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Least favorite alt-history story?

Who can forget the great Soviet ruse that had Red Army soldiers seize Berlin by arriving in civilian aircraft?

An American version of Operation Kitona would be pretty good fun if done right, but tragicly I don't think that's what this is.

That's rather sad. I wonder if they're enjoying this stuff as much as they're telling themselves or if they feel obligated to go "this is worthy and important", but I'd worry the answer is "no they genuinely love it and don't want Stuff Happening". At least the old sneering reactionaries would go "and because of the comprehensive school system, KILLER CATS KILLED HUNDREDS IN LONDON ESPECIALLY DURING THIS SEX SCENE". It's like how 2000AD's Nemesis The Warlock is awesome because as well as the very left-wing agitprop it's got weirdo aliens and a lead who looks like the Devil and steampunk planets and a demented villain yelling "You're all white men now!" to mankind, but it's not as interesting to just see a panel of a normal-looking human very seriously telling us about how Harvard's Skull and Bones Society and the Masons are secretly manipulating a war for money. "Right, but can something blow up now?"

Nemesis was also smart enough to give the only character to do that scene a ridiculous Sawf Afreekan accent, and talk about the need to go after freckeled pippil.
 
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An Americanversion of Operation Kitona would be pretty good fun if done right, but tragicly I don't think that's what this is.

Jon Land had one of his super-conspiracies just hide tanks and other similar pieces of military equipment inside parking garages and unleash them when it was time to strike. The Libyans did a similar thing in Ireland in the classic Dark Rose.
 
Apparently nearly 18 years of not Thatcher before Ken and the Volgans causes Funk to replace the perceived vulgar Fuck in English Lexicon.

Savage is from 2000AD, which IIRC had rules on what swearwords it could use back then. I think that was why Dredd always said 'Drok' and 'Grud' rather than the more standard words.

Chris
 
Using OTl figures centuries after the POD is a controversial thing in AH, but I've never minded it in all honesty.

As a a narrative device it's useful short hand. If you want to make a quick point about how your uk/usa/vatican is then an off hand mention of PM Farage/President Debs/Pope Calvin gets the point across with admirable economy.
 
Using OTl figures centuries after the POD is a controversial thing in AH, but I've never minded it in all honesty.

As a a narrative device it's useful short hand. If you want to make a quick point about how your uk/usa/vatican is then an off hand mention of PM Farage/President Debs/Pope Calvin gets the point across with admirable economy.

Plus it's easier to spot the references for a book, rather than an AH timeline.

Chris
 
Understandable - it's just the constant drumbeating of the inevitable truth of communism and their obsession with turning France-England and its empire (mostly dominionized) into an Worthy Opponent despite local nationalisms etc.

For most 'large' AH works like MR, LTTW etc. the author's political and regional biases do appear - it's just that reds takes this to another level by having True Believers write threads on the inevitable victory of communism in a wankfantasy.

Also the hyperpoliticization of culture taken into another level as state-sponsored Purging of Reaction
 
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Using OTl figures centuries after the POD is a controversial thing in AH, but I've never minded it in all honesty.

It's pretty unrealistic to have OTL figures decades after POD in many cases too, we all have to quietly accept it so we can have John Major have his speech about the 1943 Liberation ignored as everyone watches Mr Blobby* pretend to run from the posing SS.

* "Mr Spotty" for legal reasons but we all knew who Newman meant
 
Understandable - it's just the constant drumbeating of the inevitable truth of communism and their obsession with turning France-England and its empire (mostly dominionized) into an Worthy Opponent despite local nationalisms etc.

It’s pointed out quite a few times that the American Revolution wasn’t predestined to succeed, indeed it’s even emphasised that when the Communist party began to win bourgeois elections they would have just been blocked legislatively and judicially from carrying out much of their agenda had the reactionary coup attempt not led to the civil war. By the same token the Second World War is explicitly pointed out to be far worse than in our time, with the Soviet Union suffering even more whilst their hesitant American allies have a similarly terrible time of it.

The result of such a conflict would have ensured Franco-British state would have been a credible third force across the globe. It would have been in our time in the early Cold War but in ITTL both countries are relatively intact at the end of the war compared to the Americans and Soviets doing worse. France, and to a lesser extent Britain, successfully keeps an economic stranglehold on many of its former colonies to the present day IOTL. It’s not difficult to see them doing so ITTL in these conditions even if one might expect a world revolution if it were as biased as you’re making it out to be.
 
It’s pointed out quite a few times that the American Revolution wasn’t predestined to succeed, indeed it’s even emphasised that when the Communist party began to win bourgeois elections they would have just been blocked legislatively and judicially from carrying out much of their agenda had the reactionary coup attempt not led to the civil war. By the same token the Second World War is explicitly pointed out to be far worse than in our time, with the Soviet Union suffering even more whilst their hesitant American allies have a similarly terrible time of it.

The result of such a conflict would have ensured Franco-British state would have been a credible third force across the globe. It would have been in our time in the early Cold War but in ITTL both countries are relatively intact at the end of the war compared to the Americans and Soviets doing worse. France, and to a lesser extent Britain, successfully keeps an economic stranglehold on many of its former colonies to the present day IOTL. It’s not difficult to see them doing so ITTL in these conditions even if one might expect a world revolution if it were as biased as you’re making it out to be.
I understand the reasons for why the UASR's revolution almost succeeded and the worse WW2 weakening the UA/SSR but I'm still not really convinced the FBU is able to dominionize most of its colonies and how they are fine with that
 
I understand the reasons for why the UASR's revolution almost succeeded and the worse WW2 weakening the UA/SSR but I'm still not really convinced the FBU is able to dominionize most of its colonies and how they are fine with that

Do most of them end up as dominions? I realise much of the world building is subject to rewrites but as far as I was aware the big two are India and Nigeria. The Franco-British having their power enhanced rather than drained by the Second World War without a capitalist America breathing down their necks to at least pay lip service to self-determination could have led to a scenario where decolonisation is delayed or elongated to such an extent that the national bourgeoisie in some countries decide the present system is best for business. From what I can gather India and Nigeria are actually beginning to outpace the Franco-British by the present day which would likely add to the arguments for such a path on the part of some within those countries. Nigeria suffered under western backed juntas for most of its independence during the Cold War, would a more explicit imperialism really have been unable to endure? Granted India's path is entirely different to its post-independence history IOTL but there are then also cases of the Franco-British losing colonies, and indeed dominions, earlier or around the same time; Morocco, South Africa, Vietnam, etc.
 
Do most of them end up as dominions? I realise much of the world building is subject to rewrites but as far as I was aware the big two are India and Nigeria. The Franco-British having their power enhanced rather than drained by the Second World War without a capitalist America breathing down their necks to at least pay lip service to self-determination could have led to a scenario where decolonisation is delayed or elongated to such an extent that the national bourgeoisie in some countries decide the present system is best for business. From what I can gather India and Nigeria are actually beginning to outpace the Franco-British by the present day which would likely add to the arguments for such a path on the part of some within those countries. Nigeria suffered under western backed juntas for most of its independence during the Cold War, would a more explicit imperialism really have been unable to endure? Granted India's path is entirely different to its post-independence history IOTL but there are then also cases of the Franco-British losing colonies, and indeed dominions, earlier or around the same time; Morocco, South Africa, Vietnam, etc.
India is definitely a dominion; the latest I heard East Africa, Algeria, Hong Kong, Australasia (including part of the former Indonesian dominion (for reasons - Indonesia was sold by the Dutch to Japan ITTL)) were dominions.

The idea of a dominion of India isn't implausible - it's just that with WW2 an FBU-allied republic makes more sense

Indonesia/Malaysia is a confirmed loss as is Azania, Indochina and the Philippines
 
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There's Ryansworld, a TL posted on the Future History wikia written by a titular Ryan. Worth noting that most TLs written on the Future History wikia aren't meant as actual predictions and neither is this one, yet this one is still pretty terrible. For one it postulates that a direct descendant of Jesus is found leading to it being discovered that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene, leading to the collapse of Christianity (aside from a small Jesus cult in Rwanda and Burundi) and Islam no longer claiming Jesus to be a prophet (tell me you don't know anything about Islam without telling me you don't know anything about Islam). There's also an American Dark Ages which coincides with this in which America becomes a dystopian fundamentalist state straight out of the nightmares of every 2006 liberal.



EDIT: Just found out about this:

Historians with access to modern research tools (like Wikipedia)
 
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There's Ryansworld, a TL posted on the Future History wikia written by a titular Ryan. Worth noting that most TLs written on the Future History wikia aren't meant as actual predictions and neither is this one, yet this one is still pretty terrible. For one it postulates that a direct descendant of Jesus is found leading to it being discovered that Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene, leading to the collapse of Christianity (aside from a small Jesus cult in Rwanda and Burundi) and Islam no longer claiming Jesus to be a prophet (tell me you don't know anything about Islam without telling me you don't know anything about Islam). There's also an American Dark Ages which coincides with this in which America becomes a dystopian fundamentalist state straight out of the nightmares of every 2006 liberal.



EDIT: Just found out about this:
I liked this better when Ryan was hawking dumb toy openings and overpriced crap at Targets. This dark and grim ‘n’ gritty reboot is like if Zach Synder was an incoherent racist, bigoted and becoming an even bigger, more shameless self-parody of himself.
 
Using OTl figures centuries after the POD is a controversial thing in AH, but I've never minded it in all honesty.

Is it, really?

I mean, I certainly remember there being a few people back in the Old Country that were very conservative when it came to butterfly nets, but none of them ever ended up writing anything of any substance, or do anything to genuinely shape or direct the genre. That basically, they were snobs on the internet, writing dismissive, downputting posts on a (frankly) rather obscure internet forum.

Using OTL figures after the PoD (or equivalent) seems, if anything, to have been the normal, standard way of doing for most of the time that alternate history has existed as a literary genre. Turtledove did it. Stirling did it. L. Neil Smith did it. Moorcock did it. Heinlein did it. Orson Scott Card did it. It is there in Star Trek's Mirror, Mirror and in the Terminator franchise.

If anything, the idea to deliberately not allow for it seems to not just be unique, but unique to the Old Country and to Sea Lion Press, and there only in a fraction of the cases.
 
Is it, really?

I mean, I certainly remember there being a few people back in the Old Country that were very conservative when it came to butterfly nets, but none of them ever ended up writing anything of any substance, or do anything to genuinely shape or direct the genre. That basically, they were snobs on the internet, writing dismissive, downputting posts on a (frankly) rather obscure internet forum.

Using OTL figures after the PoD (or equivalent) seems, if anything, to have been the normal, standard way of doing for most of the time that alternate history has existed as a literary genre.

It's the soft (much larger) and hard (much smaller) AH dichotomy at work. For soft AH, I've found it completely understandable and forgivable. If you're going to play to a big audience who isn't history nerds, you're going to have to use big names that they recognize. For hard AH, the people who are history nerds are understandably nitpicky about the lack of butterflies (and yes, I'm often one of them).

Where I think the most valid criticism is is in using obscure OTL figures long after the POD, especially in non-narrative TLs (and even that's only confined to one website and its offshoots). The difference between using Richard Nixon in a soft AH story because you want an infamous historical figure the audience will know about and using Frank Cremeans in a TL because you looked up 1990s politicians on Wikipedia and saw him there is a great one.
 
Using OTL figures after the PoD (or equivalent) seems, if anything, to have been the normal, standard way of doing for most of the time that alternate history has existed as a literary genre. Turtledove did it. Stirling did it. L. Neil Smith did it. Moorcock did it. Heinlein did it. Orson Scott Card did it. It is there in Star Trek's Mirror, Mirror and in the Terminator franchise.
In the case of L. Neil Smith, it's mostly to score cheap political points. I don't think it's something we should want to emulate.
 
Concepts like colonized china are discussed but never implemented in a way that shows the chinese perspective.
Also the favorite nonwhite targets for a nuclear war (the middle east and China) are never really portrayed with the sort of empathy and nuance in discussions of said war they deserve (looking at the Footprint of Mussolini in regards to Operation Samson) and neither is the aftermath really dealt with.

Protect and Survive's Ashes of the Dragon actually does cover the Sino-Soviet front of WW3 with enough empathy and connects it to the Japanese invasion before.
 
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With regards to Reds, Jello did mention that she had, in hindsight, overestimated the FBU's survivability. She said that if she were to do the timeline again from scratch, world war two would just turn into a massive world revolutionary war, making the entire timeline one of conflict until you get world communism in like the 1960s, at which point the timeline ends.

However she didn't want to do that because:
a) she'd already started her timeline
b) it would probably be a very boring timeline because it would just be a series of military campaigns.
c) it let her explore new ideas in a Cold War setting
 
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