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What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?

Silent Runner said:
Given how their posts in the rest of the thread read like someone who isn't even out of middle school, I think the OP got eugenics and transhumanism mixed up because they're underage and simply lack the knowledge to tell the two concepts apart.
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I think they don't know the difference between eugenics and genetic engineering.
(Also, isn't there a decent novel series where genetic engineering is discovered in the late 1800s causing a steampunk vs biopunk WW1?)
 
Terran Allias said:
Very petty, but you know how in some CSA timelines the capital is moved to Philly? Presumably the District of Columbia is dissolved, & Washington becomes a part of Maryland. Problem is that Washington Maryland tastes like ash in my mouth
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Can't speak for most CSA TLs, but in TL-191 at least its made very clear that DC still de jure exists, and is the legal capitol, and in fact is still host to certain ceremonies like Presidential inaugurations, but everything important just happens in Philadelphia.
 
Washington City is a fine name and it likely wouldn't be changed in such scenarios. /loud Marylander noises

I am not pro-annexing DC.
 
As I recall Georgetown was a separate municipality founded in 1751 separate from both the city of Washington and the county of Washington until an act of Congress in 1871 consolidated DC by revoking both Georgetown's and the city of Washington's charters as well as dissolving the county of Washington then merging all three of them all together under a single territorial government.
 
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Indeed. Much like NYC, DC eats its neighbors.
 
Enderminion said:
Once you have weapons grade fuel out of the reactor the actual radio-logical hazard of weapons fuel is limited. The Machinists will absolutely be killed manufacturing bombs, five to ten years down the line, due to cancer, probably not due to acute radiation syndrome.
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The U-233 will be contaminated with U-232, a gamma emitter with 70 year half-life. The exact amount is probably classified, but it was reportedly a factor in the US, USSR and India all deciding to go with plutonium instead, due to the added expense of remote materials handing.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit said:
The U-233 will be contaminated with U-232, a gamma emitter with 70 year half-life. The exact amount is probably classified, but it was reportedly a factor in the US, USSR and India all deciding to go with plutonium instead, due to the added expense of remote materials handing.
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To be completely fair, 'Victorian London rendered inhospitable for generations after gentleman inventor fucked up on a faroian scale' would have some serious repercussions.
 
Information: This Eugenics discussion has become dysgenic for the thread!
  • Staff Post
    • this eugenics discussion has become dysgenic for the thread! How ironic.

    The general discussion of Eugenics, which deserves to continue in its own right, has been moved to its own thread.

    Posts directly relevant to the Cringe Inducing Timeline that started this tangent will remain untouched, the rest have been moved or copied & edited appropriately.
     
  • Staff Post
    • So, it appears that TDoR was so bad, it required its own thread to truly discuss how awful it was.

    AltHist.com aren't gonna like it when they hear about this.
     
    Ah, I see it now.

    Jesus Christ, these people are illiterate morons.
     
    Also, for the AltHist.com users reading this for when it happens (yes, I mean you in particular), I know your ego was hurt enough to come back here & see what we had to say because you attached your sense of self-importance to a badly-written revenge fic about genociding the Russian people off the face of the Earth. And yes, that is what TDoR is.

    And yes, Sorairo is "a hack writer who revels in the mass slaughter of Russians" as one of you put it. It's the kind of shit that used to dredge up old FF.Net back in the day, only with a metric fuck-ton more racism & less Sasuke clones. And it was almost certainly written one-handed.

    If you want to bitch about that to me, my AltHist account can be found HERE. Or alternatively, get actual standards in what you read and write.
     
    Sliding back to an earlier discussion but not the main part of it, more a tangent
    Somebody-Someone said:
    Also, isn't there a decent novel series where genetic engineering is discovered in the late 1800s causing a steampunk vs biopunk WW1?
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    That would be Scott Westerfelds Leviathan trilogy, which is...

    Okay? The real meat of the war and matter of countries pitting off another is all but entirely off screen, and has a very pop-history viewpoint, with "those dastardly germans who secretly assassinated the archduke to set off this war" (what), "always showing up everywhere to threaten out heroes, jingoistic monster who have ZERO named characters" and the likes, and with a lot of stuff being pushed to the backseat to either hop from locale to locale for Quick Little Vignette Scenes (usually ti dripfeed the premise of "fucked up monsters and oily mechs") or brief political stuffs ("hey, the ottoman empire is collapsing" "oh hey, Tunguska" "oh hey, japan" "Oh hey, mexico" "oh hey, new york city", those last four are all in the same last book, it's rushed as fuck).

    They're okay, because the characters aren't annoying or anything - just really flat, and without too much interest in a different history (outside the second book, which even then has the fallout or really build up of the Committee of Union and Progress revolt against the sultan just. Almost entirely off screen (Which I'm Now Realizing AS I Write This Also Completely Writes Off And Ignores The Genocidal Actions It Would Commit By Just. Making Them Never Happen For Arbitrary Reasons, By Having Not In Power At That Time And Depicted As The Good Guys, Which Is...... A Choice,,, O take back what I said about it being okay,)

    It's only real saving grace is some fantastic artwork by Keith Thompson
     
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    Kind of old but the outage over "Critical Race Theory" which is actually a type of Marxist legal theory which is use to call any teaching of America that isn't 100% patriotic as "CRT" teachers can't even talk about slavery or other facts because it might upset white kids feelings.
     
    Somebody-Someone said:
    I think they don't know the difference between eugenics and genetic engineering.
    (Also, isn't there a decent novel series where genetic engineering is discovered in the late 1800s causing a steampunk vs biopunk WW1?)
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    SpiritFluid said:
    That would be Scott Westerfelds Leviathan trilogy
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    That one didn't have eugenics on humans, the Darwinist powers were explicitly described as having banned human modification. Probably because they feared the consequences of outright human obsolence more than their enemies.

    Am I the only one who thinks a Leviathan sequel set in the thirties with the post-WW1 rearming for round two replaced by a MAD-enforced cold war with the Darwinists having the plans for genetically enhanced übermenschen just waiting to be implanted in artificial wombs and the Clankers having Tesla's Tunguska-causing deathray, or rather, bluffing and claiming that they had it since it didn't actually exist would've been really neat?
     
    Konradleijon said:
    Kind of old but the outage over "Critical Race Theory" which is actually a type of Marxist legal theory which is use to call any teaching of America that isn't 100% patriotic as "CRT" teachers can't even talk about slavery or other facts because it might upset white kids feelings.
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    I'm having trouble parsing your sentence here and determining (1) exactly what you are trying to say and (2) why it belongs in the Cringeworthy Alternate History thread.

    Discussion of history itself, or attitudes about history, can have a place here in my opinion, but I'm... not sure how this in particular fits well.
     
    SpiritFluid said:
    Sliding back to an earlier discussion but not the main part of it, more a tangent

    That would be Scott Westerfelds Leviathan trilogy, which is...

    Okay? The real meat of the war and matter of countries pitting off another is all but entirely off screen, and has a very pop-history viewpoint, with "those dastardly germans who secretly assassinated the archduke to set off this war" (what), "always showing up everywhere to threaten out heroes, jingoistic monster who have ZERO named characters" and the likes, and with a lot of stuff being pushed to the backseat to either hop from locale to locale for Quick Little Vignette Scenes (usually ti dripfeed the premise of "fucked up monsters and oily mechs") or brief political stuffs ("hey, the ottoman empire is collapsing" "oh hey, Tunguska" "oh hey, japan" "Oh hey, mexico" "oh hey, new york city", those last three are all in the same last book, it's rushed as fuck).

    They're okay, because the characters aren't annoying or anything - just really flat, and without too much interest in a different history (outside the second book, which even then has the fallout or really build up of the Committee of Union and Progress revolt against the sultan just. Almost entirely off screen (Which I'm Now Realizing AS I Write This Also Completely Writes Off And Ignores The Genocidal Actions It Would Commit By Just. Making Them Never Happen For Arbitrary Reasons, By Having Not In Power At That Time And Depicted As The Good Guys, Which Is...... A Choice,,, O take back what I said about it being okay,)

    It's only real saving grace is some fantastic artwork by Keith Thompson
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    As is often the case with YA novels, the setting itself is far more interesting than the main characters of the novels. The whale airship as a concept just slaps.

    And I don't even mind the main characters, especially in the first book which is far and away the strongest of the three.

    I compare Leviathan to Mortal Engines, even get them confused a lot, because both of them suffer from this "wow, the setting is so cool, why are we following two teens instead of all the political intrigue that they're effectively being used as pawns in? Let's see the decisionmakers as well."
     
    Cyanblackstone said:
    I compare Leviathan to Mortal Engines, even get them confused a lot, because both of them suffer from this "wow, the setting is so cool, why are we following two teens instead of all the political intrigue that they're effectively being used as pawns in? Let's see the decisionmakers as well."
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    Because YA novels tend to be anti-authority, and following the authority figures kinda-sorta goes against that?
     
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