• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Least favorite alt-history story?

Yeah, this thread may have ran its course if we're now at the level of 'Some racist posted on A H dot com years ago, can't remember the details'.

We might have just discussed all the things worth discussing under the topic in regard to the published/community-famous works. There's always the general discussion thread now, too.
 
Gary Oswald said:
Wouldn't go that far but do think it's very telling that this thread is on 86 pages, whereas the 'favourite AH' thread made it to 5 pages.
Click to expand...
To be fair, that's not a situation unique to this forum. I'm aware of one other forum which has an AH subsection and their equivalent to this thread is on 680 pages, while they've had a few goes at an equivalent of a favourite thread, most of which have died and the current one only survived because it turned into an ideas thread.
 
Jared said:
To be fair, that's not a situation unique to this forum. I'm aware of one other forum which has an AH subsection and their equivalent to this thread is on 680 pages, while they've had a few goes at an equivalent of a favourite thread, most of which have died and the current one only survived because it turned into an ideas thread.
Click to expand...
Isn't this just another form of Sturgeon's Law
"ninety percent of everything is crap."
Click to expand...
Although he was an optimist
 
Last edited:
Gary Oswald said:
Wouldn't go that far but do think it's very telling that this thread is on 86 pages, whereas the 'favourite AH' thread made it to 5 pages.
Click to expand...

I want to say that as a book reviewer, I often find it much easier to spell out what I don't like about something as opposed to what I do. For instance, I struggled to list the good reasons in depth for Red Army (my favorite WW3 book ever), while I could easily go at length about a huge plot element and theme I disliked (Peters arranging things so the Americans have absolutely no blame for the loss). It got to the point where I had to dial back the latter because it would have given the impression that I liked the book less than I did.

But as for this thread specifically, I'd be leaning towards either locking it or instituting very strict rules, similar to my own guidelines for reviewing online TLs. To avoid just sneering at easy targets, those are....

  1. The timeline has to have been inactive/completed for some time. This is to avoid knee-jerk reactions.
  2. The timeline has to have endured in general community prominence for some time as well. Yes, this is the most arbitrary of them, but it's there to avoid just looking at "man, see what this guy wrote in 200X?".
  3. The timeline must provide some interesting commentary on online alternate history as a whole.

So NDCR did fit. The part I was reviewing was long over, it remained infamous, and, most importantly, by taking all the online AH tropes to an exaggerated level and showing what happens when you write a military TL with the assumptions of a political TL, I could write a lot on it. Postwar AANW also fit, because its actual story updates are a decade old, it's remained prominent, and I had interesting things to say about it.

However, the WW3 TLs that I got too upset over did not fit, because well, they didn't really endure, and, most importantly, with full hindsight I couldn't really think of anything more interesting to say about them than "they were just double-xeroxed and scanned fanfics of Hackett/Bond." And I've had basically no incentive to review anything else.

Also, the general discussion thread enables us to critique works of AH without implying that they're the worst ever.
 
The Atlantropa Articles by Cody Franklin, better known as the guy who runs AlternateHistoryHub.

Got super hyped years ago when the trailer dropped, bought the book when it came out, read through it, it fucking sucked. The writing was just plain dry, the story was boring and failed to utilize the setting in any meaningful way, the setting itself was just plain nonsensical, the handling of the issues surrounding, you know, Nazi-dominated Europe after a literal thousand years are pretty heavy-handed (I will give it credit for not being significantly apologetic or fawning in any way, but that's not exactly a high bar), and the characters are utterly flat. The entire thing feels like something you would write in high school to try and be as edgy and gruesome as possible with Nazi Europe as just a vehicle to be edgy and gruesome.

So, to spoil it, the story takes place in Nazi-ruled Europe several thousand years after Hitler's rise to power. The idea is that Hitler, rather than pursuing his aims through war, unites Europe diplomatically somehow under Herman Sörgel's vision of Atlantropa, a project to drain the Mediterranean and make way for a new continent to be settled by Europe. However, the vision soon turns out to be an utter nightmare, as what was supposed to become a fertile continent was predictably covered in salt, leaving a salt flat the size of a sea across which the Sahara expands into Europe.

In the unspecified far future, our main characters are a pair of brothers working for the German government in order to resupply an outpost on the edge of North Africa after it's been raided by "Jews" (in quotation marks for reasons which I will soon explain). The main character/narrator is an up-and-coming member of the Nazi party who has ambitions back in Berlin, while his brother owns and runs a sailing ship on wheels which they use for the resupply mission across the Mediterranean salt plain.

A short while after departure, their ship on wheels is raided by another group of "Jews" on another ship, which they manage to destroy and kill the entire crew of except for a lone survivor who they take prisoner. For the remainder of the journey the main character attempts to talk to and understand the "Jewish" prisoner, who speaks very little German, while his older brother running the ship and his crew continue to torture and interrogate him in spite of the main character's hesitation.

As it turns out, the "Jews" who have been raiding German outposts aren't Jews at all, they're the descendants of Southern Europeans and Arabs whose homelands were also ruined by the Atlantropa project. However, before anything further can be explained the older brother and his crew kill the prisoner in horrifically described detail as the main character begs them to stop.

Finally, several miles out from the outpost, their ship breaks down due to damage from the earlier raid, and the two brothers have to set out in a smaller lifeboat-type vehicle for the final stretch in order to get help. Eventually this too breaks down just before arrival and they end up having to walk the home stretch in the unforgiving salt plain heat. The younger brother, just by happenstance right before they would have died stumbles across the hatch to a ship buried in the sand they can use for shelter.

The brothers go inside, and just by more happenstance this happens to be an ancient shipwreck from the initial days of Nazi Europe. The younger brother, to his disbelief, finds photos and documents detailing the founding of the regime known in his time only through legend. He's utterly shocked to see that the Jews of old Europe looked nothing like the ones he's seen in his time, as well as by photos of Hitler showing him not to have blond hair and blue eyes as he had always seen, but of course the actual face of Hitler we all know. Finally, he finds a detailed report of the Madagascar Plan, in which the Jews of old Europe were deported to Madagascar to die, and is utterly appalled, this being the straw that finally breaks his faith in the regime.

However, in the time he's been finding out the history of Europe that's been lost for a thousand years, his brother has managed to hail a passing ship on its way to the outpost for help, and when the younger brother voices his loss of faith in the Nazi regime he promptly joins the crew of the ship in stringing up his own brother to die in excruciating fashion without hesitation, the book ending with a first person description of being dragged behind the ship along the scorching salt flats by a rope until he dies.

Yeah, the whole thing is, as you could probably tell from this description, an utter fucking mess.
 
I was looking forward to the book too and gave up long before you did. It was just dull to read. The heavy handedness and scientific nonsense would've been fine if it wasn't a slog. Either he needed more time to build up his prose skills, or it's due to him not writing in the same 'voice' he podcasts in and he went too far the other way.
 
lordroel said:
First it is bad that you where harassed but secondly, now you know you made it when a author complains to you.
Click to expand...
Frankly, I didn't find his harassment offensive so much as I did it hilarious - he accused me of 'wallowing in [my] millenialism' and it became my usertitle because I was laughing uproariously.
 
SpudNutimus said:
The Atlantropa Articles by Cody Franklin, better known as the guy who runs AlternateHistoryHub.

Got super hyped years ago when the trailer dropped, bought the book when it came out, read through it, it fucking sucked. The writing was just plain dry, the story was boring and failed to utilize the setting in any meaningful way, the setting itself was just plain nonsensical, the handling of the issues surrounding, you know, Nazi-dominated Europe after a literal thousand years are pretty heavy-handed (I will give it credit for not being significantly apologetic or fawning in any way, but that's not exactly a high bar), and the characters are utterly flat. The entire thing feels like something you would write in high school to try and be as edgy and gruesome as possible with Nazi Europe as just a vehicle to be edgy and gruesome.

So, to spoil it, the story takes place in Nazi-ruled Europe several thousand years after Hitler's rise to power. The idea is that Hitler, rather than pursuing his aims through war, unites Europe diplomatically somehow under Herman Sörgel's vision of Atlantropa, a project to drain the Mediterranean and make way for a new continent to be settled by Europe. However, the vision soon turns out to be an utter nightmare, as what was supposed to become a fertile continent was predictably covered in salt, leaving a salt flat the size of a sea across which the Sahara expands into Europe.

In the unspecified far future, our main characters are a pair of brothers working for the German government in order to resupply an outpost on the edge of North Africa after it's been raided by "Jews" (in quotation marks for reasons which I will soon explain). The main character/narrator is an up-and-coming member of the Nazi party who has ambitions back in Berlin, while his brother owns and runs a sailing ship on wheels which they use for the resupply mission across the Mediterranean salt plain.

A short while after departure, their ship on wheels is raided by another group of "Jews" on another ship, which they manage to destroy and kill the entire crew of except for a lone survivor who they take prisoner. For the remainder of the journey the main character attempts to talk to and understand the "Jewish" prisoner, who speaks very little German, while his older brother running the ship and his crew continue to torture and interrogate him in spite of the main character's hesitation.

As it turns out, the "Jews" who have been raiding German outposts aren't Jews at all, they're the descendants of Southern Europeans and Arabs whose homelands were also ruined by the Atlantropa project. However, before anything further can be explained the older brother and his crew kill the prisoner in horrifically described detail as the main character begs them to stop.

Finally, several miles out from the outpost, their ship breaks down due to damage from the earlier raid, and the two brothers have to set out in a smaller lifeboat-type vehicle for the final stretch in order to get help. Eventually this too breaks down just before arrival and they end up having to walk the home stretch in the unforgiving salt plain heat. The younger brother, just by happenstance right before they would have died stumbles across the hatch to a ship buried in the sand they can use for shelter.

The brothers go inside, and just by more happenstance this happens to be an ancient shipwreck from the initial days of Nazi Europe. The younger brother, to his disbelief, finds photos and documents detailing the founding of the regime known in his time only through legend. He's utterly shocked to see that the Jews of old Europe looked nothing like the ones he's seen in his time, as well as by photos of Hitler showing him not to have blond hair and blue eyes as he had always seen, but of course the actual face of Hitler we all know. Finally, he finds a detailed report of the Madagascar Plan, in which the Jews of old Europe were deported to Madagascar to die, and is utterly appalled, this being the straw that finally breaks his faith in the regime.

However, in the time he's been finding out the history of Europe that's been lost for a thousand years, his brother has managed to hail a passing ship on its way to the outpost for help, and when the younger brother voices his loss of faith in the Nazi regime he promptly joins the crew of the ship in stringing up his own brother to die in excruciating fashion without hesitation, the book ending with a first person description of being dragged behind the ship along the scorching salt flats by a rope until he dies.

Yeah, the whole thing is, as you could probably tell from this description, an utter fucking mess.
Click to expand...
Well said.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top