I'd like to thank everyone for their comments so far, and thank particularly
@David Flin for taking my insomniac ramblings and deftly editing them into something readable, along with some fantastic illustrations.
The source of this new series was about six weeks ago, when a particularly bad bout of not sleeping led to reading the two essays by
@monroe I cite at the beginning of this essay, and wondering about writing a reply. It took a few nights to come together, but I wanted to write something that was partially a response but also a way forward; monroe very deftly laid out the myriad of issues with The Guns of the South and the encroachment of fascism into the genre, but I felt like having been a writer and reviewer of AH I might also have some thoughts on a potential solution.
So for
@RyanF and others I'll clarify that this is the first in four (so far) completed essays on New Alternate History, with a fifth currently being plotted out. It's entirely on me that I decided to be pompous and divide each essay
also into numbered parts, which is something that carries on into future essays.
The purpose of the essays is to propose a way forward, but I certainly don't want to make it sound like I have the only idea in town or - to directly address
@Coiler and his thoughtful comment - become elitist. There's no need to apologize Coiler, yours is an excellent set of points to make, and the only difference between you and me is I decided to throw my words into an article for David to throw up onto the blog. I don't want to punch down at all of the Swastika and Stars and Bars fiction because that would make me a massive hypocrite, both reviewing some of said titles and also having one of my stories set in a successful Operation Sealion, after all. That's why I wanted to open by highlighting good quality AH fiction set in both universes - by
@varyar and
@MAC161 - because I believe it is possible. And I don't hold to what I consider the extremist position of anyone writing in those universes being bad people or contributing to fascism, racism etc which I know some on the forum hold to.
But I also want to both highlight how much of a hold the Swastika and Bars has on the genre
and point a way towards pivoting from it. The next essay I think will take that point forward a bit further, because I highlight another key aspect that I think has simultaneously made Nazis and Confederates dominant
and made highlighting any other subgenre within AH very difficult. Hint: it involves the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (and not the Aeromorph stuff I use to haunt the nightmares of
@Tom Colton and anyone else who sees it on Facebook)