Alternate History: Scalpel or Sledgehammer?
Alternate history is really quite different from a fiction author's viewpoint than from a pure playing with history viewpoint. When I'm in 'playing with history' mode, I like small obscure changes, kind of a scalpel approach. What would happen if the Allies lost at D-Day? That's not a scalpel-type change. It's of moderate interest, but probably less interesting than Hitler deciding not to try an airborne landing on Crete, or deciding to produce more pocket battleship (really just hopped-up heavy cruisers), instead of the much more costly true battleships, especially the powerful and expensive ones like Bismarck and Tirpitz.
Scalpel approach scenarios are admired in specialized alternate history circles. If you go to alternatehistory.com, you'll find a lot of scenarios based of decisions made far away from the apparently most important historical events. If you post something on the Allies losing at D-Day or the Germans attempting Sealion, or the Japanese winning at Midway, expect snorts of derision from the old-timers on the board. Obviously, you're a newbie or you would know better.
From a fiction author point of view, a sledgehammer approach is often more effective. What if we move an island or a coal country town back in time (Island in the Sea of Time or 163X? We create an alternate history and a cool playground, plus we have heroes from the modern era that readers can identify with.
I use a sledgehammer approach in All Timeline Lead to Rome. In the near future we discover a way to create gates to an alternate reality where Europe stagnated under a Roman empire that wouldn't die, or progress. (There is a reason for that unusual behavior, but it's one of the mysteries of All Timelines, so I'm a little coy about it. One we discover the gates, we have to decide whether or not to implement something like Star Trek's prime directive on an alternate reality, denying ourselves the untouched mineral riches of both the alternate reality's Roman Europe and the alternate reality's New World, which is occupied by Indians who have had another 500+ years to progress without European interference.
By the way: I stack the deck on whether or not we implement something like the prime directive in All Timelines by making the gates energy hogs that can only be opened at weak spots in the wall between the realities. Then I make the weak spots dependent on how different the histories of a spot have been in the two universes. That makes gates in Europe and Asia essentially impossible, while gates in remote parts of the American west and Australian outback are doable, though they take enough energy that generally only a government can afford the bucks to open one, and since the weak spots are detectable from satellites, the governments quickly monopolize the best spots to put gates.
For the last ten years I've been writing and revising an even bigger "sledgehammer" type story than All Timelines as time permits. Mars Looks Different takes the entirety of near-future Earth and plops it down in a different solar system, one with terraformed Mars, Venus and moons. And, ten years after I wrote about two-thirds of a novel in that setting, I'm still months away from finishing it.
Part of the reason I haven't finished Mars Looks is that since 2009 I've been working on something sort of Alternate History that is even more of a Sledgehammer than ISOting the entire planet. I nicknamed it the ubernovel at first, but I've written three novels in the setting so far. I've been procrastinating on releasing them for the last three or four years, partly because I'm not sure I'm a good enough writer yet to do the world I've built justice, and partly because the concept takes enough explaining that I'm finding it difficult to introduce people to it without a huge initial info-dump. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to introduce you to this new sledgehammer of an AH world, and let you know what's going on in it.
Scalpel approach scenarios are admired in specialized alternate history circles. If you go to alternatehistory.com, you'll find a lot of scenarios based of decisions made far away from the apparently most important historical events. If you post something on the Allies losing at D-Day or the Germans attempting Sealion, or the Japanese winning at Midway, expect snorts of derision from the old-timers on the board. Obviously, you're a newbie or you would know better.
From a fiction author point of view, a sledgehammer approach is often more effective. What if we move an island or a coal country town back in time (Island in the Sea of Time or 163X? We create an alternate history and a cool playground, plus we have heroes from the modern era that readers can identify with.
I use a sledgehammer approach in All Timeline Lead to Rome. In the near future we discover a way to create gates to an alternate reality where Europe stagnated under a Roman empire that wouldn't die, or progress. (There is a reason for that unusual behavior, but it's one of the mysteries of All Timelines, so I'm a little coy about it. One we discover the gates, we have to decide whether or not to implement something like Star Trek's prime directive on an alternate reality, denying ourselves the untouched mineral riches of both the alternate reality's Roman Europe and the alternate reality's New World, which is occupied by Indians who have had another 500+ years to progress without European interference.
By the way: I stack the deck on whether or not we implement something like the prime directive in All Timelines by making the gates energy hogs that can only be opened at weak spots in the wall between the realities. Then I make the weak spots dependent on how different the histories of a spot have been in the two universes. That makes gates in Europe and Asia essentially impossible, while gates in remote parts of the American west and Australian outback are doable, though they take enough energy that generally only a government can afford the bucks to open one, and since the weak spots are detectable from satellites, the governments quickly monopolize the best spots to put gates.
For the last ten years I've been writing and revising an even bigger "sledgehammer" type story than All Timelines as time permits. Mars Looks Different takes the entirety of near-future Earth and plops it down in a different solar system, one with terraformed Mars, Venus and moons. And, ten years after I wrote about two-thirds of a novel in that setting, I'm still months away from finishing it.
Part of the reason I haven't finished Mars Looks is that since 2009 I've been working on something sort of Alternate History that is even more of a Sledgehammer than ISOting the entire planet. I nicknamed it the ubernovel at first, but I've written three novels in the setting so far. I've been procrastinating on releasing them for the last three or four years, partly because I'm not sure I'm a good enough writer yet to do the world I've built justice, and partly because the concept takes enough explaining that I'm finding it difficult to introduce people to it without a huge initial info-dump. Hopefully, I'll figure out how to introduce you to this new sledgehammer of an AH world, and let you know what's going on in it.