've written and want to write more on making fictional armies and their components, be it in essay or novel format.

(TLDR: getting the equipment is the easy part)

You'd have to stand against a lot of entrenched opposition in France 1940. You'd have to convince the French to remove some of the dead wood, then make changes in their doctrine at what is, effectively a moment's notice. I have some thoughts on that if you're interested.

Chris
 
The opposite must exist somewhere, just like that story in which the Pilot is ISOTed to viking Iceland and accomplishes nothing.

Poul Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early," yes. A 20th century US soldier is cast back into 10th century Viking Iceland and it does not go well for him. He's just barely able to get along for awhile on his host's hospitality, but there's a lot of cultural misunderstandings (what would essentially any pre-modern warrior make of a military policeman who admits his family owns no land), problems of not being able to exploit modern knowledge because he lacks even the tools to make the tools he needs to do 20th century industrial engineering, and eventually he ends up dead when he runs out of bullets.

It's the dark take on L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, where an archeologist visiting Rome in 1938 is hit by lightning and ends up in Rome in 535. He is stupendously well-prepared to intervene in history, to the point of having memorized a history of the war going on around him. He too fails to reproduce modern inventions (clocks, gunpowder, etc), but he knows enough of practical engineering and science to reproduce inventions that are well in his past but still in the future of 535 - he first secures a supply of money by building a still and selling the Romans brandy (which I figure isn't that bad an idea), and then goes on to 'invent' things like bookkeeping with Arabic numerals and the printing press.

You can look at both of these stories as being science fiction approaching more seriously the satire fantasy of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which has all the foundational tropes of that kind of time travel story. As in, to the point that the time traveler destroys a cavalry charge of Medieval knights with a defensive position employing landmines, electrified wire, and Gatling guns, and blows up Merlin's tower in a 'magical' ritual in which he wires a lightning rod to casks of gunpowder hidden in the basement and waits for a thunderstorm.
 
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Part of the issue of any time travel story as observed from the direction of an interest in alternate history is that they often operate on tantalizingly parallel, but still separate lines. If you can go back to the past and stomp around as much as you like without anything in the future changing, then what was the point of that to people who are fascinated by the idea of changing history? If you go back to the past and spend the whole time hiding and avoiding changing history because you're afraid of making yourself not exist or something, again, what was the point of that? You sit through all of, say, The Final Countdown waiting for the part where Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and the USS Nimitz obliterate the Kido Butai with F-14s and A-7s, and then it just doesn't happen, and if that's what you wanted then that's maddening.

This is also the problem with more Man Who Came Early-type stories. It's an interesting story, a dark and sobering one about the gulf of time and ideas that separate us from the past, but as a time travel adventure piece, necessarily its not very good, because the adventure is a failure and he dies miserably. Getting out of the time machine to be greeted with 'Hey so did you meet that Hiller guy you were talking about? What was his deal? We're late for the rally, you can tell me on the way. Heil Himmler!' runs into the same problem with enough repetition.

EDIT: Of course all of those are better than some well-meaning but inattentive relative hearing you, a voracious adolescent reader, like time travel stories and gifting you a copy of Kindred by Octavia Butler for your birthday without knowing what it is actually about.
 
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Part of the issue of any time travel story as observed from the direction of an interest in alternate history is that they often operate on tantalizingly parallel, but still separate lines. If you can go back to the past and stomp around as much as you like without anything in the future changing, then what was the point of that to people who are fascinated by the idea of changing history?

Fitting a work of its "excess", Kirov manages to circle all the way around. It doesn't hesitate to both make big divergences in history and then, Stephen Baxter style, use "cosmic retcons" to wipe them all away. It's why in the stated final arc (I say stated because Schettler declares the series finale about as often as prizefighters and Hayao Miyazaki declare their retirement), I'm bracing for some variant of either "destroy everything" or "reset everything."

The series is just far, far too gone to end gracefully at this point.
 
Part of the issue of any time travel story as observed from the direction of an interest in alternate history is that they often operate on tantalizingly parallel, but still separate lines. If you can go back to the past and stomp around as much as you like without anything in the future changing, then what was the point of that to people who are fascinated by the idea of changing history? If you go back to the past and spend the whole time hiding and avoiding changing history because you're afraid of making yourself not exist or something, again, what was the point of that? You sit through all of, say, The Final Countdown waiting for the part where Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and the USS Nimitz obliterate the Kido Butai with F-14s and A-7s, and then it just doesn't happen, and if that's what you wanted then that's maddening.

This is also the problem with more Man Who Came Early-type stories. It's an interesting story, a dark and sobering one about the gulf of time and ideas that separate us from the past, but as a time travel adventure piece, necessarily its not very good, because the adventure is a failure and he dies miserably. Getting out of the time machine to be greeted with 'Hey so did you meet that Hiller guy you were talking about? What was his deal? We're late for the rally, you can tell me on the way. Heil Himmler!' runs into the same problem with enough repetition.

EDIT: Of course all of those are better than some well-meaning but inattentive relative hearing you, a voracious adolescent reader, like time travel stories and gifting you a copy of Kindred by Octavia Butler for your birthday without knowing what it is actually about.

I like the time travel model in which traveling to the past and changing history simply creates an alternate timeline.
 
Part of the issue of any time travel story as observed from the direction of an interest in alternate history is that they often operate on tantalizingly parallel, but still separate lines. If you can go back to the past and stomp around as much as you like without anything in the future changing, then what was the point of that to people who are fascinated by the idea of changing history? If you go back to the past and spend the whole time hiding and avoiding changing history because you're afraid of making yourself not exist or something, again, what was the point of that? You sit through all of, say, The Final Countdown waiting for the part where Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, and the USS Nimitz obliterate the Kido Butai with F-14s and A-7s, and then it just doesn't happen, and if that's what you wanted then that's maddening.

I found that maddening too. <grin>

I suppose one could argue that history did change, although in a very small way, and you might already have butterflied yourself out of history.

Chris
 
This is also the problem with more Man Who Came Early-type stories. It's an interesting story, a dark and sobering one about the gulf of time and ideas that separate us from the past, but as a time travel adventure piece, necessarily its not very good, because the adventure is a failure and he dies miserably. Getting out of the time machine to be greeted with 'Hey so did you meet that Hiller guy you were talking about? What was his deal? We're late for the rally, you can tell me on the way. Heil Himmler!' runs into the same problem with enough repetition.

I think my view is its absolutely necessary that *someone* has written that story, but nor that everyone does it.
 
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