I think Serrano encapsulates a third of the central issue of
why war, and especially high-level military decisions, feature centrally in alternate history right here:
War was the method to decide political questions for almost all of human history.
To me, this seems closely couple to two other significant issues appended to that to consider that aren't really discussed by the panel.
The second is that human society is fundamentally chaotic. Small things can have massive consequences; large things can leave almost no trace behind. War, by its nature, is particularly chaotic. Single individuals and small groups of individuals make decisions with very visible and immediate consequences in times of war. Alternate history, by its definition, explores a
what if question: What if things had been different? The more clearly defined the initial perturbation is, the more it resembles an exercise in understanding real history, and the easier it is for readers to immerse themselves in a believable alternate course of events. Because war is one of the most chaotic parts of collective human behavior, historical wars contain many key pivot points that can be boiled down extremely succinctly and had very large apparent consequences. It is therefore very natural for alternate histories to ask things like "What if the Japanese did not attack Pearl Harbor?" or "What if James Buchanan had withdrawn federal troops from South Carolina?"
Conversely, many
other perturbations that aren't military in nature have a very immediate impact on warfare. For example, the election of Henry Clay in 1844 would have had many consequences, but one of the most immediate and obvious things that followed the election of Polk in the 1844 election was the hugely important Mexican-American War, so it falls on the alternate historian to either explain why that war was inevitable
or explore the consequences of that war not taking place.
The third is that history is, to a large degree, the documented course of events. This is subject to huge selection effects. What is written down is biased towards recording the events of wars, as those have been generally viewed as immediately salient and important to document - and particularly wars from the perspective of leaders making decisions. Julius Caesar's military campaigns are well-documented. The bronze Roman dodecahedrons, apparently an invention used for some mundane purpose, are not. The historical record doesn't include many memoirs written by illiterate serfs about what their day to day life was like; it includes quite a bit of information about emperors, though.
So for an alternate historian - whether from someone who spent time formally studying history, like Eric Flint, or whether from a strictly amateur enthusiast - the major "what if" points and their chains of visible consequences involve wars even if the perturbation itself is not military, because historically wars are (1) important and commonplace, (2) chaotic and potentially extremely sensitive to perturbation, and (3) well-documented and well-studied.
Lots of alternate history work includes "kitchen table" scenes exploring the effects of everyday life, but if
all you're changing is the slice of life rather than the timeline itself, that tends to slip over into the genre of historical fiction, rather than alternate history. If you're interested in the
how and
why of how a timeline changes, that is probably going to involve talking about war and technology, not just glancing at the consequences of those changes on some particular person's everyday life.
Speaking of which:
What we seem to be converging toward is in wanting to read literature that feels like literature. A timeline is not literature, nor is a customized map, nor a diagram of battle positions, nor a blueprint for a tank. AH enthusiasts who want to present us with a whole new world should strive to draw us fully into it, make us live it. Of course, that's applicable to writers of all genres. It's pretty standard craft advice. Maybe the problem is that AH hasn't been attempting to be literature, which resonates with the critique that SF used to receive before the New Wave (and still receives from critics who haven't heard that the New Wave happened).
I loved writing my own pop-epic styled The Sure Bet King simply because it represented something in between the trashy cheap thrillers and dry textbooks I normally like reading, which lead to the epiphany that alternate history has that exact kind of bifurcation. It trends towards either "BLOW UP ROBOT STONEWALL JACKSON AFTER HE VOWS TO MAKE THE CONFEDERACY GREAT AGAIN" or "Here's the Cabinet of President Ted Williams, in wikibox form", to deliberately turn to the caricature extremes.
Getting into the details of
how and
why a timeline changes can very easily start to involve details that might seem fairly technical, especially if critical changes happen in, say, a different settlement of borders at a peace conference. At that point, including maps or diagrams can make some things a lot easier to understand - even if that might not seem interesting to someone who isn't interested in the
why and
how of alternate histories' timeline perturbations play out into a re-telling of history.
In most professional novels (alternate history and otherwise), maps and diagrams helpful in understanding the
how and
why of things - e.g., where exactly is Mordor in relation to the Shire - get put either at the front or the back of the book, so that readers who don't care about such things (which includes a lot of people who work in the publishing industry) won't be bothered by the interruption of the flow of text.
It's true that the activity of trying to do the core world-building isn't the same as the activity of writing an actual story, and there are a lot of people who just do the world-building without writing the novels. This is not a phenomenon limited to alternate history. For every Tolkien whose massively detailed fantasy world-building leads to great literary achievement, there are thousands of people building detailed fantasy worlds that they never really write actual stories for.
For alternate history, a lot of the core audience
is people who want to follow the discussion of
how and
why one change in the timeline leads to other changes. Many do want to be able to see things like concise timelines, maps, family trees, or even possibly the blueprint for a tank if it's relevant to how the timeline shifts. Actual history books involve a lot of maps and concise timelines simply because they're great ways of trying to organize information that is
very relevant to understanding history. You can't tell a story with a map alone, but a good picture really is worth a thousand words.
I think the point about critics shouldn't pass without a discussion of literary critique as a field. There's this lingering sense that
real literature is what literary critics like, which - particularly visibly in, say, the case of science fiction - has more to do with the sociology of literary critics than anything meaningful about the quality of the works themselves. This is closely linked to the idea that there's a meaningful divide between "trash" genre fiction and "serious" literary fiction. There is not. What's called "literary fiction" and applauded by literary critics in elite circles includes a lot of works that are really not
good literature and just happen to aimed very directly at a group quite similar to literary critics.
The old "pulp-era" science fiction includes things that are every bit as good as literature as things in the classic literary canon; it just happens that literary critics turned their noses up at those works, just as most of them
continue to turn their noses up at most modern "genre fiction" without as much as a cursory read. They'd rather re-hash classic literary works (where they can lean on a body of existing published analyses from prior generations of literary critics) or read new "literary" fiction that employs heavy-handed attempts to appeal to the conventions of current schools of literary criticism.
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