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The Borders of Genre: The Glorification of Fascism Within Alternate History

David Flin: If writing for a mainstream audience, one has to write something that will strike a chord with that mainstream audience. I can write about Edwardian life till I am blue in the face, but Bloody Downton Abbey is what the mainstream audience consumes because that's what it understands about the period.

Yes, the sense of a lost golden age pre-1914 is so engrained that when I wrote about the genuine 1911 Great Unrest on a BBC forum, people insisted that it was a counter-factual scenario rather than true history. This was despite books like The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935) by George Dangerfield and the very crisp and focused The Edwardian Crisis (1996) by David Powell which I would recommend to anyone with an interest in modern British history - let alone more academic texts on the period.

The point you raise David is a challenge in non-alternate historical fiction too. My wife wrote a historical novel which had the mainstream attitude that women were not permitted on late 18th Century/early 19th Century ships at all. This is despite the fact Lord Nelson complained there were so many women on many of his ships that they were consuming all the drinking water. No, they were not prostitutes but wives of officers and artisans, including the blacksmith, and yes, wooden ships did have forges on them. However, she knew if she portrayed a ship as it was genuinely, many readers of historical fiction would turn away saying she was trying to push a Feminist line, just being odd or lazy with her research.

The latter's cropped up in a pure fantasy setting I've read before, but at least there it feels more justified because it's that explicitly not actual history even if it's drawing very heavily from the stereotype of 18th Century Britain, albeit that also perpetuates the matter in pop culture.

Though David's suggestion of the Partition does feel like something you might be able to get a mainstream UK audience for even if production is only greenlit because of the South Asian community here. At the very least 'United India and Pakistan/Bangladesh' is concise enough to be easy to explain
 
If writing for a mainstream audience, one has to write something that will strike a chord with that mainstream audience. I can write about Edwardian life till I am blue in the face, but Bloody Downton Abbey is what the mainstream audience consumes because that's what it understands about the period.

Does it? What defines a mainstream audience here, because I feel if the goal is to focus on a mainstream audience then why release or write anything outside of the norm, by that logic it's perfectly okay to just settle for what is typical, so keep those those WW1, WW2, Civil War, Tudor Monarchy, *insert typical regional common story here* stories coming.

Sometimes you have to build your own audience, because what you want to write you may not have the luxury to 'know' of your audience, to say nothing what if you want to write a radical premise. If I want write something about Feudal Japan, where I basically upend Japanese history, am I also beholden talk about Samurai and Ninja as their stereotypical incarnation, because it is what people know as 'fact'? Instead of showing Samurai as merely full time warriors who did not farm, nor did they hold a unified code of honor, or that ninja were more independent warriors (sometimes samurai) than sneaking assassins. If I just simply went for what would get me a theoretical audience, I'd be doing an idea a disservice. For the works that I've done that aren't mainstream I had build up a following of people willing to go read a place that might well be alien to them in some sense update by update.

Like yes, alternate history and even history comes with expectations, but these can always be changed and challenged, and depending on the subject they should be. It's why I think we and others should be more bold about what Alternate History is and could be, but it's always going to be risky. I'm saying this in general, it's not really directed at anyone in particular.
 
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Does it? What defines a mainstream audience here, because I feel if the goal is to focus on a mainstream audience then why release or write anything outside of the norm, by that logic it's perfectly okay to just settle for what is typical, so keep those those WW1, WW2, Civil War, Tudor Monarchy, *insert typical regional common story here* stories coming.

I was responding to a suggestion regarding writing for a mainstream audience.

If one is writing for a different audience, then the nature of what one writes will change. Because, whatever the target audience is, one writes for that.

Back when I used to write stuff here, I did so explicitly to get feedback on whether the things I was trying to do worked. Basically using people here as beta readers. As my target audience shifted away from the majority of people here, that became less useful.

If one is writing for oneself or for a niche audience, what one writes will probably be different than writing for a mainstream.
 
Though David's suggestion of the Partition does feel like something you might be able to get a mainstream UK audience for even if production is only greenlit because of the South Asian community here. At the very least 'United India and Pakistan/Bangladesh' is concise enough to be easy to explain

And the Ms Marvel show and recent Doctor Who have both done Partition too, so that's a bunch more people who aren't Asian who'll be aware of the basics
 
My first instinct on reading the article was: What if someone wrote a post-Nazi victory book where, instead of the "ruthless efficiency and engineering triumphs" meme, we saw a more realistic "economic chickens come home to roost while leadership continues with over-grandiose fantasies.

All on a backdrop of casual atrocity and bigotry being rampant.

A world where it is common to have the characters worrying about starvation and basic necessities, a "Winter of Discontent" writ large and enduring, whilst they read of the Fuhrer announcing yet another megaproject. And they can't really say "Yeah, this one's not ever coming about, is it?" and referring to dozens of part-completed and abandoned or hugely delayed other megaprojects.

That they're at the turn of the century or near-present, and TVs are of the fifties vintage and still rare, computers are strictly controlled (and, when they find one, turn out to be crap and ineffective, although the regime has built them up to being astonishing tools of control of the economy and statistical projection for everything from eugenics and population control to agriculture). That sort of thing.

Blow apart the "Yes, well, at least the trains would run on time and we'd have spacebases on the Moon by now" meme. Nazi Germany only survives economically by pillaging and sucking other nations dry and characters privately wonder that their nation will be so robbed as to cause widespread starvation, but can't say that out loud.
 
I do still have a WWII book concept at the back of my mind. When reading Phillip Ball's Critical Mass, he refers to a model by Axelrod and Bennett to derive the possibilities of various coalitions and international conflict over time, and remarks on the very high accuracy when applied to the pre-conditions of WWII (it got the alliances that ended up coming out almost perfect, with only Portugal and Poland in the wrong camp).

But it did show two minima on the landscape (where the minimum shows the point of greatest conflict): the one that did happen, and an alternative (less likely, but still prominent) one where most of Europe joins forces against Soviet Germany [Edit: Russia. Of course. Silly Andy with silly typo] - with the UK allied to Nazi Germany to fight Soviet Russia the same way we actually allied with Soviet Russia to fight Nazi Germany. Now, there are a bunch of questions I'd have over the model (like: was the accuracy the result of overfitting in retrospect?), but the alternative scenario is still fairly plausible.

The concept is that of a figher pilot writing letters home/diary entries (like some real-life accounts) as he gets deployed towards the front - and slowly discovering just how horrific the Nazis actually are, and with what we've allied ourselves.
 
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I think part of the problem is that most of these are "AH as a setting", which means very different works get lumped together just because they have a alternate past as a setting. It's like judging this:

crawdadscover.jpg
Against this:
miahunter.jpg
And judging both against this:
withoutapaddle.jpeg

Because all three vastly different works in obviously quite different styles just happen to all feature wilderness as a central plot point. I mean, think of it this way: If the setting of one of these Axis victory cheap thrillers had been finagled into not being a stated AH while keeping most of the plot intact as possible (ie, it's a surprisingly well-funded postwar neo-Nazi organization instead of a victorious Axis one...), would it even be noticed by AH enthusiasts amongst the giant pile of cheap thrillers?

(I kind of brought this up before regarding Rodham, where the talk was basically yes, it wouldn't be noticed or cared much about by AH fans not in its normal target audience if it was a Primary Colors/All The Kings Men style obvious metaphor)

Yes, the real crunchy "AH as a genre" is small, but is it really fair to lump otherwise barely/un-related stuff in with it?
 
One is inundated with discussion threads that start with the premise that summarises as: "Real historians and military analysts hate this one simple trick which would let Nazi Germany win WW2". The discussion generally follows a formulaic pattern, and the uneasy feeling one often gets is that a significant proportion of those arguing it would have been possible and argue strenuously for that point of view hold the unstated opinion: "And it would have been a good thing."

I agree. It's hard to avoid a sniff of with fulfillment in some of these.

And like how you satirised that to clickbait

What tends to anger me is where the trick is essentially genocide. We see that a lot in timelines and whatif challenges (not here) where Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa survive longer, or colonists "keep" Namibia / Kenya / Algeria white, or in AH stories that use it to allow the author to have an all white cast in Africa. But to be honest what Saville did to the Congo in Afrika Reich is fairly similar.

I don't think you need to assume that depiction is always glorification to hold that it is easy for depiction to shade into glorification without a deliberate effort not to make it so, and most popular published AH just doesn't make that effort.

Some alt-victory stories, while not actively glorifying the winning side, end up doing so by having all the point of view characters (even the sympathetic / anti govt ones) being from the "master race" and having no engagement with the horrors that set up the timeline. This is why I find T191 somewhat of an improvement over Guns of the South.

In essence, if a story sanitises the genocidaires or slavers by glossing over or completely ignoring the genocide or slavery, it ends up glorifying because whatever triumphs the story presents are stripped of their horrific context. Fatherland feels like that until suddenly the twist and the context emerges, which I found rather good when I first read it.
 
I agree. It's hard to avoid a sniff of with fulfillment in some of these.

What's interesting to me is that The Big One and Anglo American Nazi War, while explicitly meant to counter Wehrabooism and show the inability of the Germans to actually win, both go too far to the other side. And TBO in particular accidentally makes the Germans stronger: They can stay on the entire length of the Volga for years without the tide turning conventionally (uh-huh) just so that the super-bombers can come in and save the day.

And of course, the postwar parts of both are massive wish fulfillment. Not only do the Americans get a gigantic pile of superweapons, there's the worse part in that the stories clearly delight in them actually being used.

Some alt-victory stories, while not actively glorifying the winning side, end up doing so by having all the point of view characters (even the sympathetic / anti govt ones) being from the "master race" and having no engagement with the horrors that set up the timeline.

This is far and away the biggest literary problem with the Draka books. There's no "Winston Smith" type figure of either a jannissary or lower-level citizen to show a human and jaundiced eye. Instead, it's super-rich, super-powerful top of the heap citizens who don't just come across as authors pets, but uninteresting author's pets.
 
I am a week late in replying, but I don't think there is a problem with envisioning an Axis victory as long as you portray it like the horror it would have been.
The Man in the High Castle is an Alien Space Bats scenario, though, as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan never had the capability to conquer and occupy the United States of America
 
What tends to anger me is where the trick is essentially genocide. We see that a lot in timelines and whatif challenges (not here) where Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa survive longer, or colonists "keep" Namibia / Kenya / Algeria white, or in AH stories that use it to allow the author to have an all white cast in Africa. But to be honest what Saville did to the Congo in Afrika Reich is fairly similar.
Not to deviate from the subject of the thread, but with regards to Namibia, I think some people base themselves on the Western United States, Northern Mexico, Patagonia, the steppe zone of Ukraine and Russia, Dzungaria and Inner Mongolia, which also had semi-arid or arid environments with nomadic populations and saw successful settler colonialism by sedentary populations.
 
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Not to deviate from the subject of the thread, but with regards to Namibia, I think some people base themselves on the Western United States, Northern Mexico, Patagonia, the steppe zone of Ukraine and Russia, Dzungaria and Inner Mongolia, which also have semi-arid or arid environments with nomadic populations and saw successful settler colonialism by sedentary populations.

Yeah, like that stuff happens and like ultimately I don't think there should be a moral restriction on speculating on stuff that is unpleasant.

A lot of bad things do happen and awareness of how things could have gone worse and what that would look like is useful history. What the imperial endgame was in terms of what settler colonisation involves is a useful thing to keep in mind and working out why it worked in areas of the new world but was less successful in Africa is useful knowledge.

I would nonetheless be ultimately suspicious of someone who is only ever asking about scenarios of genocide. We had someone banned from this forum for doing just that.

There is sometimes (though certainly not always) a tone in talking about unpleasant things that like @David Flin says "the uneasy feeling one often gets is that a significant proportion of those arguing it would have been possible and argue strenuously for that point of view hold the unstated opinion: "And it would have been a good thing.".

When a bunch of threads are saying 'what would have looked like if Namibia was majority white, what it would look like if Kenya was, if Zimbabwe was' but never asking about a Namibia without settler colonisation, which honestly is much easier to get, that does lead you to some conclusions about the overall state of play.

Which is not to say that any of those threads are bad in themselves but as a whole, it's unsettling.
 
I agree. It's hard to avoid a sniff of with fulfillment in some of these.

And like how you satirised that to clickbait

What tends to anger me is where the trick is essentially genocide. We see that a lot in timelines and whatif challenges (not here) where Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa survive longer, or colonists "keep" Namibia / Kenya / Algeria white, or in AH stories that use it to allow the author to have an all white cast in Africa. But to be honest what Saville did to the Congo in Afrika Reich is fairly similar.

There's also Libya as the Fourth Shore.

There's at least an AH timeline or two elsewhere where Portuguese colonialism in Africa survives and does better, which always creeped me out a little bit. It's not even a straightforward, "ah the writer must be a racist for suggesting such an idea, they're cancelled." It's more of a situation of turning an authoritarian paternalistic colonizer state into your protagonist just feels wrong, even if you write the colonizer of turning about face and doing necessary reforms and improving race relations. Because you're still celebrating colonialism in some way, even if it's a fantasy version of it that does things right by modern day standards and that the historical colonizers would have detested. It's a weird, uncomfortable situation, but we're still playing EU and Victoria anyway. (Well maybe you're are, I'm not, I never bothered to learn how to play Vicky.)

I think part of the problem is that most of these are "AH as a setting", which means very different works get lumped together just because they have a alternate past as a setting.[...]

Yes, the real crunchy "AH as a genre" is small, but is it really fair to lump otherwise barely/un-related stuff in with it?

It's rather amusing the amount of random AH content you see in mainstream media these days. A lot of recent AH television works aren’t obvious like Confederacy/Nazi victories but rather lower-stakes political stuff like Netflix's 1983 (Poland stays communist) or the CBC production La Maison Bleue ('96 Quebec independence referendum succeeds, comedy ensues).
 
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It's rather amusing the amount of random AH content you see in mainstream media these days. A lot of recent AH television works aren’t obvious like Confederacy/Nazi victories but rather lower-stakes political stuff like Netflix's 1983 (Poland stays communist) or the upcoming CBC La Maison Bleue ('96 Quebec independence referendum succeeds, comedy ensues).
I hope we see more of that, because it's a good way to let mainstream audiences know that there's more to AH than Nazi victory dystopias. The latter one especially is interesting on two counts: first because it's a rare instance of comedy in an AH setting, and second because there are no bad guys, just a bunch of bumblers all around. You can root for independent Quebec or think that the decision its electorate took in that TL was a stupid one, neither viewpoint is invalid in the context of the story.
 
Unless there actually is another World War, it's hard to imagine some other conflict or event displacing WW2 as the setting or POD for AH fiction. Accumulating more history since WW2 may lessen the overall prominence, but what single thing could really take its place?
I think we will get a lot of Russia / Ukraine WIs and Covid related WIs in the next decade or so. It won't displace ww2, but it might help a little bit.
 
There's at least an AH timeline or two elsewhere where Portuguese colonialism in Africa survives and does better, which always creeped me out a little bit. It's not even a straightforward, "ah the writer must be a racist for suggesting such an idea, they're cancelled." It's more of a situation of turning an authoritarian paternalistic colonizer state into your protagonist just feels wrong, even if you write the colonizer of turning about face and doing necessary reforms and improving race relations. Because you're still celebrating colonialism in some way, even if it's a fantasy version of it that does things right by modern day standards and that the historical colonizers would have detested. It's a weird, uncomfortable situation, but we're still playing EU and Victoria anyway. (Well maybe you're are, I'm not, I never bothered to learn how to play Vicky.)
Being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should have remained part of Portugal as autonomous regions like the Azores and Madeira and would have been better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories.
 
I don't think there is a problem with envisioning an Axis victory as long as you portray it like the horror it would have been.

I agree.

Not to deviate from the subject of the thread, but with regards to Namibia, I think some people base themselves on the Western United States, Northern Mexico, Patagonia, the steppe zone of Ukraine and Russia, Dzungaria and Inner Mongolia, which also had semi-arid or arid environments with nomadic populations and saw successful settler colonialism by sedentary populations.

The Herero and the Mapuche could have a fair amount to say to each other on disposession, or indeed on genocide.

Too often the predominance of a culture seen as nomadic has been treated by settlers as motivation for terra nullius

When a bunch of threads are saying 'what would have looked like if Namibia was majority white, what it would look like if Kenya was, if Zimbabwe was' but never asking about a Namibia without settler colonisation, which honestly is much easier to get, that does lead you to some conclusions about the overall state of play.

Lands of Red and Gold is fairly unique in this regard, although Male Rising comes close. @Jared and Jonathan Edelstein have assigned agency to uncolonised peoples in a way few authors have, not merely as viewpoint characters but as protagonists.

Being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should have remained part of Portugal as autonomous regions like the Azores and Madeira and would have been better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories.

As someone who read Davidson at a somewhat formative age, a fair of amount of Cabral and the odd writing by (Aristedes) Pereira since then, I have to disagree.
 
Being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should have remained part of Portugal as autonomous regions like the Azores and Madeira and would have been better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories.
“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”

- Edward Said, Orientalism
 
Being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should have remained part of Portugal as autonomous regions like the Azores and Madeira and would have been better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories.

Not being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should never have been part of Portugal at all, and would have been much better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories, and these are all* legacies of slavery and genocidal oppression.




* Yes, yes, the Falklands, St Pierre et Miquelon.
 
Being Portuguese, I must say I do think Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe should have remained part of Portugal as autonomous regions like the Azores and Madeira and would have been better off as such. The United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have overseas territories.
Sure, but as a Portuguese person it really isn't up to you. Self Determination is the only ethical option.
 
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