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

RoseEmbolism said:
There's a lot of sociology in the novel that puts it firmly in the alt history pile. Like the idea that population growth is inevitable, and thus inevitably leads to war. Tell Heinlein that no, women don't actually want to squeeze out watermelon sized objects until it kills them, and he'd give you the surprised Pikachu face.
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Starship Troopers (1959) predates the pill (1960) and was written just as the post-war baby boom was about to tail off (in no small part because of the pill). At the time the U.S. birth rate had been around 25 per 1,000 people for fifteen years.

Can't imagine why someone writing after the biggest population explosion in history would come to the conclusion population growth is inevitable unless externally checked.
 
Also those objects are often called "babies."

I've never noticed any persistent natalism in Heinlein books. I think the noticeable sexual neurose was his repressed homosexual desires.
 
foamy said:
Starship Troopers (1959) predates the pill (1960) and was written just as the post-war baby boom was about to tail off (in no small part because of the pill). At the time the U.S. birth rate had been around 25 per 1,000 people for fifteen years.

Can't imagine why someone writing after the biggest population explosion in history would come to the conclusion population growth is inevitable unless externally checked.
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Sounds like Heinlein is like Malthus, making a thesis on population growth immediately before a paradigm shift renders it moot, just on the opposite side of the curve.
 
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Dab master said:
Also those objects are often called "babies."

I've never noticed any persistent natalism in Heinlein books. I think the noticeable sexual neurose was his repressed homosexual desires.
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It isn't natalism per se. It's Malthusianism. You can also see it in Farmer in the Sky, written a decade earlier.

For a straight shot of raw natalism (for the right sort) you want Kornbluth's The Marching Morons.
 
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foamy said:
It isn't natalism per se. It's Malthusianism. You can also see it in Farmer in the Sky.

For natalism (for the right sort) you want Kornbluth's The Marching Morons.
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Honestly, I don't understand why this one uses natalist ideas. It's not a hard-core Malthusianism, but it promotes the idea that the Earth is filled with idiots (because according to the author, mostly idiots will have many children), and only a few (without children or with one child) elites will hold the world back from total Chaos. The solution is seen in killing idiots en masse (although the method is condemned as cruel, it is shown as working).

Vannifar said:
Sounds like Heinlein is like Malthus, making a thesis on population growth immediately before a paradigm shift renders it moot, just on the opposite side of the curve.
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You see, I am a child of the late nineties, and I have often heard concerns about displacement. In fact, even in the second half of the eighties and early nineties, all the popular literature was concerned with the "Malthusian crisis", although it should have been obvious that something was not going according to plan. Only relatively recently has the concept of a "second demographic transition" and fears about too low a birth rate become mainstream - people noticed at the very last moment. And if there is some kind of upswing or another "baby boom", then I will not be surprised if prominent experts change their forecasts already by the middle or the end of the process.

foamy said:
in no small part because of the pill
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Partially yes, but still, in my opinion, it is a bit of an exaggeration - at the time of the invention, the birth rate in the USA was already rapidly falling, and it took a decade for them to become truly widespread (if I am not mistaken). In Great Britain, the second peak of births was precisely in the mid-sixties. In addition, I will remind you that the emphasis on hormonal contraceptives became the reason why HIV spread so widely.
 
Can I ask something? The thing is, I came up with a detail for my world. The gist is this - historically, despite legal contraception, hormonal contraceptives reached the USSR very late, and the main means were condoms and abortions. It must be admitted that specifically in the USSR the quality of condoms was mediocre, but if we assume that we "improve" the USSR and turn the "Cold War" in its favor, then I have an idea that we can create conditions in which some countries will put more emphasis on condoms, and pills are less common. Does this make sense? Or does it sound too Cringe?
 
You could probably delay the Pill a decade or more by having Russell Marker die in Mexico: even his own former assistants had great difficulty replicating the synthesis without his lab notes.
 
Mad Bad Rabbit said:
You could probably delay the Pill a decade or more by having Russell Marker die in Mexico: even his own former assistants had great difficulty replicating the synthesis without his lab notes.
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Then can I ask you this question? Will this idea fit into the concept? The thing is that I want to play with the ideas of retrofuturism and atompunk, but in the entourage of the sixties. And the sixties are considered a period of "sexual awakening" (reality here is a little, and sometimes much more complicated). And I'm wondering - can I, with such a premise, use the "frivolity" that can be found even in James Bond films? On the other hand, the sixties were different everywhere - for example, in Spain, contraceptives became widespread only after Franco's death.
 
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
 
Dab master said:
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
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I think it comes from the assumption that an America that never rebelled against Britain would basically be a bigger version of OTL Canada. A lot of self-proclaimed progressives hold up Canada as a paradise of universal healthcare, gun control, and racial harmony while ignoring its more unsavory aspects both past and present like the residential schools system, the missing and murdered indigenous women, and other instances of both official and unofficial discrimination against people of color in Canada.
 
Dab master said:
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
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Teaboos when I want to go to the dentist::rage:
 
Dab master said:
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
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You just described Code Geass.
 
Dab master said:
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
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I think a TL where the wave of revolutions during the late 18th early/19th century either fail out right or don't happen for whatever reason but instead of wholesome reformism everywhere things just boil over into and even more radical wave of revolutions later on could be fun.


Hmm, that reminds me
 
Dab master said:
A trope I'm annoyed by is when the lack of an American revolution makes a more utopic world.

Imagine Britain with no incentive to get rid of slavery because the American South is in the empire when cotton becomes vital. Imagine earlier British incursions into Latin America and China.

An earlier Anglo-American world empire with American manpower able to provide the muscle needed for the British to do more direct colonization.
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Umm...Pax Britannica, the most "utopic" TLs out there?
 
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