Alternate histories that are useless ideological wankery;

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There are a very few alternate history points of divergence that literally need intervention by God or a sufficiently-minded alien from the Q Continuum to bring them about. Sure, anything is possible but for some things improbability is far too overwhelming to make a decent story about them.

The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot.

The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures.

Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic. Kazakhstan, and a unified India and China are obvious examples. For that matter a unified China including Tibet and Xinjiang is another obvious example. Then there's that the potentiality of a late Medieval Chinese industrial state is always overlooked in favor of steampunk Victoriana, with the problem that an industrial China's a lot more interesting because Britain was two tiny islands. A unified and industrialized Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale.

On the other side of things, Japan *always* ends up being the only non-Western power to industrialize and overtakes China in the process despite that Japan was traditionally a backwards backwater of the Chinese dynasties. This is no doubt due to ignorance and people being unwilling or unable to spin a tale about super-Korea or super-*Vietnam. Then there's the question about why nobody ever postulates worlds where William Henry Harrison never attacks Prophetstown which makes the War of 1812 very interesting.

The other major vexation in alternate history series is a tendency to uber-wank societies like the Confederacy and the Nazis. Timeline-191, despite being one of the lengthiest timelines gets really, really ridiculous. Not only does the Confederacy get a handwaved emancipation but it lasts too long in World War I and ends up with both an atomic bomb and the ability to run World War II and a Holocaust analogue at the same time, which would be rather beyond anything realistic. And the tendency for Man in the High Castle-type timelines where the Nazis end up more like Sauron than they do a society more inefficient than Stalinism that burned out in 12 years is both annoying and has a lot of unfortunate implications. The ones with the Confederacy do, too, but then the Confederacy and its crimes are regularly overlooked by of all parties the party of Lincoln and Grant so WTF do I know.

Then there's the converse tendency where some societies are *never* allowed to go anywhere. The most egregious example is the Ottoman Empire where points of divergence include things like a successful Treaty of Sevres (*shudder*) or the Greeks taking over successfully the parts of Ottoman Anatolia where most Turks lived, leaving aside that in real life they showed that had they done so Turks would be as numerous as Cherokees today. Or alternately one never sees Amerindians having their own version of a Meiji Restoration despite the length of things like the Auracao War or the Zapatista Revolt. Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks even though logically the one should be more plausible than the other (given the USSR lasted into the 1990s where Nazi Germany lasted barely over a decade).

Comments

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

"All Change Points, from Xerxes to the last presidential election, create worlds with clean, efficient Zeppelin traffic. Changing history may produce Zeppelins as an inevitable by-product, much as bombarding uranium produces gamma rays. Often, the quickest way to tell if you are in an Alternate History is to look up, rather than at a newspaper or encyclopedia. From this premise, it is not outside the realm of Plausibility that our history between 1900 and 1936 was, in fact, an Alternate History. It would, at least, explain a lot."

- Kenneth Hite, "An Alternate-Historical Alphabet," January 14, 2000.

[verytwistedmind.livejournal.com]

I always thought Sealion was the origin of the Star Wars program in the USA. Make your opponent believe you're going to do something HUGE and AMAZING and they'll rush to keep up with you.

Confederacy point; Are you a Harry Turtledove fan?

Where did you get the Chinese Empire would be a juggernaut on the US scale? That sounds like a good read.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

I'd always wondered what a universe would be like where GB didn't really get overly involved in WWI and adopted a more distanced and nuanced role from the sidelines; and then gave dominion status to India (intact and without partition) sometime in the 30's.

Consolidation rather than desperation....no Uncle Adolph and perhaps no USSR, but a German dominated Europe and London and Berlin competing for dominance. Don't quite know what would need to change, perhaps too much, but I've an idea for a novel lurking somewhere in there.

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

"Useless Ideological Wankery" isn't that the definition of an alternate history? What possible purpose can they serve beyond merely being the backdrop for a pulp action adventure?

"The first of these is a Nazi invasion of England via Operation Sealion. The Germans had no way in Hell to pull that off, they had no navy, their air force was not designed for that purpose, and the British were rather more formidable than the Germans realized. Sealion is as mythical as a polka-dotted unicorn drinking from Russell's Teapot. "

SO, lack of a navy and insufficient airforce were merely problems of timing. In order for Sea Lion to be plausable one merely need postulate 2 changes to history. First that the Germans actually destroyed the RAF in the Battle of Brittan rather than switching to bombing of civilian centers at the critical moment in the battle. Second that one somehow keeps the US out of the war in Europe for 18 - 24 months. Without active US involvement the combination of total air superiority and submarine warfare on shipping would have done a very good job of starving England and weakening their armies while Germany built a navy.

The one risk to this of course being that the worsening condition on the Eastern Front would have prevented Germany from having a large enough army left in the west to pull off the invasion by the time enough landing ships had been constructed.

"The second of these is the Confederacy winning the US Civil War. It has a very, very narrow timeframe to do that in if we're assuming a recognizable scenario. Once the Confederacy resorts to conscription the South will weaken every year no matter how well its armies do on the battlefield, while Northern strength is ever-increasing by comparison. Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy. For that matter the South could only win the war in the East but it lost it in the West due to the Union's three best generals being up against the Confederate General Failures."

This is true if one restricts ones views to the military field of battle, there are ways that the South could have achieved a political victory had they had the insight to recognize that a military victory was unachievable. Even just assassinating Lincoln *BEFORE* it was too late might have won them the war.

Another way is to assume that England decided that a Puppet regieme in the American South was more valuable to them than a unified America or the pesky issue of slavery and actively intervened on the South's behalf.

"Another irritating thing one sees in alternate history are borders that are the same as our world's without sufficient logic."

This is true and I can see why it might be irritating but why would you expect it to be any different? Honestly most writers do not have the time to become an expert in every political situation through out history before they can even begin to write a story, their goal is to write a story not get multiple history PHD's. Further even if they did you have the problem of needing to write an entire companion book explaining to the reader how each currently non existent political entity came into being before they can even begin to understand what is going on in the story.

In order for readers to follow a story one must be able to put it in a background which they can grasp, sure altering the lines on the map as a result of your changes might be more "realistic" but given that the reader will not understand that it is easier to just leave them where they are and stick to only the first order changes to history that you are making to create the setting for the story.

In other words, good history says the lines on the map would have to change, good storytelling says they shouldn't and if you want people to actually read the damn thing you're better off sticking with the dictates of good storytelling.

Alternate Histories

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Obsession with Nazi or Confederate victories comes from 2 main things... A) the fact that likely readership considered them pivotal, and B) Some author's penchant for dystopia.


As for me, I always liked The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanly Robinson (who can really do no wrong in light of his Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, trilogy)

It's divergent thesis is "imagine that the black death decimated 99% of Europe rather than one or two thirds."

So, virtually no Christian influence on the world stage, for starters, and a world mostly dominated by China and an Islam that repopulates Europe, as well as some side notes of unlikely bedfellows like Samurai fleeing the destruction of their dynasties and making alliances with Native Americans, while disseminating information about primitive small pox cures (so the remaining Amerindian population a century post-new world discovery is far more significant than in our own world)

You mentioned borders....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt_Map.PNG

[kgbman.livejournal.com]

Any long war scenario and the only question is when and how the Union defeats the Confederacy.

Not necessarily. On paper, Great Britain should have utterly annihilated their thirteen rebellious colonies. The United States should have subdued North Vietnam without breaking a sweat. There's more to winning a war than who has the most men or the most guns. I would agree the South had no chance of winning by force of arms alone after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But there was a real possibility that Lincoln might have lost the election of 1864, which could have resulted in a negotiated settlement of the war.

Nor does one see Soviet-wanks the way one sees Nazi-wanks

The Nazis are a convenient trope for fiction since everyone agrees they were evil. There isn't as much accord on the nature and the scale of the Soviets evil (though there ought to be.)

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

One problem I see with your ideas is that some of the nations you talk about simply aren't well known. Thus, people are less likely to want to read about them and they would require a great deal of exposition.

Eric Flint's 1632 series is pretty good stuff. But it can't escape needing to spend a lot of pages explaining just what was going on in Europe in the early 17th century.

Though to his credit Flint does much better in his books about an AU War of 1812.

Second, the CSA winning isn't as out there as you make it out to be. Lincoln had to cut a deal on slavery with Maryland just to keep DC from being surrounded by the CSA from the start. And I do recall once seeing a book where the UK allied with the CSA and the Union found itself in deep trouble PDQ.