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Tomn posted:I really like "Lest Darkness Fall" for that reason - it's a pretty silly story in a lot of ways (good ways, mind you) and it's based on now-outdated views of history, but unlike a lot of more recent time-travel stories it acknowledges the difficulty of convincing people in that time to go along with the crazy time traveler's plans, as well as acknowledging that just because you know guns exist and are a thing doesn't mean you have anywhere near the personal ability to make guns. It's also notable that the key technological revolution that allowed the hero to win his final battle wasn't any kind of weapon at all - it was the telegraph that allowed reinforcements to arrive in time, while the rest of it was down to good old-fashioned generalship. Seems much more spot on than the more common "And now we have invented the early machine gun, let all cower before our hail of bullets!" He's probably aware of Alien Space Bats at least.
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Apr 18, 2015 14:40
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One thing that kind of bothers me about alternate history is that it seems to be always focused on wars - I cannot think of a novel that would work with the premise of a, say, invention or a philosophical priniciple being discovered elsewhere or elsewhen. The implications are obviously more subtle but it would be an interesting twist on the old and tired military variations.
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Apr 18, 2015 19:08
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anilEhilated posted:One thing that kind of bothers me about alternate history is that it seems to be always focused on wars - I cannot think of a novel that would work with the premise of a, say, invention or a philosophical priniciple being discovered elsewhere or elsewhen. The implications are obviously more subtle but it would be an interesting twist on the old and tired military variations. Well, there's Voyage, which revolves around Kennedy not being assassinated butterflying into a manned Mars landing in the late 80s (at the cost of basically eviscerating 'literally everything else we've learned about space in those 25 years'). There's a lot of stuff out there; even the What If anthologies have an examination of 'what if the potato hadn't taken root in Peru to be discovered by Pizarro and brought back to Europe'? Short stories tend to have a bit better time of it, sure, but there's a reason most alternate history tends to focus on military stuff. Two major reasons, actually. 1. It's more popular. 2. It's easier to have small changes cause major ramifications in chaotic environments. Easiest place to have that, and the place where a lot of people can most intuitively see small changes having a large effect, is warfare. Like I said, you may want to investigate some short story collections for your fix. Short stories tend to get a bit more imaginative with their points of departure. Years of Rice and Salt comes to mind as another thing that isn't war-focused, though, at novel length.
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Apr 18, 2015 19:29
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anilEhilated posted:One thing that kind of bothers me about alternate history is that it seems to be always focused on wars - I cannot think of a novel that would work with the premise of a, say, invention or a philosophical priniciple being discovered elsewhere or elsewhen. The implications are obviously more subtle but it would be an interesting twist on the old and tired military variations. I tend to most enjoy stories focused around politics. One which I recently read is called The Fourth Lectern (which was written and published on Amazon as an e-book by one of the regulars on alternatehistory.com) which looks at what might have happened if UKIP had been involved in the UK general election debates back in 2010; he also wrote a sequel (called Maybe the Horse Will Learn to Sing) which looks at the subsequent election in 2014.
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Apr 18, 2015 19:31
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The best thing to come out of AH.com will always be The Anglo-American/Nazi War. That TL. 
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Apr 18, 2015 21:39
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Mycroft Holmes posted:The best thing to come out of AH.com will always be The Anglo-American/Nazi War. That TL. Either that or Protect and Survive
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Apr 18, 2015 21:54
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anilEhilated posted:One thing that kind of bothers me about alternate history is that it seems to be always focused on wars - I cannot think of a novel that would work with the premise of a, say, invention or a philosophical priniciple being discovered elsewhere or elsewhen. The implications are obviously more subtle but it would be an interesting twist on the old and tired military variations. Check out The Years of Rice and Salt.
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Apr 18, 2015 22:03
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Has anyone read the 'Outlander' series of books? It's about a WW1 nurse that gets transported back to 18th century Scotland. I'm watching the series now and its brilliant but haven't heard much about the books although they're apparently popular. Although I do think they underestimate the impact an extra couple of hundred years of medical knowledge would have on society.
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Apr 18, 2015 22:46
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Mycroft Holmes posted:The best thing to come out of AH.com will always be The Anglo-American/Nazi War. That TL. I remember really enjoying Fear and Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail, 1972, but I went sour on it eventually. I just don't like stories that keep piling on misery upon misery. It has a sequel which is updated occasionally and I sometimes check in to see what's happening: the premise is that Donald Rumsfeld is elected president in 1980 and the entire world goes to hell because Rumsfeld, at least as he's portrayed here, is an honest-to-goodness psychopath. Not my cup of tea these days. I mostly enjoy stuff like the one where Britain's post-war prime ministers are all in office out of order and John Major is portrayed as "a wide boy running a pyramid scheme".
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Apr 18, 2015 22:55
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Wheat Loaf posted:I remember really enjoying Fear and Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail, 1972, but I went sour on it eventually. I just don't like stories that keep piling on misery upon misery. It has a sequel which is updated occasionally and I sometimes check in to see what's happening: the premise is that Donald Rumsfeld is elected president in 1980 and the entire world goes to hell because Rumsfeld, at least as he's portrayed here, is an honest-to-goodness psychopath. Speaking of British Politics I always liked the Randolf Churchill time line which sees Franch and Britain fight a colonial war in the 1890s an d ends with Britain and half the empire under Syndicalism, with a much more reinvigorated china and a German dominated eastern Europe, and Al Capone as President of a isolationist France . Yeah fear and loathing is kind of like a hate read now, I loved it right up through 83 at which point the author seemed to decide that he just wanted to wreck the USA and India for no real reason. Even funnier when one sees how early on he seemed to be going for more of a USA that had retreated from the world stage and suggested a India that was actually better economically than now, but oh well, people seemed to liked the full on maximum dystopia and he gave them it. What did you think about the 2nd American Civil War timeline?
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Apr 19, 2015 04:13
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Tomn posted:I really like "Lest Darkness Fall" for that reason - it's a pretty silly story in a lot of ways (good ways, mind you) and it's based on now-outdated views of history, but unlike a lot of more recent time-travel stories it acknowledges the difficulty of convincing people in that time to go along with the crazy time traveler's plans, as well as acknowledging that just because you know guns exist and are a thing doesn't mean you have anywhere near the personal ability to make guns. It's also notable that the key technological revolution that allowed the hero to win his final battle wasn't any kind of weapon at all - it was the telegraph that allowed reinforcements to arrive in time, while the rest of it was down to good old-fashioned generalship. Seems much more spot on than the more common "And now we have invented the early machine gun, let all cower before our hail of bullets!"
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Apr 19, 2015 04:30
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Crowsbeak posted:Speaking of British Politics I always liked the Randolf Churchill time line which sees Franch and Britain fight a colonial war in the 1890s an d ends with Britain and half the empire under Syndicalism, with a much more reinvigorated china and a German dominated eastern Europe, and Al Capone as President of a isolationist France . Yeah fear and loathing is kind of like a hate read now, I loved it right up through 83 at which point the author seemed to decide that he just wanted to wreck the USA and India for no real reason. Even funnier when one sees how early on he seemed to be going for more of a USA that had retreated from the world stage and suggested a India that was actually better economically than now, but oh well, people seemed to liked the full on maximum dystopia and he gave them it. That one's pretty good. The WWIII TL in the writers section is pretty good as well.
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Apr 19, 2015 07:00
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