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Can you write an historical story ignoring War?

Maybe it's just habit, but you don't have to refer to yourself in the third person... 😜
 
SoldierOfChrist said:
The sicko rivet-counting stuff will never be readable though.
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One of the biggest lessons I've learned from doing Fuldapocalypse is that there just isn't nearly as much of that out there as I thought. Most readers, even those of cheap thrillers, don't like that. And many authors frequently get things hideously wrong (I'm not even talking context, I'm talking basic details, my go-to example being William W. Johnstone's 'Abrams M60 with an attached flamethrower' ), showing at least they don't care too much for the topic either.

Beyond Larry Bond (who actually has some talent at a very hard to master subgenre) and a couple of really obvious niche imitators, the rivet-counting tale just isn't there outside select indie circles. It's very much an online AH problem more than it is a fiction or even necessarily print/visual AH.
 
I think a lot depends on your readership.

Some of us love wars, particularly the ones that were never fought. Some of us love stories set in alternate worlds that aren't openly war stories, but still have action and adventure to draw us in; some love very basic plots that really provide an excuse to explore alternate worlds (The Two Georges, for example). You don't have to write about war, but you do have to draw the reader into your world.

Chris
 
One problem, I think, is that violence has profound effects on things we consider to be nonviolent.

I've talked of how I'm a ballroom and swing and blues dancer - you can't talk about the history of blues and swing without discussing the violence and the lynching omnipresent in the Jim Crow South, and you can't discuss the importation of Cuban dances into the United States without at least a cursory mention of the Spanish-American War.
 
It's a solid point at the end: people write what they like and interests them, and if a lot of people like war stuff, you'll get war-adjacent stuff in the same way if you told lots of romance writers to do a war anthology there'd be a lot of romance-adjacent stuff. Though I'd wonder if the "Alternative Peace" framing is part of this; if you say "this is an anthology about peace instead of war", that inherently leads people to think "so a war being avoided or what happened after" rather than an absence of war.
 
I mean, obviously you don't need war to have conflict in your story, but when the topic is 'peace' it's kind of natural for your conflict to involve the antithesis of peace in some way. Particularly given 'peace' is such a nebulous concept, being kind of based on a negative (if you take peace as the absence of conflict).

In an AH context, when you say 'Alternate Peace' that brings to mind two things for me: either an enduring peace where a war historically broke out, or a 'peacetime' period (e.g. 1918-1939) where things go differently. Both those scenarios are still defined by war, whether it be textually ('this is how the effects of that historical war went differently') or metatextually ('this is how the war that you know happened historically didn't happen').

Also, as you point out, military conflict has been such a constant of human history that it is an obvious thing for allohistorians to play with. And, fundamentally, I think trying to write allohistorical social history is... really hard? Social history in general is hard, I think?

'What if X won the Battle of Y' is just... easier? More accessible? In the same way 'President Y dies in Year X' or 'King Z marries Duchess Y' is easier and more accessible. The allohistorical 'method' of 'here's an event: and here's the spread of butterflies' is a lot simpler with this sort of stuff than when you're trying to grapple with various societal trends, the actions and mindsets of millions of people. There's probably also still a bit of the Great Man allure at play but, again, you can understand that allure in an AH context- the whole allohistorical enterprise seems a lot more manageable when you imagine history is driven by a handful of great men, as opposed to envisioning history as the sum total of every person who has ever lived, all acting as autonomous beings.

Sorry for the ramble. Seems like an interesting book, might have to look into getting it.
 
TR1996 said:
Also, as you point out, military conflict has been such a constant of human history that it is an obvious thing for allohistorians to play with.
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I remember somebody saying on here in 2018 that 'this is the part of history before the part with maps with arrows on them' and thinking 'well, all of history is either that part or the part with maps with arrows on them'. It's the equivalent of that old joke on how to predict the weather in Scotland. If you can see the mountains it's going to rain, and if you can't see the mountains it's raining.

But yes, your comment basically says a lot of my own thoughts on this.
 
I was trying to think of an AH story which I have written which does not have war. The one I completed last year Taken in Lycia - currently with Tom - is set in Turkey in 1937 but even then war has just finished raging in Abyssinia and the Japanese are on the march in China. Still it is not about war as it is a detective novel with these wars very much in the background.

Perhaps the one of my books with the most non-war scenes is The Mark in the Sea. While there are chapters set during the Norman Invasion, the Anarchy, the Austrian-Prussian War and the Second World War, others are outside direct wars though still with conflicts, such as the impact of the French Revolution or espionage in the years before 1914.

One challenge is that there have been few stretches of world history when there has not been war and certainly not violent conflicts such as civil unrest. Even when there is no formal war, there are often armed robberies and murders anyway and assassination or its avoidance/prevention are often offer clear points of divergence. Something like the penetration of Protestantism into islands in the North Sea as I featured in The Mark in the Sea is much more slow burning and probably often readers will not have the patience to wait for it. We find books like The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) end up being very long books and some readers find them annoyingly sporadic.
 
Coiler said:
One of the biggest lessons I've learned from doing Fuldapocalypse is that there just isn't nearly as much of that out there as I thought. Most readers, even those of cheap thrillers, don't like that. And many authors frequently get things hideously wrong (I'm not even talking context, I'm talking basic details, my go-to example being William W. Johnstone's 'Abrams M60 with an attached flamethrower' ), showing at least they don't care too much for the topic either.

Beyond Larry Bond (who actually has some talent at a very hard to master subgenre) and a couple of really obvious niche imitators, the rivet-counting tale just isn't there outside select indie circles. It's very much an online AH problem more than it is a fiction or even necessarily print/visual AH.
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Thank you for a term: 'rivet counting' Coiler to sum up precisely what I sometimes get demands for/complaints about from readers. I have read books by Peter Tsouras which I would challenge as being on this basis, notably Disaster at D-Day: The Germans Defeat the Allies, June 1944 (2013) which proved hard to get through with the numerous lists of various units of both sides. Conversely for my Provision the complaint was that there was too much dialogue; too much character development (especially of women) and:

'Very boring if you are an alternative history fan. There is so much dialogue that has next to nothing related to the premise of the book-which had high promise. I find myself skipped 10's of pages to get to actual historical content. This guy is obsessed with Ireland and country settings. If you like military action don't buy it.'

The premise of the book is that the Allies are losing the War of the Atlantic and Britain is suffering starvation. It views it through the eyes of the members of one family. This apparently is not 'actual historical content' which clearly in the eyes of the reviewer has to be 'military action'. That is referenced, but only in news reports the way most people would have been aware of it; even those in he armed forces below general rank. Two of the characters are actually in the fighting: one an aircraft navigator; one an infantry officer, but the war is seen from the view of two men very close to particular dramatic incidents rather than anyone saying 'oh, yes, because we have been unable to get more than 40,000 US troops to England we are going to have to postpone D-Day until 1946 and so the Soviets will struggle to penetrate into pre-war Poland'. There are vocal readers out there who have very strict rules about what is 'real' alternate history and really it is simply campaign reports.

On the technical errors, it also cuts both ways. I remember when Ryan McCall's novel, The Nanking War (2013) came out. It features the Americans going to war against Japan in 1937 and there were complaints on highly technical details. The one which riled me at the time and does to this day:

'McCall arms the U.S. Marines in Nanking War with magazine-fed Winchester rifles. In 1937, U.S. Marines assigned to China were issued Springfield 1903, bolt action rifles.'

Apparently it is fine for the USA to be involved in a war 4 years earlier than actually happened in our history, but it is unacceptable to think that marines might have been issued with a newer rifle - one which actually existed at the time. These people love to show their 'superiority' by setting rules that they feel alternate history authors trip over. This fixation with military manoeuvres and an unacceptance that there will be rippling changes in terms of weapons, let alone behaviour or impacts on the home front, has a horribly deadening effect on AH writing. I find myself pre-empting such criticisms with lengthy explanations in the historical notes about why I selected such a choice and why it was feasible, even if the reader will not permit it. I do wonder how many burgeoning AH authors have given up in the face of such criticism which masquerades as being about quality, but is more about someone who finds them unable to write fiction, putting others in what they feel is their 'proper place'.
 
Alexander Rooksmoor said:
Apparently it is fine for the USA to be involved in a war 4 years earlier than actually happened in our history, but it is unacceptable to think that marines might have been issued with a newer rifle - one which actually existed at the time. These people love to show their 'superiority' by setting rules that they feel alternate history authors trip over. This fixation with military manoeuvres and an unacceptance that there will be rippling changes in terms of weapons, let alone behaviour or impacts on the home front, has a horribly deadening effect on AH writing.
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Let me put it this way: "The side that won triumphed too easily" (which has been stated, and reasonably so) about both Team Yankee and Red Army (my two favorite WWIII books) is a completely valid criticism. "They're using [Weapon _______] insteas of [Weapon ________]", not so much.

But you're right, even when judging by the standards of cheap thrillers. The fun of The Survivalist, with its handwaved explanations and unashamed audacity, stood in great contrast to the tedium of online World War III timelines.
 
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