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Alternate History: X,Y,Z

There was a curate's egg AH a few months ago, The Peacekeeper, which did commit to a world and culture of post-industrial uncolonised Native Americans with very different mores & a justice system they see as obvious.
 
I don't know if mentioning TV Tropes is still done (it's been a decade since I last contributed to the place), but they do have a nice article about Zeppelins in alternate history.

John W Campbell said xenofiction was the highest form of speculative fiction and that the aim of Science Fiction was to "write a creature who thinks as well as a man or better than a man but not like a man".
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Probably my favorite work of xenofiction is John Brunner's The Crucible of Time, which is entirely told from the perspective of an alien species that has no humanoid traits whatsoever--their appearance is not described but we know they have crustacean features and inflatable air bladders.

Admittedly, Nicole Rudick was correct to point out that a woman also fits that definition and Campbell would never print a story about one of those, but I think Campbell was right that that’s an admirable goal.
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:D
 
"You wake up as..." is easy, because you know everything? I beg to differ. Take the example of being Hitler in 1939 (more difficult when the war has already started). What would you do, even in hindsight?

* Offer peace to the Allies? Prepare to get whacked, if not by some Nazi more radical than Adolf, then by an angry mob if you have to confess that you wasted all of Germany's money for arms that won't be used, and the state is broke now.
* Go on to win the war? Yeah, if you don't mind to become the most-hated man in history.
* Tell the truth? Yeah, good luck with that. - Unless the ASBs just wanted to test you...

There's really no easy way out...
 
Max Sinister said:
There's really no easy way out...
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Au contraire, the incredibly obvious answer is 'don't write fiction where the protagonist is Hitler.'


In any case, you're not engaging with Gary's point which is that as actually written the subgenre largely consists of the author-insert characters making the historically correct choice time after time, entirely stripping the fiction of tension.
 
SenatorChickpea said:
Au contraire, the incredibly obvious answer is 'don't write fiction where the protagonist is Hitler.'
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TBF, it was me who used that example cos I remember there were five timelines with that premise on ah.com, which is peek 2015 era internet edgyness really. Once I've brought it up, its expected for the readers to engage with it.

Max is right, it's very easy for that story to end very badly, but like you say that's not how these stories actually tend to go in practice.

I wonder if part of the problem is the failure states are too harsh. Like the SI dying to a mob or being couped ends the story. So you have a situation where they have to get lucky all the time cos their situation is such that one false move ends the story. Whereas in a story with much lower stakes and less centered on one person, you can have far more ups and downs.

Probably that's overthinking and it's just sturgeons law again, mind.
 
Are there any good examples of 'You Wake Up As' in AH or in the broader pop culture? I guess technically there is Quantum Leap, but it definitely feels a lot thinner than the broader SI/isekai genre.
 
JesterBL said:
Are there any good examples of 'You Wake Up As' in AH or in the broader pop culture? I guess technically there is Quantum Leap, but it definitely feels a lot thinner than the broader SI/isekai genre.
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Quantum Leap is arguably a good example of using the concept in a way that doesn't overstay its welcome before moving on to the next glimpse, so a lot of the disadvantages Gary describes don't kick in.
 
Quantum Leap is also rigged so Sam (and now Ben) don't have all the info, or has to adapt to new skills, or has to adapt to unfamiliar contexts that have him at a disadvantage - "I woke as a woman in the early 60s and nobody takes me seriously and I can't walk in these heels".

In online AH terms I guess that's like waking up in WW2 as a senior figure but it's Frederick Bowhill, the head of RAF Coastal Command, and all your historical knowledge is about Fighter & Bomber Command. And also it's Mrs Bowhill's birthday and you didn't know!
 
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