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Least favorite alt-history story?

Thank you. I need to get back on that.

For me, it rather depends on how it's done. Mine was probably a bit twee for some tastes, but I think a lot of my writing tends towards the twee.

I have a 20-month old who is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine 1917 at the moment, so if you did get back on it I'd love to see how it develops.
 
I'm okay if an AH story has an ASB premise.

If the author literally begins the story by portraying an alien space bat re-arranging reality, however, I'm done right there.

A literal "ASB rearranging reality" sounds like a combination of laziness and "look I'm meta! Lol! Reference!"

However, what do you think of in-universe justifications for the AH premise, including obviously blatant ones? (Rice and Salt's convenient Europe-only wipeout, The Seventh Carrier's haywire satellites destroying non-propeller planes to make WW2 ones viable again, Larry Bond's Cauldron and Red Alert 2 having a super-effective counterforce strike enable a conventional WW3?)
 
A literal "ASB rearranging reality" sounds like a combination of laziness and "look I'm meta! Lol! Reference!"

However, what do you think of in-universe justifications for the AH premise, including obviously blatant ones? (Rice and Salt's convenient Europe-only wipeout, The Seventh Carrier's haywire satellites destroying non-propeller planes to make WW2 ones viable again, Larry Bond's Cauldron and Red Alert 2 having a super-effective counterforce strike enable a conventional WW3?)
They can strain credulity, but if I think they're theoretically plausible outcomes of nature or human behaviour, I can suspend disbelief or roll with the scenario. I might not, but I can.

Framed the right way - gods in a fantasy setting, hyper-advanced civilizations in a sci-fi setting - I could go with the flow as well.

I'll even accept a triggering event that doesn't follow the rules so long as no attempt is made to provide a meta explanation for it. There's plausible deniability for the author, in a "We don't know what we don't know" way. In a setting that is otherwise mundane, I can accept that things will happen that we do not yet have the capacity to understand or explain. It's my approach to my current project, so I probably should accept it.

So I guess maybe where I'm going with this is that I'll accept reality-bending within the story, or I'll accept it outside the story, but the stereotypical ASB is both and it makes me cringe.
 
So I guess maybe where I'm going with this is that I'll accept reality-bending within the story, or I'll accept it outside the story, but the stereotypical ASB is both and it makes me cringe.

Reminds me of some of Calbear's two more recent TLs, where he has "Skippy the ASB" timeshift the WWII US to WWI and give the 1941 US 1945 equipment just in time for the Pacific War, respectively. (And no, there's no catch, no counter-balancing, no nothing. It's just the side that already won getting to win much more easily).
 
However, what do you think of in-universe justifications for the AH premise, including obviously blatant ones?

All for the blatant ones when the AH you want to do is mega A. I've not read Peshawar Lancers and not sure I'd like it, but if you want to do a 19th century adventure story AH with implausible stuff, why not say "fuckoff great meteor hits Earth and lots of Brits move to India"?

Justifications in general, usually in favour for that AH thrill of "it could have happened". The specifics would be the issue, I.e. is it too implausible when the story isn't meant to be, doesn't have a sensible link, is clearly axe-grinding ("how great things would be if Ghostbusters 2016 never happened") and can't justify it by the story being good
 
However, what do you think of in-universe justifications for the AH premise, including obviously blatant ones? (Rice and Salt's convenient Europe-only wipeout, The Seventh Carrier's haywire satellites destroying non-propeller planes to make WW2 ones viable again, Larry Bond's Cauldron and Red Alert 2 having a super-effective counterforce strike enable a conventional WW3?)

Depends on the execution and the tone.

I think the general rule is the less the work talks about an element, the wilder it can get. And the more you come back to it, the more it needs to feel logical.

I've read AH where the POD is a literal divine intervention by the aztec gods to prevent the spanish conquest. I've read AH where the POD is a long defeated zombie invasion which tore up the 19th century imperial powers and created a new political outcome. I've read AH where the POD is French revisionist time travellers shooting important generals who fought them. I've read AH where the Pod is the existence of sentient dragons.

It's massively out of place in a story that cares deeply about a realistic tone but if you're writing historical tinged fantasy then it can work.

But like pretty much all those works throw out those pods in like a line and then move on. We don't get whole chapters devoted to explaining how it really works, that's not the story.
 
you can't just casually toss this out and not tag me mate

title pls

It's the Alex Acks Marta Ramos series of steampunk detective short stories. I haven't read all of them but in the ones I have, there are no zombies, its just set in a world where there's no big states as a result, the USA is balkanised into a bunch of small feuding monarchies and so pirates and native americans are thriving in the gaps.

The zombie invasion which created that world is mentioned like once in a throw away comment.
 
Followed closely by the Iraqis avoiding the Coalition flanking maneuver in the Gulf War by simply stationing troops along the entire border.

Someone actually did that?

It might have worked - sort of - if the troops sent a warning (instead of trying to be an unbreakable line), allowing the Iraqis to start to retreat or dig in before it was too late. I don't know how well it would have worked in practice. A much more determined fight for Kuwait would certainly have long-term implications.


All for the blatant ones when the AH you want to do is mega A. I've not read Peshawar Lancers and not sure I'd like it, but if you want to do a 19th century adventure story AH with implausible stuff, why not say "fuckoff great meteor hits Earth and lots of Brits move to India"?

Justifications in general, usually in favour for that AH thrill of "it could have happened". The specifics would be the issue, I.e. is it too implausible when the story isn't meant to be, doesn't have a sensible link, is clearly axe-grinding ("how great things would be if Ghostbusters 2016 never happened") and can't justify it by the story being good

Depends on the story, I suppose.

Someone did an article that asked what would happen if John Campbell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell) had never become an editor and it was really nothing more than axe-grinding at best.
 
I've actually seen literal Alien Space Bats creating an alternate history, but the creators have claimed they weren't familiar with the term when they wrote it.
 
There should be a plausible How Governments Fail anthology on a plausible scenario where an uncolonized OTL country becomes colonized due to government failure
 
A literal "ASB rearranging reality" sounds like a combination of laziness and "look I'm meta! Lol! Reference!"

Oh, I dunno about that. I can think of a very long-running TL which began that way and I think it was because the author (a noted D&D player) simply wished to play around with their favourite late-C20 and mid-C18 political figures, not suspecting at the time that it would become a multi-million word story.

Certainly the later, SLP-published version is very different.
 
Might be misremembering a few things but a couple of years ago on the wiki box thread (not the current one and most probably not the previous one) made a wiki box of an OTL NBA player who is black and portrayed him as a slave who is forced to partake in some Kentucky derby type event and the information portrayed him as some type of animal. Apparently it was so bad Calbear had to step in. I’m on my phone now so I can’t link to the whole conversation but maybe there is somewhere here who remembers this and can
 
Might be misremembering a few things but a couple of years ago on the wiki box thread (not the current one and most probably not the previous one) made a wiki box of an OTL NBA player who is black and portrayed him as a slave who is forced to partake in some Kentucky derby type event and the information portrayed him as some type of animal. Apparently it was so bad Calbear had to step in. I’m on my phone now so I can’t link to the whole conversation but maybe there is somewhere here who remembers this and can

... Why would you even want to? I'm more and more convinced this thread should be locked and thrown overboard.
 
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