|
Those would be the Island In The Sea of Time for the Nantucket-back-in-time series, and the Change World for the world-goes-to-poo poo series. With the latter, I believe it is a plot point that something went seriously wrong with the physical parameters of the universe to cause the premise of the book, but I can't say since I've never read them. You know, all online discussion of alternate history writers always ends up revolving around Turtledove, Stirling, Flint, and a bunch of Tor guys, so I want to toss out a few other titles I really liked that no one seems to have read. The Light Ages and The House of Storms by Ian R. MacLeod The premise of this one is that sometime in the late 17th century an English al/chemist discovered a substance called aether, a substance that can be alloyed with anything to make it responsive to human will. (The exact nature of aether is something that's kept ambiguous throughout both books.) Anyway, the two books are set centuries after the discovery, when aether has become the backbone of every aspect of English life, and has changed England to the point where it is barely recognizable. Both the monarchy and Parliament are gone, and England is ruled by a system of guilds akin to an old Hanseatic state. The world is industrialized, but war, colonialism, and scientific progress have basically ended. Even the Christian calendar and days of the week have been replaced. The overall effect is that MacLeod's England resembles a fantasy world more than a traditional "alternate history." (There's probably also a fair bit of Pavane in there, but since I haven't read Pavane I can't be sure.) The two books are essentially about the struggle between change and conservatism, as observed by passive main characters who are close to the main action, but never really affect it themselves. They're very much in the scientific-romance mold, and are very English. Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick This is a fun one. It's pretty much a materialist sf retelling of the Faust legend; in the early 16th century, the German alchemist Johannes Faust, angered by the inadequacy of the knowledge of his day, burns his library and invokes the dark powers to give him wisdom. Sure enough, Mephistopheles appears, this time around a composite entity operated by a civilization from another universe offering Faust all of the scientific knowledge of his universe. Faust accepts, and what follows is about 500 years of technological advancement crammed into five decades. You've got crazy poo poo like Faust nailing a copy of the periodic table to the door of a cathedral and the fight over the Spanish Armada being reimagined as a duel between Spanish ironclads and English missile cruisers. It ends in tears, but it wouldn't be Faust if it didn't. The Dog King by Christoph Ransmayr The broad premise for this one is that after WW2, the United States enacts the Morgenthau Plan on the defeated German states, deindustrializing them and instituting a punitive culture based around guilt and atonement. The story itself concerns a boy growing up in the Austrian Alps who's affected by this environment. Despite what I've written, it's not a nationalist screed; it's more of a meditation on the relationship between victims and victimizers, and on the limits of official cultures of remembrance. The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski This is probably pulpier than my other entries. A physician from the present gets thrown back in time, and tries to start changing history, only to end up dying on the Titanic. He does make one change, which results in a snowball effect up to the present day, when the world has become divided into two competing alliance systems centered around the world-empires of Imperial Germany and Japan. The bulk of the book is set in this world, focusing on the efforts of a bunch of characters to get ahold of a time machine and avert their reality, all while trying to avoid the chaos as the great standoff finally breaks down into apocalyptic war. It's not great (it's literally a phone book), but it's one of the few books out there to play with the idea of Germany winning WWI, so I have some affection for it.
|
#
¿
Jul 2, 2014 01:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 01:37 |
|
|
Freudian posted:I'm confused. The Mongol invasions were in the 1200s. The Black Death was in the mid-1300s. The first part of the book opens with Tamerlane's horde making their way through empty Hungary. Given the historical record, ballpark for that is ~1400 AD. As for YRS, I read it back in high school, but I haven't reread it since. I liked it at the time, but lately I've been puzzling over the fact that the 500 years without Europe doesn't...actually change much? I mean, a lot of events are different, but technological progress seems to tick on at about the same rate, the New World is discovered about a century later, the planet is industrialized in the 19th century, there's a WWI and a Weimar period. There's even a democratic superpower based in the central latitudes of the North American continent. There's even tons of characters that are allegorical to people in Western history. I suppose this ties into the theme of the book, but I haven't figured it out yet. My big personal disappointment (though it didn't mar the experience of reading the book) is the fact that KSR decided to wipe out the Kievian Rus states with the Black Death. I mean, c'mon, you're writing a book about a world without European modernity, and you leave out the one civilization that has had, by far, the most neurotic relationship with Europe of anyone in the world? What would happen to Russia if there was no European example? Hell, you could write a book on that subject alone.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2014 23:31
|
|
|
That sounds like Robert Silverberg's Gate of Worlds. There's also a small collection of short stories in that world that was published in '91. Also, if you want a reference library for alternate history stories, you need to check out uchronia.net. It's not as good as it used to be (its ability to keep on top of the new titles is...questionable), but it's useful if you want a whole bunch of stuff in one place. Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Jul 23, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2014 05:42
|
|
|
Well, on the subject of ol' Josef Vissarionovich, Harry Turtledove has expanded his old short story "Joe Steele" into a full-length novel that's coming out next year. The premise for this one is that the Djugashvilis emigrated to America in the 1880s, where Josef grew up, got into politics, and eventually became president in 1932. Now, I don't like Turtledove. I think he long ago decided that he could just sling out slabs of grey prose and his fans would buy it, which they would since they don't want stories so much as extended scenarios full of data points to critique. I also feel he's been playing to his conservative reader base more in recent years, and this sounds a lot like it could be boiled down to say "FDR and the federal government are the Antichrist." However, that's just the proximate problem. The real issue I have is that I don't find the concept all that interesting. I read a fair bit about Stalin in my younger days, and the one thing that keeps coming back to me his how much a product of his environment he is. He's bound up in questions of Caucasian culture, Russian culture, and the nature of the Bolshevik Party and of Soviet communism itself. Is he an aberration, or exactly the sort of man his environment would produce? Hell, let's go farther and ask if he was actually trying to become the man he thought his society needed. It's a question that can't be answered, and I would say that the history of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1991 was about trying to answer the question "can we be Soviet without Stalin, and would we want to be?" (I'd suggest the ultimate answer was "no" to the first and "I don't know" to the second, but your mileage may vary.) If you remove Stalin from Russia and put him in America...who cares? All that context is gone. He's just another boogeyman to frighten good little Yankee children.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2014 23:27
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Conservative a what now? There's nothing in the books I've read that sound like Harry Turtledove in particular playing to his conservative readers if he has any. If anything he's generally been positive and glowing regarding FDR. Well, I may be wrong on that point. All I'm going off of is some half-remembered discussion about The Man With The Iron Heart, the book with Heydrich not getting assassinated and leading the Werwolf movement to become a success in postwar Germany. There was a bit of a stink about what sort of Iraq allegory the story was, but as I said, I didn't really pay close attention, so I may have some details wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2014 22:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 01:37 |
|
|
Metal Loaf posted:I've heard that S. M. Stirling was actually a member of alternatehistory.com for a while, and the highest-profile professional AH writer who's been associated with the site, but then he was banned for racism. I used to post on AH.com many moons ago, and all that is true. He also got himself banned from another site I frequent for pretty much the same reason. I think he also had a reputation for starting fights on soc.history.what-if. Dude's a big ol' goon. Oh, and I believe Tom Kratman also posted on AH.com briefly before getting banned for general asshattery.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 5, 2014 13:48
|
|