Creekmench
A shade of indigo
- Pronouns
- He/him
My first foray in AH was reading a YA novel about a failed American Revolution with the founders in exile in Spanish Louisiana. I'd never heard of Turtledov until AH.com
What is this thing called "plot" that people talk about?
He's probably a big feature for people my age or older but there's tons of other, more mainstream gateway drugs for people to get into AH now.
There's also a lot of free stuff (such as the Old Country), so the bar to trying Turtledove is comparatively higher.Turtledove worked better when the hook was "go into a bookstore/library and find the alternate history novel in the sci-fi section" (at least that's where his stuff was in the bookstores I went to as a kid). When it's either "watch The Man In The High Castle" or just "Go into Amazon and type in 'Alternate History' into the search bar, find a lot of AH books (if not necessarily good ones)", he loses his distinctiveness.
Here, let me start you off with a good one, then, it's free.I don't have any desire to read Turtledove's novels, because by common consensus of the people who have read them, they're pretty terrible, but I'd like to give his short stories a go at some point.
My first foray in AH was reading a YA novel about a failed American Revolution with the founders in exile in Spanish Louisiana. I'd never heard of Turtledov until AH.com
I still think he was a gateway for many alternate history fans and that his books still can be one, but that he doesn't have the same cachet he used to.
The big gateway for me was Sliders on the BBC, the umpteen million Elseworlds comics in Titan trades, and Sonic the Comic and a Sonic book both doing a "Robotnik never existed". Sliders probably is a major gateway for a generation, so it's a real shame I looked at the Robin-Hood-but-in-San-Francisco episode a year or so back and found it was baaaaaaad.
SM Stirling's earlier stuff (including the Draka (cough))
That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?
Can't be sure as I'm not American, but the impression I got from the Draka fandom was that it included several things which gave it appeal at the time:That seems one of the biggies for US AH fans, why is that? Just right-place-right-time for a generation?