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

Space Oddity said:
The man who made it had an informal reward named after him that was handed out during the Turtledoves.

AH.com is a community that tends to avoid admitting it has serious problems in some areas.
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He was also one of the first members to die while the board was active and had a lot of friends. I don't think it the award was named because his political beliefs were so admirable.

Also, the lost cause version of the war was taught pretty consistently in US primary education until very recently, and it was very much the consensus view. It is only recently more accurate history has started to make inroads into the public consciousness. It is one reason why so many Gen-Xers and Bab y Boomers are so defensive of the Confederacy. They were taught a highly sympathetic version of it along with all the rest of their history from a supposedly trustworthy source.
 
mesonoxian said:
He was also one of the first members to die while the board was active and had a lot of friends. I don't think it the award was named because his political beliefs were so admirable.
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It was a combination of his death, his friends among the membership, and the general feeling that he was a major TL contributor that produced the award, yes, with his politics being largely ignored. However, various moves to table the award due to the optics were rather pointedly rebuffed for years.
 
Space Oddity said:
It was a combination of his death, his friends among the membership, and the general feeling that he was a major TL contributor that produced the award, yes, with his politics being largely ignored. However, various moves to table the award due to the optics were rather pointedly rebuffed for years.
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I think that isn't inappropriate. I didn't know him, but a lot of people did. He wasn't a world leader, just a writer and friend they wanted to memorialize.
 
LHB said:
The problem with any sort of Allies vs Axis World War on this scale is it requires massive changes to Nazi Germany, some of which are in direct violation of ideological imperatives or the power dynamics that put them in charge, that you aren't talking historical Nazis to begin with. This is compounded by the fact that the Nazis barely had enough fuel to run their war machine as-is, starting in 1942 were being outproduced just by the Soviet Union and the possibility of them invading Britain before invading the USSR has been debated to death with the consensus being such a feat is totally impossible under all but the most optimal of conditions. AANW is the closest you'll get and that one, by the author's own admission, depends on a massive handwave to even happen at all.
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I think you'd basically need a timeline in which Western Europe including Britain went full fascist-sympathizer and actively supported the Nazis against the communists, only for the Nazis to turn on other Western European nations after the Soviets were safely disposed of and the Nazis had gotten more time to build up an integrated war machine that utilized the resources of Central and Eastern Europe. Sort of a reversal of how things played out with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, plus stretching out the timeline more and with more active fifth-columnist behavior by right-wingers in Britain and France.
 
I recently read Turtledove's The Hot War, the first book in his new-ish "cold war goes hot" series. The flashpoint is Truman nuking Manchuria in 1951.

There's plenty of not great stuff in the book, but a few things stood out for me.

Capitalists don't have radar

For context, the escalation to full nuclear war happens in stages. All of the Soviet attacks are surprises
  1. In retaliation for the attack on Manchuria, Stalin attacks mid-tier cities in Germany, Britain, and France with nuclear weapons
  2. Truman responds by nuking the Soviet airbase in former Finland that launched the attacks in Europe
  3. Stalin then retaliates by nuking an airbase in Alaska
  4. Stalin begins a conventional invasion of Europe, and the US nukes several logistics hubs in Eastern Europe
  5. Stalin launches a surprise nuclear strike on the US West Coast
  6. The US retaliates and destroys many Soviet cities
Now, you may be thinking "but wait, how on earth did Stalin manage to pull off three separate surprise nuclear strikes"? Well, Turtledove has an answer for you:
  1. The main Soviet strategic bomber was the TU-4, a reverse-engineered copy of the B-29 that was nearly identical
  2. The Soviets painted them with US colors
That's it. The Soviets managed to launch a surprise nuclear strike on the West Coast, at night and during wartime, by painting their bombers to look like US bombers. After they did the same thing twice before. Oh, and multiple POV characters (at least three) openly voice their concerns about this exact ruse to their superior officers, who say they will report it up the chain, in true Turtledove fashion of foreshadowing with a flare gun

Asiatic Hordes

"Urra! Urra!" The chant got louder, and higher in pitch. He knew what that meant. "They're coming!" he bawled, and peeped out behind the Mercedes again. Coming they were, and just as he remembered from the old days: rank after rank of men, arms linked..." - Turtledove 171

But the rest of the Red Army men closed ranks, linked arms, and came on. They were as impervious to doubt or damage as they had been on the Ostfront a few years before. Vodka and fear of their own secret police both had to play a part in that" - Turtledove 209​

Your brave hero is Gustav Hozzel, a Wermacht veteran of the Ostfront who volunteers for a militia company after the Soviets invade West Germany (and who the Americans inexplicably equip with a Springfield bolt-action in 1951, but I digress...).

The Soviet army in 1951, despite being just a few years removed from being arguably the largest and most veteran fighting force in human history, has apparently decided to eschew armored vehicles, machineguns, artillery, or the very concept of cover. No, the New Soviet Man links arms with his fraternal comrades and marches toward machineguns while drunk off his ass and singing songs, haunted by blocking battalions and chekist death squads. Just as he did in 1944, when our friend Gustav was wounded while defending...Poland.

This is really bad on Turtledove's part - the Soviets absolutely did not make a common practice of charging trenches with arms interlinked and when drunk. There are reports of some Soviet formations doing that in the bad old days of 1941, but for most of WW2 the Soviets attacked with massive superiority in armor and artillery, using veteran soldiers to attack in the non-suicidal ways that veterans conduct attacks against machinegun nests.

The Soviet army in 1951 would still be chock full of veterans from the Great Patriotic War, and was very large and very well equipped with heavy weaponry. Turtledove provides some justification by claiming that Soviet armored divisions were out of fuel thanks to American logistics warfare (apparently the USSR was not introduced to the concept of supply depots?), but his use of Nazi stereotypes of Russian soldiers as drunk barbarians who attacked in suicidal human wave attacks is inexcusable for somebody who has studied WW2 as much as Turtledove has
 
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Oh god, I knew something was off with the whole Soviet retaliation plan going off without even a hitch. Yeah, radar totally would have screwed them wouldn't it? "Hey, inexplicable plane flying towards location A, who are you and what's your heading?"
 
Silent Runner said:
That wouldn't be out of place if it was a sniper rifle-but that isn't the case is it?
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No, it was the standard rifle given to German militiamen fighting against the Soviets. I'm pretty sure the US was giving away M1s as souvenirs at this point, they had so many. Let alone captured German equipment.

But no, let's ship over rifles that are 20+ years out of date just in case

serra2 said:
Oh god, I knew something was off with the whole Soviet retaliation plan going off without even a hitch. Yeah, radar totally would have screwed them wouldn't it? "Hey, inexplicable plane flying towards location A, who are you and what's your heading?"
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There was some vague justification about flying low, but even then there are other ways to detect bombers. "Hmm, what is this large flight of dozens of bombers coming directly from the USSR when none of our planes are in the area?"

There's other issues with that bombing attack too - why on earth would Stalin throw away every bomber and nuke he had to hit the West Coast, when he could just nuke Rotterdam, Antwerp, etc and stop US/UK reinforcements and supplies from making it to the Continent to fight his armies
 
Silent Runner said:
That wouldn't be out of place if it was a sniper rifle-but that isn't the case is it?
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Marines were using the Springfield at Guadalcanal, and some where still using it as their main rifle all the way up to Okinawa. The Army got first dibs on the Garand, and then the Marines had to share theirs with the numbers needed to replace those the Army lost in the field. The Marines, being Marines, turned it into something to be proud of and put skill as a riflemen above all others. Who needs eight rounds when Marines make all five count? It's something that at the corps of their ethos now.

I can maybe see some Marines keeping them by 1951, but they'd be the designated marksmen and the like. But force wide, Army included? No way. Hell, by 1951 there were those pushing for the US to look at and adopt the brand new FN-FAL our European allies were really interested in.

Yes, that play on words was intentional. Sue me.
 
bigseb31213 said:
There was some vague justification about flying low, but even then there are other ways to detect bombers. "Hmm, what is this large flight of dozens of bombers coming directly from the USSR when none of our planes are in the area?"
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Also, there's the slightly inconvenient fact that the Tu-4 didn't have the range to reach the continental US and still carry a useful combat load.
 
Silent Runner said:
Also, there's the slightly inconvenient fact that the Tu-4 didn't have the range to reach the continental US and still carry a useful combat load.
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Ayup. In the 50's the US wasn't worried about the Soviets being able to reach the west coast so much as we were worried about the Soviets steamrolling Europe and using the bases and resources there to attack us. The USSR had no chance of getting a force across the Pacific undetected and/or in one piece, not even to Alaska. But storming Europe and striking across the Atlantic? Comparatively much easier.

Not even the Bear wanted to tangle with the USN in open water if they could avoid it, which is exactly what a Pacific assault would have required the entire way. Not to say the Japan, Australia and all the islands in the South Pacific wouldn't have been turned into burning warzones, but it would have been to pin down allied forces to keep them from hitting the USSR, not to use them as staging areas to cross the Pacific.
 
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bigseb31213 said:
Yes that was an issue. It was handwaved away by making the Soviet attack a one-way trip launched from secret bases in the Soviet very far east, which might work on paper?
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Nope. Not with first generation A-bombs. Too heavy. Stalin's TU-4s would have come down in the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and the West Coast
 
Simon_Jester said:
I think you'd basically need a timeline in which Western Europe including Britain went full fascist-sympathizer and actively supported the Nazis against the communists, only for the Nazis to turn on other Western European nations after the Soviets were safely disposed of and the Nazis had gotten more time to build up an integrated war machine that utilized the resources of Central and Eastern Europe. Sort of a reversal of how things played out with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, plus stretching out the timeline more and with more active fifth-columnist behavior by right-wingers in Britain and France.
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That wouldn't be as hard as you'd think.

The more allies the Soviet Union has, the more desperate countries like Britain would be to contain it. Especially if those are allies that Britain is actually very afraid of being hostile to the existence of its empire like Japan or especially America.
 
I like reading WW3 scenarios even if they aren't amazing- the concept's interesting to me. But one series that's badly written is the Battlefield series. 4 books. The escalation to full war (using Ukraine) is actually intriguing and different from other modern WW3 AH in how it's done, but the execution of the thing goes off the rails eventually. Russia leaving the Baltics alone for months in a full scale war against NATO, potraying left leaning figures in not-so-positive ways (all college campuses are full of commie traitors, the leader of the British Labour Party is LITERALLY a Russian stooge and received support from Russia), logistical issues (if the USN loses 38 ships in one battle, is it able to support an invasion of the Philippines the next week?) and poor grammar and spelling in sections. Just...no. Even for me.
 
Turtledove is getting on in years and may be suffering from a degree of "meh, whatever"-ism?

He may also be reaching a level of fame and status (promoted in part by that huge surge of writing he did in the '90s to put his kids through college) where people view him as "master of alternate history" and no one has the guts to actually edit his work or tell him he's bullshitting on a premise.

I've always thought Turtledove is at his best writing medieval and fantasy works, really.
 
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Turtledove peaked with Worldwar/Colonisation and hasn't really made anything on the same level since.
 
This is more of a general complaint, but one thing I'll always find annoying is how so many serious WW2 alternate histories have the Nazis winning in some fashion. It's been done so often that at this point it just seems lazy unless it's a footnote in a vastly larger story. One of the few examples I can think of it being done well occurs in Patton's Spaceship; an entry in a series of novels dealing with universe-hopping, time-travelling Carthaginians fighting a trans-time war against alternate-universe future Athenians. (The Carthaginians were responsible).

I reckon if you want to write a WW2 alternate history story where things are drastically different, you're best off figuring out a way to use the Soviet Union.
 
Simon_Jester said:
He may also be reaching a level of fame and status (promoted in part by that huge surge of writing he did in the '90s to put his kids through college) where people view him as "master of alternate history" and no one has the guts to actually edit his work or tell him he's bullshitting on a premise.
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Also known as "Protection From Editors", or David Weber Syndrome. (At least to people who thought David Weber was all he's cracked up to be even before it set in.)
 
Terra Novan said:
...What? I knew Turtledove can get lazy with his writing, but this is just too much. How did things get this bad?
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He had some pretty fundamental issues from the start, and having to drag out series for those college fund bucks didn't help. Moreover, he's a "pop-AH" writer who doesn't have a target audience of history enthusiasts, so he has to keep divergences blatant and play to a pop-culture crowd that either won't notice or won't care about inaccuracies.
 
prometheus110 said:
This is more of a general complaint, but one thing I'll always find annoying is how so many serious WW2 alternate histories have the Nazis winning in some fashion...
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Good authors do it because it's dramatic. The Nazis make very good villains for storytelling.

Bad authors do it for a much broader complex of reasons.

Jake said:
Also known as "Protection From Editors", or David Weber Syndrome. (At least to people who thought David Weber was all he's cracked up to be even before it set in.)
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Well, it's not that I ever thought Weber was one of the great authors of history, but back in the '90s he was at least competent in the technical execution of his work. He could set up a plotline and resolve it in a timely manner, without everything dissolving into a fog cloud of six different Highly Concerned Councils of Vagueness discussing the ramifications of each other's discussions of the ramifications of the last plot-relevant event, namely the one that happened two novels ago. :p

Basically, there are several forms of Protection From Editors Syndrome:
1) Author's technical execution of the writing itself remains constant, but now includes objectionable content of a political, sexual, or other type.
2) Author's work is unobjectionable, but padded out with ridiculous amounts of filler, i.e. David Weber Syndrome.
3) Author's work is competently executed but the plots become dull or poorly thought out.

There's probably others I haven't thought of.
 
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