AH: turning points 1
While I’m notorious in AH circles as someone who insists that a AH story be (1) A GOOD STORY and (2) have some historical basis, not to mention (3) be one simple Point Of Divergence, not a whole mess of them (I can deal with some cascade effects, but not simultaneous stuff) - I give a lot of latitude to someone who gets those points clearly covered.
Some famous AH works don’t fit those rules, really. The most common is the time-travellers-come-back-and-yoink-with-the-past…such as THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH and ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME. Both involved near-present types who introduce themselves and their tech into a ‘past’ world, but I can deal with the way it’s presented, even though the time travel in neither one is ever explained in a reasonable way.
Another failing in AH stuff is a sheer lack of imagination! The number of things I have seen cross my desk as a Sidewise judge or in general that revolve around the following topics - to the point of making one want to slam the next one up across the room and into the recycling bin - drive me nuts.
- The US Civil War (followed by a highly unified, fascist and militarist Confederacy that Menaces All)
- The whole WW2 period (Nazis rule the world, etc.)
- JFK wasn’t killed at Dallas (very little of which is very realistic and most involves JFK as a perfect and peaceful paladin.)
- an endless Roman empire, with odd tech thrown in but otherwise pretty unchanged
- Killer Aztecs on the march, destroying all before them and ruling the world with blood sacrifices and machine guns.
- and more recently, let’s throw in dragon, elves, magic and whatnot and call that alternate history without significantly changing history as it happened.
Part of the problem with these is a failure of imagination; people hack endlessly at these areas and don’t do anything all that interesting or new with them. Or like Harry Turtledove, they hack at them through 15 books and 10,000 point-of-view characters until you scream and threaten to burn the books before being forced to read any more of the turgid things.
Part of what bothers me in these re-repeats is that most fail to understand the backgrounds of the situations very well!
The CSA came about because of the whole ’state’s rights’ thing, and was not a very successful device because the national effort was very dependent on the support of the individual states - or lack thereof. Turning a very loose association of states into a unitary fascist setup is a very tough act to pull off. It wasn’t going to happen. Much more likely to me would have been something like the banana republics of Central America - a new set of similar sleepy despotisms.
The Axis powers went into the war as badasses that
- considered themselves have-not nations that deserved the goodies others had and
- made the most of their initial progress by
- being organized badasses who were looking for a quick stomp.
They were not in any way ready for a long war and expected Those Wimps to keel over before their awesomeness. (And especially in the case of the Germans, they were horrendously wasteful and corrupt and mismanaged when it came down to resource management and real governance.) In short, they wouldn’t have been able to hold up once the quick stomp plan ran into a serious roadblock, and certainly not over the long run.
JFK was no paladin, and there were lots of things that otherwise would have blown up and sank a Kennedy administration that we just didn’t really get into at the time. Google simultaneously on “Don Reynolds” and “LBJ” for starters.
The Romans staying the same over all that time is laughable; see also Byzantium.
The Aztecs were going to crash sooner or later, either when the smallpox hit and devastated Mexico, or when enough of their enemies decided to off them. Remember always that their power position wasn’t that strong, and that the majority of the forces that creamed the Aztecs were NOT Spanish but pissed-off locals that had had enough of the Aztecs and saw this as their oppotunity to take them down.