PoC focal Alternate History recommendations

[8mph_ansible]

'eyos and 'ellos towards one and all,

Been talkin alternate history to some folx online over the weekend. And in the my mind I've reviewed all the alternate history works I've read, came across and heard about. Now this, if you understand, can be rather funny given that much of the genre's material feels like a short playlist on repeat.

Comments

[8mph_ansible]

Mm, I might have to look into it though I've grown to have a dislike for Stirling's work. I often hear a little about the book because Eric Flint's 1632 series did the same thing--in that he took a small, whitebread U.S. town and tossed it back in time into central europe.

I take it the work has multiple character pov?

[rydra_wong]

IIRC, Mr. Tagomi is one of the ensemble leads in Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle (in which the US is divided between the Germans and the Japanese post-WWII). Been a long while since I read it, though.

[8mph_ansible]

Read that one too and adding the book to the list because of him makes it hard to decide. He's the only PoC there and doesn't get many parts compared to the other characters but he plays one of the more larger roles throughout the book.

Also books such as The Man In The High Castle has a lot of the features of what I personally try to avoid or skip over nowadays when it comes to alternate history. e.g. events and scenarios leading to, during or after a WWII and/or Cold War scenario, Nazi FTW, white supremacy FTW, the South rises again (becoming a Nazi puppet state in this case), if you're not white (or a useful and powerful non-white group like the Japanese in this story) you're either enslaved and/or eradicated (continent wide genocide across Africa, global Jewish extermination, Black Americans spending their entire lives as slave labor aboard ships, etc. etc. etc.). And is partially why I made this thread.

And wow, you folks are reminding me of just how much of this genre I've read through. lol

[rydra_wong]

e.g. events and scenarios leading to, during or after a WWII and/or Cold War scenario, Nazi FTW, white supremacy FTW, the South rises again (becoming a Nazi puppet state in this case)

Oh god, I know. I'm kind of maybe working on an alternate history thing, and it made me realize how a good 80% of the genre seems to involve either "the Nazis won WWII" or "the South won the Civil War". And some of the individual books are very good, but ... the whole of human history to play with, and this is what people go for like homing pigeons?

[8mph_ansible]

What can I say? It's a vanilla milkshake that brings them to the yard.

[ryuutchi]

I think "Noughts and Crosses" by Marjorie Blackman counts? The author is a PoC, and the leads are a black girl and a white boy.

[8mph_ansible]

From what I can find about it, I kinda think it does. =)

[redstarrobot]

It's been a really long time since I read Bruce Sterling's Zeitgeist, which is sort of an AU take on Y2K, but I think the lead's father is Native, and much of it takes place in Turkish Cyprus, so huge swathes of the characters are Turkish. Sterling's got sort of a strong and specific take on globalization and the fluidity of cultural identity (and technology and...), which has both pros and cons. His interests seem to be very specifically "melting pots" of culture, either due to modern trends or due to historic population movements. But he is interesting, because a lot of writers have the implicit assumption that cultural influence on the global scale is what it was in the 1950s, where the largest economy dictates global influence (making it a game between the US, Europe, and China), and Sterling doesn't take that view, because immigration and the rapid spread of technology levels the playing field in the way a lot of people aren't recognizing.

[8mph_ansible]

Heh, I think you just sold me on the book. =p

[redstarrobot]

I really enjoyed it, but I'm an absolute sucker for pre-millennial future-shock anxiety, particularly when it involves a vicious send-up of the Spice Girls (which was coincidentally a vicious send-up of the definition of national identity at the same time) and a world in which everyone is an ex-pat trying to figure out what the heck that means.

[8mph_ansible]

Thanks! A lot more out there than I expected to be had *cheers*

The description I read for the book does interest me somewhat though I'm not sure where it fits with alternate history in a sort of time divergence fashion. Though your marketing plug is slowly snaring me into becoming a regular reader of Hathor legacy. =p