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

Usili 2.0 said:
do you happen to know the name for the one where they got ISOTed into the Man in the High Castle verse?
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The post right above yours :p

(it isn't perfect, of course, but it avoids a curbstomp not by nerfing the US but by acknowledging 'holy shit, we have to basically conquer and rebuild the entire world outside the US and Canada aaaaaaaaaaaaaa')
 
If I'm gonna drop some Fresh Hot Takes, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that a) most pop cultural timelines are pure unadulterated cringe, and b) timelines that dip into offering insight into the pop culture of TTL are likewise almost always cringe, and it's because it's almost always Nothing But Hits.

Like, every film or TV show or video game is just pure uncut wish fulfillment. I mean AH is inherently indulgent in that it's historical fan fiction (and fan fiction is an inherently indulgent genre), but it'd be nice to read a TL where a Christopher Nolan makes a MGS movie starring Christian Bale and...it turns out to be Just Okay, maybe makes a bit of money, and society just moves on. I get the impulse to flesh out a world by dipping into pop culture, but it'd be nice if some of that was written with an eye towards plausibility and realism, or at the very least one where these fanwanky projects are made and don't succeed, or are compromised by the nature of the industry, or something.

Seriously, if I read one more TL where Alan Moore becomes the head writer of Doctor Who and the show goes on to be The Most Amazing Thing Ever, I'm just going to surgically blind myself so I won't have to roll my eyes anymore.
 

This map I found online which looks like it was filled in with a crayola marker
 
The Heck? somehow that tiny US surrounded by the north american somehow makes that map even worse somehow.
 
Parts of The Peshawar Lancers are making me cringe. Mostly the over-the-top Russians. The Raj is fleshed out pretty well and it's clear that the time after the Fall allowed for a mixing of cultures not to dissimilar to post-Norman England (hell, the post-Fall Brits actively make a new feudal system in India to survive), but then here come the literal cannibal Satanist Russians. The POV Russian even has a thought about (and I'm paraphrasing here) how someone would look on an altar.

The justification in-universe is that they turned to religious cannibalism both because the Fall shattered 19th Century morals and in Russia this meant the Devil had won and they should start worshiping him while eating their Central Asian subjects to keep them down.

Going in, I though it would be less black-and-white morality and more about the Great Game continuing despite the world ending. It is about that, but again, cannibal Satanic Russians.
 
CastIron said:
Parts of The Peshawar Lancers are making me cringe. Mostly the over-the-top Russians. The Raj is fleshed out pretty well and it's clear that the time after the Fall allowed for a mixing of cultures not to dissimilar to post-Norman England (hell, the post-Fall Brits actively make a new feudal system in India to survive), but then here come the literal cannibal Satanist Russians. The POV Russian even has a thought about (and I'm paraphrasing here) how someone would look on an altar.

The justification in-universe is that they turned to religious cannibalism both because the Fall shattered 19th Century morals and in Russia this meant the Devil had won and they should start worshiping him while eating their Central Asian subjects to keep them down.

Going in, I though it would be less black-and-white morality and more about the Great Game continuing despite the world ending. It is about that, but again, cannibal Satanic Russians.
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Peshawar Lancers is one of those things from Stirling that has a fascinating concept and premise but a mediocre execution. North Africa-based France? India-based British Empire? Yes please! Cannibal satanist Ruskis, the total collapse of the USA without any successors larger than city-states, and a Sino-Japanese imperial union? Hold up.
 
CastIron said:
The justification in-universe is that they turned to religious cannibalism both because the Fall shattered 19th Century morals and in Russia this meant the Devil had won and they should start worshiping him while eating their Central Asian subjects to keep them down.

Going in, I though it would be less black-and-white morality and more about the Great Game continuing despite the world ending. It is about that, but again, cannibal Satanic Russians.
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Like many of his works, this seems a love letter to Two-Fisted Pulp Novel Tropes. See the current-ish Shadow Of Annihilation series for similar themes.
 
ScottishMongol said:
It probably says something about Stirling that I consider Peshawar Lancers his best work.
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I feel the same way. It was one of the books that really got me into AH- I discovered AH.com while looking for a map of the PL universe, and the first ever bit of AH I wrote was PL fanfiction about a Spanish government-in-exile in Cuba.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Seriously, if I read one more TL where Alan Moore becomes the head writer of Doctor Who and the show goes on to be The Most Amazing Thing Ever, I'm just going to surgically blind myself so I won't have to roll my eyes anymore.
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Yeah, I was thinking of going back to re-edit/replace that at some point to make something more plausible, was fun to write at the time. I was writing it more for fun than anything else, kinda why it started off with John Denver being cast as the Doctor. Hopefully the rest of the TL had more balanced things to your liking.
 
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Arthur Frayn said:
Seriously, if I read one more TL where Alan Moore becomes the head writer of Doctor Who and the show goes on to be The Most Amazing Thing Ever, I'm just going to surgically blind myself so I won't have to roll my eyes anymore.
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What about one where Guy Hamilton becomes the head of the BBC and arranges a James Bond/ Doctor Who crossover film: Daleks Are Forever.
 
Jared said:
What about one where Guy Hamilton becomes the head of the BBC and arranges a James Bond/ Doctor Who crossover film: Daleks Are Forever.
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I'd watch it.

And while I have to admit that Alan Moore writing for Dr Who would be pretty awesome, I reckon he's probably a better fit as a guest writer for Blake's 7.
 
One alternate history trope I rather hate is that of Napoleon somehow becoming a staunch loyalist to the French kings. Why would he do that? Why in the hell would someone who's rapid advancement in society depended on the revolution, and who explicitly called himself its son, back the Ancien Regime?
 
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SzechuanSauce said:
One alternate history trope I rather hate is that of Napoleon somehow becoming a staunch loyalist to the French kings. Why would he do that? Why in the hell would someone who's rapid advancement in society, and who explicitly called himself a son of the revolution back the Ancien Regime?
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Well, if somehow the Ancien Regime was why he rapidly advanced in society.... not that this is realistic.
 
ScottishMongol said:
It probably says something about Stirling that I consider Peshawar Lancers his best work.
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Somebody-Someone said:
agreed
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EBR said:
I feel the same way. It was one of the books that really got me into AH- I discovered AH.com while looking for a map of the PL universe, and the first ever bit of AH I wrote was PL fanfiction about a Spanish government-in-exile in Cuba.
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Funny how I consider the Domination his best writing; with it he at least seemed to know what he was doing, compared to the constant annoyance of fantasy + culturally ignorant BS that Peshawar gave off.
 
Sumeragi said:
Funny how I consider the Domination his best writing; with it he at least seemed to know what he was doing, compared to the constant annoyance of fantasy + culturally ignorant BS that Peshawar gave off.
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Looking back, I dislike the fantasy elements he put in to PL. I didn't mind the cultural ignorance, mostly because I was fairly culturally ignorant myself at the time.
 
Sumeragi said:
Funny how I consider the Domination his best writing; with it he at least seemed to know what he was doing, compared to the constant annoyance of fantasy + culturally ignorant BS that Peshawar gave off.
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Stirling really should write more original/fantasy settings, since his grasp on history/RL tend to range from bad to questionable.

I still like ISOT/Emberverse, however.
 
I admit I'm bias towards ISOT even if it's probably far more full of kinks then it should be. Admittedly that's because ISOT sparked a life long interest in Time Travel, Alt History and the bronze age for me, so it was kind of my gateway into this genre so that creates some bias. I need to reread intently it one of these days to see how well it holds up.
 
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