Alternate histories that are useless ideological wankery;

[underlankers]

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

Comments

[jonathankorman]

"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.

[chron_job]

I'm searching for a word...

Roughly paraphrased, it would mean: concerning the different textures of various historical period's divergent visions of the future.

The Jetsons, as well as Walt Disney's "Land of Tomorrow", have a definitive "50's future feel" (or early 60's, same thing), in the same way that Flash Gordan and Rocketman have a "30's future feel", and in a way that, I presume, Blade Runner and Neromancer will eventually mean "the 80's future feel"

[jonathankorman]

Yeah, folks talk a lot about "retro-futurism" nowadays, which I think is part of what you're talking about.

And William Gibson famously has progressed from writing stories set in the future during the '80s, to the near-future during the '00s, to the present now. One wonders if a decade from now, he'll be writing about the recent past a decade or two from now ...

[underlankers]

Well, if it come to that it should be noted that in the 1930s and 1940s there were a lot of people that saw both fascism and communism as the waves of the future and democracy as doomed. It worked differently in one way because fascism lost utterly due to a communist victory so Pyrrhic liberal democracy survived by default.

Then there's the reality that Southern plantation slavery of the 1850s was an innovation due to the cotton gin and hence had surprised damned near everyone in the USA, which was why the issue of what states slavery would or would not spread to mattered as it did.

[verytwistedmind]

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.

[underlankers]

Actually Hitler really believed he could pull off Sealion. That he couldn't is a lot more obvious in hindsight than at the time, though by the same token a failed German invasion of Britain would have *really* ruptured German delusions of invincibility long before the Battle of Moscow did

[johnny9fingers]

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.

[kgbman]

Historian Niall Ferguson has gotten a lot of mileage out of speculation about Great Britain staying out of World War I. Essentially, he thinks it would have ended in a German victory followed by a more militaristic, German-led, EU-style Continent. The Kaiser wasn't a good guy but he certainly wasn't Hitler, so as far as that goes a German victory in WWI might not have been as bad as what actually happened. If it happened early enough, it might, as you said, have prevented the Russian Revolution. Lenin would have died in his exile.

[johnny9fingers]

That's irritating.

I was once nice about Ferguson....then I read a smidgen more of his work, the overall thrust of which I found not quite to my taste, though not completely without merit of any kind.

[Tips Hat.]

[telemann]

I assumed Germany only wanted trade expansion and a sphere of influence in central Europe. They weren't after any territorial expansion per se, although the treaty they signed with later with the Soviets (to get Russia out of the war), gained them huge swaths of land in Poland, and the Ukraine-- all of that would have not happened had the war ended quickly with another defeat of the French. I'm not sure about what the other aims were for the other combatants.

[rasilio]

"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

[underlankers]

Not really, unless you mean to imply that S.M. Stirling and Harry Turtledove are closet Nazis. The stories one writes need not reflect the views of someone in the real world

Alternate Histories

[chron_job]

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

Re: Alternate Histories

[underlankers]

A) Or alternately that people fell prey to the myth that the Nazis had a degree of competence in everything that would have won them the real-life war and mistook that for their fictional counterparts. The Soviets were murderous but not genocidal. Nazi policies would have left a Europe under their rule as bad off at the start as Soviet-ruled Europe was by the end of the Soviet Empire. And it would be all downhill from there.

B) And that's a fair point. It can make for a good dystopia, but people should not mistake a dystopia for a realistic scenario.

The elephant in the room is that the Black Death's first outbreaks were in China, which would mean that this would be a world dominated by Indigenous Australians and Native Americans.

Re: Alternate Histories

[chron_job]

> The elephant in the room is that the Black Death's first outbreaks
> were in China

Did China loose between a third and two thirds of its population to the Black Death?

If not, then we already have a situation where the epidemic was disproportionately deadly in Europe, as opposed to China. All the author's premise asks of us is to pretend that it was even more disproportionately deadly.

Re: Alternate Histories

[underlankers]

No, but it lost several hundred thousands to the Mongols who spread the plague in the first place......