Remove ads

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

Geedubs said:
You say that as if Anarchism wasn't one of the driving forces behind Trade Unionism.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
More to the point in a fiction discussion thread, @Norseman says that as if having the human spirit conquer some is as worthy of indignation as having it conquer all.

Which, in the context of a discussion of fiction, is the part that really bothers me. I get why someone might disdain pure wish fulfillment fiction in which all obstacles are casually dismissed. But I don't think it's reasonable to extend that arbitrarily downward, because that's how we get to 'grimderp.'

By asserting that nothing we would normally consider idealistic or good CAN matter, we are left, by process of elimination, with the idea that nothing can matter except the things we really, really wish didn't matter.
 
Simon_Jester said:
More to the point in a fiction discussion thread, @Norseman says that as if having the human spirit conquer some is as worthy of indignation as having it conquer all.

Which, in the context of a discussion of fiction, is the part that really bothers me. I get why someone might disdain pure wish fulfillment fiction in which all obstacles are casually dismissed. But I don't think it's reasonable to extend that arbitrarily downward, because that's how we get to 'grimderp.'

By asserting that nothing we would normally consider idealistic or good CAN matter, we are left, by process of elimination, with the idea that nothing can matter except the things we really, really wish didn't matter.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Cite where I said that please. Or even hinted at it for that matter.

EDIT: And in case it is not painfully obvious from what I've written: Ideals are only good if people are willing to work long and hard, to look plainly at the facts and say, "This is not acceptable! But how do we go from this, to a better state of things?" Then to act, to work, to struggle in ways that might actually get them what they want. It is the difference between labour unions organising themselves, and some overemotional twerps trying to murder Henry Clay Frick. The latter bunch also thought that if only people heard the right words they'd rise up in revolution.

EDIT2: And I don't think I want to continue this derail, since it only makes things needlessly unpleasant.
 
Last edited:
the atom said:
I'd say it sort of has the same problem even if to a lesser extent. Most of the downtimers go 'oh huh hadn't thought of that', and those that don't are usually effortlessly swept aside. I won't comment on the realism of this but it the conflicts don't exactly have the most tension.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I don't know. Britain wins battles pretty easily, but there are some stunning failures when private groups try to go out and spread ideas that the downtimers aren't interested in. Remember those Irish communists? Or that group of pro-African activists? Or the Arabs who tried to convince the Ottomans to kick all the Jews out of Jerusalem?
 
Norseman said:
TBH I have very little patience for "the people want to be liberated from this shit." Part of it is because I've read anarchist literature which is full of it (in every sense of the word). Part is because "the people want to be liberated from this shit" usually leads to pyramids of skulls.

I would like to see a story where uptime revolutionaries fail because no one is interested in their crap.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You're unlikely to ever run into a total lack of interest. Peasant rebellions did exist in pretty much every period, after all. 1632 did handle it pretty clumsily, though.
 
SeptimusMagisto said:
You're unlikely to ever run into a total lack of interest. Peasant rebellions did exist in pretty much every period, after all. 1632 did handle it pretty clumsily, though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yes. Peasant rebellions always existed, but... when the peasants had a miserable lot they found a cause or ideology that they needed. Sometimes it was a heresy, sometimes it was just a list of grievances, but if they needed a unifying idea they were always able to find one. Some sort of grievance, heresy, charismatic nutter etc, was always hanging about, but most of the time they came to a bad end.

Sometimes though the circumstances were right and you'd get more. But most of the time uprisings that worked were long in the planning.

Compare the English Peasants Revolt (1381) with the Uprising of the Romanian Peasants (1907). The latter was very much a "we've had enough!" sort of uprising, which also meant it was depressingly short (people interested should read Liviu Rebreanu's book The Uprising, it can be found used at a reasonable cost). By the way, said book is *amazing* at portraying the motions of an actual uprising, the behaviour of the people, and how rumours flow madly.
 
Norseman said:
There is one story that I do not like much, but which illustrate a necessary point: The Man Who Came Early. Your ideas and technical competance does not matter when society is not able or willing to accept them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The problem here is that these ISOT stories don't send one person back. They send tens of thousands at the very least. Enough people - and evidence of apparent miracles - that the issue is basically guaranteed to at least get a foothold. Basically any single issue uptimers try to force in an ISOT story will happen, unless it's a very short time-jump the tech difference is sufficient they will get a following.

One person before their time will be crushed under the sheer inertia of society. Tens of thousands with world-shattering technology? They'll cause societies inertia to shatter as people fly in every direction possible at once.
 
Byzantine said:
The problem here is that these ISOT stories don't send one person back. They send tens of thousands at the very least. Enough people - and evidence of apparent miracles - that the issue is basically guaranteed to at least get a foothold. Basically any single issue uptimers try to force in an ISOT story will happen, unless it's a very short time-jump the tech difference is sufficient they will get a following.

One person before their time will be crushed under the sheer inertia of society. Tens of thousands with world-shattering technology? They'll cause societies inertia to shatter as people fly in every direction possible at once.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Sure. If you give an idea enough force it can succeed. But at that point the reason it succeeds is not the beauty of the idea and the oppressed having a single tear roll down their grimy cheeks. The reason it succeeds is that it now has FORCE behind it, and as Simone Weil said:

Simone Weil said:
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Give an idea, however foolish that kind of force and it will succeed.

But the people I am talking about are very quiet on the topic of how they will get enough force to make the world do things their way. However much force that is. Indeed, they seem to be indignant when talk of force comes up*. Instead of talking about how they will gain it, they speak as if they already have it (and what they will do with it), or they avoid the topic completely to talk about how good and right their cause is.

* Note I am not talking armed revolution. Just concrete political organisation would suffice in many cases. The sort that every interest group in a democracy will use.

EDIT: And seriously I should stop being pulled back into this debate.
 
Last edited:
Okay, we get it. Norseman doesn't agree with the concept of revolutionary ideals or people being successful in an ISOT or, seemingly, real life. Can we discuss something else?

I'd offer up a cringy AH timeline myself, but I don't tend to go around intentionally reading bad timelines and I haven't had enough free time to read stuff lately to stumble across a bad one accidentally.
 
Last edited:
Geedubs said:
Okay, we get it. Norseman doesn't agree with the concept of revolutionary ideals or people being successful in an ISOT or, seemingly, real life. Can we discuss something else?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Eh, that's slightly unfair to his position. My read is that he's just really big on material conditions, but you're right in that the debate is going to hijack the whole thread if it keeps going.
 
I had no idea that so many people were beholden to historical idealism as opposed to materialism.
 
Mental Omega said:
I had no idea that so many people were beholden to historical idealism as opposed to materialism.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If you have trouble understanding someone who favors a 90/10 split of materialism/idealism in their real life situation and discussions of real life, and a 60/40 split or something in the fiction they read for entertainment... Well, I have trouble understanding why you have trouble understanding.
 
RiverDelta said:
You might want to specify where people are doing that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A lot of Alt-History that I have read goes with a Great Man style of history, and has some ideologies never develop, or even develop analogues ideologies. However I think that this might be less of an author issue of not understanding Historical Materialism, but more a way to have completely alternate timelines.
 
I think a lot of people just want to tell a story so it gets lost in that.
 
Simon_Jester said:
If you have trouble understanding someone who favors a 90/10 split of materialism/idealism in their real life situation and discussions of real life, and a 60/40 split or something in the fiction they read for entertainment... Well, I have trouble understanding why you have trouble understanding.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Personally I'm just very insomniac after having one too many energy drinks and just came onto this thread to look for an ideal time and place to make a dumb "I fucked your mom lol" joke for cheap laughs so my brain is not entirely functional right now.
 
Astrid Fornhoff said:
I think a lot of people just want to tell a story so it gets lost in that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
People tend to want to write (and want to read) stories centering on the actions of characters and them achieving significant things, so an alternate history that focuses on the action of characters will necessarily have those characters achieve things through their willpower.

Unless you're writing a story with no protagonists or the protagonists are small cogs in a giant machine, it's hard to get around that, nor is it a requirement for all alternate history to aspire to be that- soft alternate history vs hard alternate history, like soft science fictions vs hard science fiction.

There's a reason Great Man history exists; because it makes for a good story.
 
Last edited:
Plus it's like...

Even if you reject the Great Man theory in and of itself, there's an underlying physical reality that individual humans who make decisions while in powerful offices exist. These individuals will appear in stories and be noticed as 'decision-makers' or 'heroes' or whatever.

It's hard to intentionally structure the story so that you deliver the message 'anyone who seems to be doing anything important is actually a figurehead for world-historical forces.' Especially if you're worried about the story coming across as ham-handed or didactic.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Plus it's like...

Even if you reject the Great Man theory in and of itself, there's an underlying physical reality that individual humans who make decisions while in powerful offices exist. These individuals will appear in stories and be noticed as 'decision-makers' or 'heroes' or whatever.

It's hard to intentionally structure the story so that you deliver the message 'anyone who seems to be doing anything important is actually a figurehead for world-historical forces.' Especially if you're worried about the story coming across as ham-handed or didactic.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean, people can change historical events, without Napoleon for instance the French Republic wouldn't have won as much as they did in the wars, and the USA might've an even worse democracy without Washington. But people then go beyond something like that to things like Without Napoleon republicanism never becomes a major thing, or without Washington democracy dies as a political force, or Without Marx communism never exists, in any form. And sometimes the go even further with it.
 
History is filled with complexes which i tend to find is seldom is perfect in line with any one historical philosophical theory be it economic determinism, great man theory, social evolutionism and so forth.
 
I just remembered that The Three Eagles existed because someone started liking my comments from back when I was arguing with the author.

It started off well and there were some elements I really liked- it was one of the inspirations for my Separated at Birth TL. But the author had absolutely zero willingness to accept constructive criticism and eventually had a minor meltdown when I pointed out that Nixon's America backing down to the ridiculously hyperbolic threat to nuke eight American cities from a Domination that had only just tested its first nuclear weapon was implausible.
 
I poked my head in. When I saw the Japanese copying B-52s and an implication they captured a boomer in port I went 'Nope, author has an agenda to forcibly neuter the US beyond even refusing them their overseas forces'.

Which, in the middle of Vietnam and the Cold War is *the vast majority of the American military*.

There's 'preventing a curbstomp for an interesting story' and there's 'purposely screw everyone over in stupid ways'. Axis of Time had similar issues. So far as ISOTing the US into fictional worlds, I prefer the one to Man in the High Castle.
 
EBR said:
I just remembered that The Three Eagles existed because someone started liking my comments from back when I was arguing with the author.

It started off well and there were some elements I really liked- it was one of the inspirations for my Separated at Birth TL. But the author had absolutely zero willingness to accept constructive criticism and eventually had a minor meltdown when I pointed out that Nixon's America backing down to the ridiculously hyperbolic threat to nuke eight American cities from a Domination that had only just tested its first nuclear weapon was implausible.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah. Like, I'd agree with you it started off well, and just I dunno, my taste for it soured just in how it was being written and wow, I honestly wasn't aware of that bit. :/
Skywalker_T-65 said:
I poked my head in. When I saw the Japanese copying B-52s and an implication they captured a boomer in port I went 'Nope, author has an agenda to forcibly neuter the US beyond even refusing them their overseas forces'.

Which, in the middle of Vietnam and the Cold War is *the vast majority of the American military*.

There's 'preventing a curbstomp for an interesting story' and there's 'purposely screw everyone over in stupid ways'. Axis of Time had similar issues. So far as ISOTing the US into fictional worlds, I prefer the one to Man in the High Castle.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
If I recall, the US did keep their overseas forces, but when they got ISOTed, they wound up scattered all over the United States; do you happen to know the name for the one where they got ISOTed into the Man in the High Castle verse?


More-so as a bit of a musing, but with ISOTs, I am always surprised there's not more of necessarily a focus on say the individual person in it all in terms of the kind of say societal and religious reactions to something like this happening for both those in the ISOTed nation and the world they've arrived in. Like, how and why did this happen? Will this happen again? For instance. Or hell, even going with the assumption of a single power/nation getting ISOTed and not multiple nations getting ISOTed. Admittedly the discussion about Three Eagles has reminded me of the thoughts I've had before on say like, the US and/or the USSR from 1961 winding up in the Draka verse in 1941 and just exploring the kind of consequences from that; both in terms of the societal impact, but also in terms of the kind of political aspect on having to deal with this weird world that they've arrived in.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top