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Alternative by definition?

George Kearton

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Interesting (but amusing) that Amazon are listing the "Sharpe" novels as "Alternative History".
There ought to be some way we can take advantage of this - but I'm damned if I can see it!
Craftier/more intelligent heads to the rescue please...
 
The line between "alternate history" and "historical fiction" can sometimes be very blurry indeed. In some cases pure writing time makes the difference, ie, a 198X WW3 novel written in 1988 is vague, while a 198X WW3 novel written in 2010 is clearly alternate history. You could make a case that any ahistorical event in something written after the fact like say, I dunno, Kelly's Heroes for a goofier example, could technically be classified as "alternate history" even though that wasn't the intent of the writers.
 
The line between "alternate history" and "historical fiction" can sometimes be very blurry indeed. In some cases pure writing time makes the difference, ie, a 198X WW3 novel written in 1988 is vague, while a 198X WW3 novel written in 2010 is clearly alternate history. You could make a case that any ahistorical event in something written after the fact like say, I dunno, Kelly's Heroes for a goofier example, could technically be classified as "alternate history" even though that wasn't the intent of the writers.
Inglourious Basterds canonically (and via Word Of God) is meant to be something that looks like a work of historical fiction but, as a means of surprising its audience, is only pretending to be so - the ending is definitely a work of AH, and this was done because Tarantino wanted to attack the problem WWII movies have where really dramatic, world-changing things starring your protagonists are impossible because we all know how WWII ended in reality.
 
Another factor in defining AH versus Historical Fiction has got to be "eventual outcome". For all his heroics, Sharpe does not actually change any of the historical outcomes of the events into which he is placed.

True there- similarly Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is just dripping with allohistorical details, but at the end of the day it's more in terms of 'the main characters are working to achieve what would happen historically' than anything else.

I mean there's several fictional cities and so forth, so it's still a bit different than OTL, but not much in the grand scheme of things.
 
There is also a series about fighting dragons in the Napoleonic Wars - seemingly no changes to OTL history, no changes prior to Napoleonic Wars and little indication of a POD - the dragons are just there!
 
There is also a series about fighting dragons in the Napoleonic Wars - seemingly no changes to OTL history, no changes prior to Napoleonic Wars and little indication of a POD - the dragons are just there!

That's Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and the first few are actually very good. There's a whole backstory for the dragons, and the third book (I think) has a Napoleonic-era Sealion but with dragons
 
There is also a series about fighting dragons in the Napoleonic Wars - seemingly no changes to OTL history, no changes prior to Napoleonic Wars and little indication of a POD - the dragons are just there!

Tbf modern fantasy tends to do this a lot "magic is real and this has changed nothing, its just secret for reasons" see also Harry Potter.
 
There is also a series about fighting dragons in the Napoleonic Wars - seemingly no changes to OTL history, no changes prior to Napoleonic Wars and little indication of a POD - the dragons are just there!
The Temeraire series: a really good butterfly net around certain Doctor-whovian fixed points, perhaps?
There is, if I recall correctly, a slightly more detailed consideration of how dragons might affect the history of not-Europe, at least in the sense of the future history of the series... Raids across the Atlantic by African dragons to retrieve transported slaves, for example, which would have significant implications for the colonization of Brazil and of Africa, and expanding use of dragons in various economic niches even in England (let alone China, North America and the surviving Incan empire).
But it obviously wasn't intended as either historical fiction or alternate history (at least at first): it was intended to be "Napoleon... WITH DRAGONS!", at which at least the first few books succeeded at quite well.
 
Tbf modern fantasy tends to do this a lot "magic is real and this has changed nothing, its just secret for reasons" see also Harry Potter.
From what I've heard, it's also the case in that terrible movie Bright, which ruined what could have been a good idea with sloppy screenplay and slapdash worldbuilding. Classic fantasy races have been around all along but somehow never made any difference whatsoever in the course of human history.

 
From what I've heard, it's also the case in that terrible movie Bright, which ruined what could have been a good idea with sloppy screenplay and slapdash worldbuilding. Classic fantasy races have been around all along but somehow never made any difference whatsoever in the course of human history.



I enjoyed that film, its not a classic but it was a good romp.
 
I enjoyed that film, its not a classic but it was a good romp.
It would probably have been much better if they'd put any effort at all in worldbuilding. It's not like there's anything unprecedented about a setting that involves fantasy races in modern society--see the Shadowrun RPG and Orcs of New York, to name just two examples. If, say, orcs, elves and other legendary creatures had started showing up in the 1960s (perhaps a dimensional gate opens as a result of all the weird stuff going on), and spent the next couple of generations living the immigrant experience, you could have human history identical up to within living memory, and still have orcs et al. become a common enough sight that their presence is taken in stride. That movie I would have watched.
 
I mean where do you draw the line? Is, say, a Napoleon biopic a work of alternate history because he says a line on the battlefield of Austerlitz that in real life he said in exile in St Helena but the writers decided would work better in the screenplay there?
I guess that to qualify as AH there has to be a divergent outcome to a given historical event, even if things then go back to more or less OTL (though I personally dislike second-order counterfactuals). Otherwise it falls under historical fiction.
 
I guess that to qualify as AH there has to be a divergent outcome to a given historical event, even if things then go back to more or less OTL (though I personally dislike second-order counterfactuals). Otherwise it falls under historical fiction.
Yeah, that seems fair. Of course a fair few 'proper' AH exercises - usually those academic essays one sees in collections like What If? - seem to revel in the idea that you can change a lot of things but it all deterministically turns out the same as OTL anyway, which seems a peculiar point of view.
 
Yeah, that seems fair. Of course a fair few 'proper' AH exercises - usually those academic essays one sees in collections like What If? - seem to revel in the idea that you can change a lot of things but it all deterministically turns out the same as OTL anyway, which seems a peculiar point of view.
Agreed - it's a most strange view which implies that historical events don't have consequences.
 
Yeah, that seems fair. Of course a fair few 'proper' AH exercises - usually those academic essays one sees in collections like What If? - seem to revel in the idea that you can change a lot of things but it all deterministically turns out the same as OTL anyway, which seems a peculiar point of view.
Either that or a change in, say, the 4th century BC would result in the end of history within decades at most.
 
Yeah, that seems fair. Of course a fair few 'proper' AH exercises - usually those academic essays one sees in collections like What If? - seem to revel in the idea that you can change a lot of things but it all deterministically turns out the same as OTL anyway, which seems a peculiar point of view.
What If? was one of the biggest AH disappointments for me. 3/4ths of the authors barely touched on the alternate part of alternate history, and those authors who did bother clearly slapped something together 3 minutes before the deadline.
 
What If? was one of the biggest AH disappointments for me. 3/4ths of the authors barely touched on the alternate part of alternate history, and those authors who did bother clearly slapped something together 3 minutes before the deadline.

More disappointing than that was What Might Have Been, which starts off with a foreword by the editor which basically amounts to 'Alternate History is a silly idea anyway, so anything other than short essays should be disregarded', and follows up with a collection of essays including one or two gems (Montefiore on Stalin fleeing Moscow in 1941 for example) but is mostly either not alternate history at all (an essay on Arnold's involvement in the civil war which just says where things could have gone differently), blatant political points scoring (Gore wins in 2000 and barely seems to want to respond to 9/11) or decent ideas taken too far (Anne Somerset's Spanish Armada victory, which makes it look less plausible than reality by having literally everything go right for the Spanish, up to and including the Dutch just letting the Duke of Parma's army board the transport ships and sail across the channel entirely unmolested, and the Duke of Parma managing to get the army on board those ships in 36 hours when he couldn't even do it in a week IOTL).
 
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