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

ScottishMongol · Jan 7, 2021

Here's something new to add:

A few years ago I read a novel called a Long Time Until Now by...I forget the author. Anyway, it's about a US Army platoon in Afghanistan that suddenly gets sent back to the Paleolithic. Later a Roman century and some odds and ends also show up. It's actually a pretty good novel for the most part, balancing the unit trying to survive in the past with some pretty compelling drama as the soldiers struggle with psychological issues; they deal with isolation, one develops symptoms of PTSD after a fight with some downtimers, etc. I'd never seen an ISOT novel delve into the psychological effects and it was pretty well executed. There's also some pretty decent interpersonal drama as they struggle with the question of whether they'll ever get home, balanced against the urge to maintain their military discipline.

"Hang on, this doesn't sound so bad. What's the catch?"

They go back to the future.

Okay, okay, maybe that's not a terrible idea on paper - but in the process the book shelves all that juicy conflict without needing to resolve it, which felt cheap. What's more is the way the plot wraps up.

Super advanced humans from the future show up and rescue everyone, take them to the future, and then send them back to their own time periods. And then the platoon gets taken in by the CIA after being missing for a year and told to stick to the cover story that they'd been held hostage by insurgents, and they all agree to never speak of it again. Uh huh.

Also everyone in the future is white. One of the characters points this out. Yikes.

Anyway it turns out the author was some right-wing crank, which I wish I'd known before giving him my money.

Skywalker_T-65 · Jan 7, 2021

I think I remember seeing that on Amazon before. Never bothered with it, though.

Sarthaka · Jan 8, 2021

Over at AH.com, something that just irks me is the pre-determined determinism that something must happen. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which required over 7 million casualties, starving to death, and the royal family fleeing the country and the government totally collapsing to collapse is pre-determined to collapse, because why? Even in 1917 the empire only had ethnic groups asking for more autonomy and a greater say in the empire, and not independence. It took 7 million casualties, people starving to death, the imperial government collapsing, the army being destroyed and being pushed back on 3 fronts for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to collapse. It's collapse was not pre-determined or something. Same in regards to the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, USSR (the fall of the USSR was a fluke in all honesty), and other states. There is nothing pre-determined. That determinism in many topics in AH.com just turn me off real bad.

Jack Jack · Jan 8, 2021

ScottishMongol said:
Here's something new to add:

A few years ago I read a novel called a Long Time Until Now by...I forget the author. Anyway, it's about a US Army platoon in Afghanistan that suddenly gets sent back to the Paleolithic. Later a Roman century and some odds and ends also show up. It's actually a pretty good novel for the most part, balancing the unit trying to survive in the past with some pretty compelling drama as the soldiers struggle with psychological issues; they deal with isolation, one develops symptoms of PTSD after a fight with some downtimers, etc. I'd never seen an ISOT novel delve into the psychological effects and it was pretty well executed. There's also some pretty decent interpersonal drama as they struggle with the question of whether they'll ever get home, balanced against the urge to maintain their military discipline.

"Hang on, this doesn't sound so bad. What's the catch?"

They go back to the future.

Okay, okay, maybe that's not a terrible idea on paper - but in the process the book shelves all that juicy conflict without needing to resolve it, which felt cheap. What's more is the way the plot wraps up.

Super advanced humans from the future show up and rescue everyone, take them to the future, and then send them back to their own time periods. And then the platoon gets taken in by the CIA after being missing for a year and told to stick to the cover story that they'd been held hostage by insurgents, and they all agree to never speak of it again. Uh huh.

Also everyone in the future is white. One of the characters points this out. Yikes.

Anyway it turns out the author was some right-wing crank, which I wish I'd known before giving him my money.

Michael Z. Williamson - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This is the author If you all want to know

Simon_Jester · Jan 8, 2021

DeusExMachina said:
Over at AH.com, something that just irks me is the pre-determined determinism that something must happen. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which required over 7 million casualties, starving to death, and the royal family fleeing the country and the government totally collapsing to collapse is pre-determined to collapse, because why? Even in 1917 the empire only had ethnic groups asking for more autonomy and a greater say in the empire, and not independence. It took 7 million casualties, people starving to death, the imperial government collapsing, the army being destroyed and being pushed back on 3 fronts for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to collapse. It's collapse was not pre-determined or something. Same in regards to the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, USSR (the fall of the USSR was a fluke in all honesty), and other states. There is nothing pre-determined. That determinism in many topics in AH.com just turn me off real bad.

It can require an amazingly detailed level of understanding of any given subject to predict whether or not it would be butterflied by a change in alternate history. Debates about whether something was or was not likely to happen, as opposed to some kind of fluke, can go on for centuries.

And since a lot of timeline crafter types start out getting BAD feedback for throwing in gratuitous screwball departures, hit with "this happened for a reason and would still happen," the tendency is to overcompensate in the other direction and just not change anything if one doesn't have specific ideas about why and how it happened.

Which is why you get "Nothing Ever Happens In South America," for example.

prometheus110 · Jan 8, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
It can require an amazingly detailed level of understanding of any given subject to predict whether or not it would be butterflied by a change in alternate history. Debates about whether something was or was not likely to happen, as opposed to some kind of fluke, can go on for centuries.

And since a lot of timeline crafter types start out getting BAD feedback for throwing in gratuitous screwball departures, hit with "this happened for a reason and would still happen," the tendency is to overcompensate in the other direction and just not change anything if one doesn't have specific ideas about why and how it happened.

Which is why you get "Nothing Ever Happens In South America," for example.

It's honestly extremely annoying that having "realistic" turning points has been turned into a shibboleth by some people when it comes to Alternate History. Granted there'll probably always a balancing act between "How could X actually happen?" and "what makes a good story?" but I reckon writers should 100% be allowed to write absolutely batshit divergences if they want.

Is it realistic to have a giant energy dome cover the contiguous United States on the eve of the Iraq war and turn the people there into soup? Nope. Do I want to read what happens next? Yes (and I did. It's called Without Warning and I recall it being interesting enough).

Simon_Jester · Jan 8, 2021

The problem isn't the bizarre, screwy, supernatural-intervention points of departure.

It's when people just casually throw in something like "oh yeah and in my timeline X won the War of Y against Z" because they like that as an idea, while failing to remember that X was hilariously outnumbered and outgunned and lost the war for a reason. Which can become kind of teeth-gritting because it leads to wanks and general random bullshit getting thrown in, and because it's often coming from people who have to be laboriously educated about the reasons X lost... and there's a neverending stream of such people, so the older you get the more annoying it gets.

There's a real, understandable reason to push back against casual "oh yeah, and then ridiculous thing happened because I'm too clueless to even understand why it wouldn't happen" entries in a timeline... But it does create the perverse incentive to insist on as-OTL sequences of events in cases where that means overlooking how much potential there is for butterflies.

[Though that's also a conservation of detail issue; the more butterflies you acknowledge the harder it is to keep track of what's going on]

Jake · Jan 8, 2021

Jack Jack said:
Michael Z. Williamson - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This is the author If you all want to know

Ah, yes. The guy who decided to put a fresh spin on the tired old "The Vietnam War, but on an alien planet" plot by having his alleged "heroes" commit something very obviously inspired by the My Lai massacre and portray it as justified and necessary.

I didn't buy another Baen book for about five years after that.

Terra Allias · Jan 8, 2021

ScottishMongol said:
Also everyone in the future is white. One of the characters points this out. Yikes.

Anyway it turns out the author was some right-wing crank, which I wish I'd known before giving him my money.

Was there a reason given for that or is affirmative action not a thing anymore

Jack Jack said:
Michael Z. Williamson - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This is the author If you all want to know

I've always wanted to lampoon the outwordly strong but inwardly pathetic liberal government thing by having them shit "goof guy" ass

Zagan7 · Jan 8, 2021

Jake said:
Maybe so, but the burden of proof that their perception of the story is incorrect lies with you. Particularly if the complaints begin to form a pattern.

Makes sense.

General_Urist said:
1. It's easy to declare that someone does or does not perceive a work as doing something, but who can declare what it actually DOES do? Interesting philosphy, but on SV that someone seems to be the moderators and arbiters. So best to clear things with them.

2.The mods on SV have shown themselves to be rather strict on fictional depictions of despicable acts sometimes (as some threads about Warhammer Fantasy have found out the hard way), so now that this discussion happened it's probably better that you contact and ask them. If not about WWCTEW specifically, then about what is permissible in general. I personally don't think the Imperial Effect is in the same realm as genocide, but best to play it safe. Plus SV's moderation has the "pirate principle" - if it looks like you're openly declaring you don't care for what the moderator's standards are, they will go much harder on you. Asking the staff will at least make it clear you're acting int good faith. And if it turns out that re-writing the opening sections of the TL is necessary to comply with the rules, better find out sooner rather than later. Worst case scenario, you're temporarily confined to AH.com until a rewrite happens.

(and in case something goes wrong there too, you DO keep local backups, right?)

Very interesting. I like hearing about the background thought process behind timelines. I admit I haven't re-read the opening chapters lately, so I don't clearly remember how egregious the Imperial Effect was then. In any case, I too think it's best to finish the story, since it sounds like a rewrite of the early sections won't impact the broad strokes. Curious how much detail you'll go into, even if the war is over there are a lot of decades left in the 20th century.

The staff of SV seem fair and I trust their judgement.

I know of the pirate principle and I've never done something like that. I fully support the authority of the staff to run their site as they seem fit.

Yes, I have backups.

Simon_Jester said:
To be fair, it's reasonable for the author to say "a bunch of y'all who are unfamiliar with my timeline's details have randomly started complaining about it now that it's been promoted to your attention, without taking time to adequately familiarize yourselves with it, and now you are committing factual errors on the level of "Cowboy Bebop At His Computer." "

And jumbo-criticism threads like this DO lend themselves to that phenomenon- complaining about stuff you haven't read, or have only skimmed, or read only AFTER someone told you to look for problematic themes so that you end up strip-mining the work for evidence to support its badness.

It's something to watch for.

That is an interesting take on the matter.

Simon_Jester · Jan 8, 2021

Zagan7 said:
That is an interesting take on the matter.

I would take it as a courtesy if you would either not comment on my views, or express an actual opinion, so that I have some way to respond other than wondering what you're even trying to say.

Zagan7 · Jan 8, 2021

Simon_Jester said:
I would take it as a courtesy if you would either not comment on my views, or express an actual opinion, so that I have some way to respond other than wondering what you're even trying to say.

Oh, sorry. I meant I supported your point of view.

Skywalker_T-65 · Jan 8, 2021

To tie into the point a bit above:

You know how I mentioned being off-and-on tempted to write the Greek Plan as a timeline because of how wacky it is?* Yeah, the main reason I haven't done that is the tendency to jump in and go NAH NAH YOU WRONG if you try and write some of the more wacky stuff that isn't technically ASB. Or just in general try to write weird divergences beyond the cliche and done to death. I've gotten into several arguments with people over Austria-Hungary, to use that example, as well.

The Greek Plan issue is, as I think I've brought up before, one guy who jumps into literally any thread even tangentially related to Russia pre-1900 (this is also why I haven't done any of my various Swedish ideas) to go YOU WRONG. I swear, it's impossible to find a good Russian timeline in pre-1900 without that guy trying to stir the pot and tell the author and/or readers why they're wrong about everything. Not helped by a tendency of some people on the website to deliberately tag the 'experts' to drag them into threads they may otherwise have not seen.

EDIT: I could do the same with Naval History for just about any country, by the by. I don't, because it's a dick move and I'd rather not be 'that guy' who makes people not want to write something. If the timeline is interesting, I may give gentle corrections, but I'm not going to tear someone a new one just because they're wrong on something.

*the amount of changes are silly. Austria would be completely different. Russia would act in new and divergent ways. Who even knows how the Greeks/Neo-Byzantines would develop, once Russia inevitably falters.

Z-Cosmonaut · Jan 8, 2021

Skywalker_T-65 said:
The Greek Plan issue is, as I think I've brought up before, one guy who jumps into literally any thread even tangentially related to Russia pre-1900 (this is also why I haven't done any of my various Swedish ideas) to go YOU WRONG. I swear, it's impossible to find a good Russian timeline in pre-1900 without that guy trying to stir the pot and tell the author and/or readers why they're wrong about everything. Not helped by a tendency of some people on the website to deliberately tag the 'experts' to drag them into threads they may otherwise have not seen.

Yes, oh God yes, I think I know who and what you're talking about. It'd so annoying that this happens so much. And it's not just timelines, any discussion about Russia causes people to drag that one person in, and all I can go is "Why are you even on a website about AH"? I mean I can think of a lot of people like that, but this person has to be on damn near every thread about Russia because suddenly the whole community decided that they were the expert on Russia, and so they must bring them on every topic that mentions it in any form.

Comrade Future · Jan 8, 2021

Skywalker_T-65 said:
The Greek Plan issue is, as I think I've brought up before, one guy who jumps into literally any thread even tangentially related to Russia pre-1900 (this is also why I haven't done any of my various Swedish ideas) to go YOU WRONG. I swear, it's impossible to find a good Russian timeline in pre-1900 without that guy trying to stir the pot and tell the author and/or readers why they're wrong about everything. Not helped by a tendency of some people on the website to deliberately tag the 'experts' to drag them into threads they may otherwise have not seen.

Well, to be honest, in Western historiography, there are many works dedicated to Russia .... are of a very peculiar character.

BBadolato · Jan 8, 2021

Skywalker_T-65 said:
The Greek Plan issue is, as I think I've brought up before, one guy who jumps into literally any thread even tangentially related to Russia pre-1900 (this is also why I haven't done any of my various Swedish ideas) to go YOU WRONG. I swear, it's impossible to find a good Russian timeline in pre-1900 without that guy trying to stir the pot and tell the author and/or readers why they're wrong about everything. Not helped by a tendency of some people on the website to deliberately tag the 'experts' to drag them into threads they may otherwise have not seen.

EDIT: I could do the same with Naval History for just about any country, by the by. I don't, because it's a dick move and I'd rather not be 'that guy' who makes people not want to write something. If the timeline is interesting, I may give gentle corrections, but I'm not going to tear someone a new one just because they're wrong on something.

If this is who I think it is assuming it's not me since I can be bad about that too in some scenarios, then I feel it's one of the biggest issues of AH.com and perhaps as a genre as a whole. Once you get past Europe, usually Rome, England/Britain, France, Germany, the United States, WW2, and maybe the Cold War there are just periods that are black holes for many that they either play it safe, or you get people with even cursory knowledge of some periods as the closest thing to expert, which I probably guilty of. And this is before you get into knowledge gaps.

EBR · Jan 8, 2021

ScottishMongol said:
Here's something new to add:

A few years ago I read a novel called a Long Time Until Now by...I forget the author. Anyway, it's about a US Army platoon in Afghanistan that suddenly gets sent back to the Paleolithic. Later a Roman century and some odds and ends also show up. It's actually a pretty good novel for the most part, balancing the unit trying to survive in the past with some pretty compelling drama as the soldiers struggle with psychological issues; they deal with isolation, one develops symptoms of PTSD after a fight with some downtimers, etc. I'd never seen an ISOT novel delve into the psychological effects and it was pretty well executed. There's also some pretty decent interpersonal drama as they struggle with the question of whether they'll ever get home, balanced against the urge to maintain their military discipline.

"Hang on, this doesn't sound so bad. What's the catch?"

They go back to the future.

Okay, okay, maybe that's not a terrible idea on paper - but in the process the book shelves all that juicy conflict without needing to resolve it, which felt cheap. What's more is the way the plot wraps up.

Super advanced humans from the future show up and rescue everyone, take them to the future, and then send them back to their own time periods. And then the platoon gets taken in by the CIA after being missing for a year and told to stick to the cover story that they'd been held hostage by insurgents, and they all agree to never speak of it again. Uh huh.

Also everyone in the future is white. One of the characters points this out. Yikes.

Anyway it turns out the author was some right-wing crank, which I wish I'd known before giving him my money.

That's awful. What makes it worse is that it sounds like it started out pretty solidly before just kind of falling to pieces at the end.

DeusExMachina said:
Over at AH.com, something that just irks me is the pre-determined determinism that something must happen. For example, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which required over 7 million casualties, starving to death, and the royal family fleeing the country and the government totally collapsing to collapse is pre-determined to collapse, because why? Even in 1917 the empire only had ethnic groups asking for more autonomy and a greater say in the empire, and not independence. It took 7 million casualties, people starving to death, the imperial government collapsing, the army being destroyed and being pushed back on 3 fronts for the Austro-Hungarian Empire to collapse. It's collapse was not pre-determined or something. Same in regards to the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, USSR (the fall of the USSR was a fluke in all honesty), and other states. There is nothing pre-determined. That determinism in many topics in AH.com just turn me off real bad.

There is a tendency in the field of history- not even AH but professional academic history- to regard historical events as inevitable because they happened, therefore they're inevitable. I just finished reading an excellent non-fiction book called "The Great Divergence" for my MA program that takes aim at the idea that Europe having an industrial revolution and achieving global hegemony and not, say, China or Japan, was inevitable.

Teen Spirit · Jan 8, 2021

People do treat certain historical events like they're fixed points in time out of doctor who.. The details may change but the events happen all the same. Scramble for Africa, Communist revolutions, empire collapsing, Europe dominating, etc etc. There are exceptions but on the whole.

EBR · Jan 8, 2021

Part of it may be that a world without those things risks being so different from our own that it becomes unrecognizable to readers.

Teen Spirit · Jan 8, 2021

EBR said:
Part of it may be that a world without those things risks being so different from our own that it becomes unrecognizable readers.

I think that gets into an issue of scale. At a certain point you're going to be dealing with situations beyond your general original idea and places you probably don't know as much about. So twisting events from RL into something that's smiliar yet different does make it easier to write certain things. Like Austria-Hungary collapsing does require a bit less work than trying to figure out what the region would look like if Austria-Hungary held together. Which is useful if the TL is not about Austria-Hungary.

I feel like a lot of my arguments come down to "People need to manage the scope of their projects better." but I feel like that is a serious issue in a lot of alt history.

Monter · Jan 8, 2021

BBadolato said:
If this is who I think it is assuming it's not me since I can be bad about that too in some scenarios, then I feel it's one of the biggest issues of AH.com and perhaps as a genre as a whole. Once you get past Europe, usually Rome, England/Britain, France, Germany, the United States, WW2, and maybe the Cold War there are just periods that are black holes for many that they either play it safe, or you get people with even cursory knowledge of some periods as the closest thing to expert, which I probably guilty of. And this is before you get into knowledge gaps.

What happens often, and I'm in no way free of that, is someone read a single (excelent) book on the subject and goes to the board with unparalleled wisdom on the subject, which is... worrying, since a single book is in no way the end to all be (specially if it is an introductory overview which are pretty shallow for a reason). Worst case is when dude feels confident enough to go blind on primary sources to see "the real history".

veteranMortal · Jan 8, 2021

Teen Spirit said:
People do treat certain historical events like they're fixed points in time out of doctor who.. The details may change but the events happen all the same. Scramble for Africa, Communist revolutions, empire collapsing, Europe dominating, etc etc. There are exceptions but on the whole.

I mean, empires collapse when they collapse for a reason, communist revolution was a pretty inevitable result of the industrial revolution.

Like, the details being different means you're just describing "general trends stay basically the same" which is just pretty on the face of it obvious?

ToothMaker · Jan 8, 2021

Jack Jack said:
Michael Z. Williamson - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This is the author If you all want to know

I've read a few of his books - I found them kind of meh. Not as readable as Ringo, but nowhere near as offensive as Kratman.

EBR said:
There is a tendency in the field of history- not even AH but professional academic history- to regard historical events as inevitable because they happened, therefore they're inevitable. I just finished reading an excellent non-fiction book called "The Great Divergence" for my MA program that takes aim at the idea that Europe having an industrial revolution and achieving global hegemony and not, say, China or Japan, was inevitable.

What was the conclusion? Could China or Japan have been the center of an industrial revolution given the issues they had?

EBR · Jan 8, 2021

ToothMaker said:
What was the conclusion? Could China or Japan have been the center of an industrial revolution given the issues they had?

The book was mostly dedicated to debunking explanations of why Europe did but they didn't (Europe didn't really have a freer market, technologically all three regions were roughly on par with each other even if they were ahead in different areas, Asian governments were not more authoritarian, philosophical and scientific discourse existed in all of these places, "Protestant work ethic" isn't really a thing, etc.) but it made the surprising argument that an industrial revolution happening at that point in time wasn't inevitable at all. The author advanced an argument that there were multiple places where an industrial revolution could have happened, and that it happened in Europe but not China, Japan, or (less likely) India was mostly but not entirely a product of lucky geography and Europe finding the New World first.

No discovery of the New World by Europeans, no European industrial revolution seemed to be this person's argument.

Teutonic_Thrash · Jan 8, 2021

EBR said:
The book was mostly dedicated to debunking explanations of why Europe did but they didn't (Europe didn't really have a freer market, technologically all three regions were roughly on par with each other even if they were ahead in different areas, Asian governments were not more authoritarian, philosophical and scientific discourse existed in all of these places, "Protestant work ethic" isn't really a thing, etc.) but it made the surprising argument that an industrial revolution happening at that point in time wasn't inevitable at all. The author advanced an argument that there were multiple places where an industrial revolution could have happened, and that it happened in Europe but not China, Japan, or (less likely) India was mostly but not entirely a product of lucky geography and Europe finding the New World first.

No discovery of the New World by Europeans, no European industrial revolution seemed to be this person's argument.

Is that Patricia Crone's Pre-Industrial Societies? The argument you've outlined is one I associate with her.

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

Writer with too many ideas.

Banned Forever

Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!

World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan

Alternate Historian

Alternate Historian

Writer with too many ideas.

Man from Zeerust

Experiencer of Bij

Lost in Ever After

Lost in Ever After

Gay and Stupid