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#1
April 8th, 2011, 04:30 PM
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the true POD or why I can't understand Alt-history
I'm not trying to be a nudge. But I still can't understand how people look at alternate history on this board.
Many people offer PODs that are accepted while others aren't. (AN EXAMPLE ONLY) If I had a story were Pierce was against the Kansas-Nebraska Act or he didn't issue the Ostend Manifesto. Some would be in an uproar saying its not in his nature to do these things. To me alt-history is about things that couldn't happen in an entertaining story. Plus the true POD is not him making the decsion, but way back in his youth that did change his nature to make those descions that would change history and maybe lead to a better America. Once again, I'm using this as an example. One of the best stories ever on this board had Australia with an almost whole new ecology but we can't accept minor changes in peoples responses. I asked "what if" Operation Pastorius succeed and the first comment was "How could it go well? It was dropping 8 hardly trained people off with nearly no chance of success." well yeah of course. Did I have to spell out, "if the Germans had better trained people with a better plan would " ...... I mean come on really. Maybe I don't understand the rules. I always thought alt-history was why not or what if. 
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#2
April 8th, 2011, 04:54 PM
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I agree with the whole notion that Alt Hist is about putting forward new and interesting scenarios which flirt with likelihood. It also works well with alternate worlds that are sometimes bandied about in conversation, albeit in a Whiggish way, for instance, 'WI Hitler had won the war.' Such conversations unfortunately never get past a very vague discussion of 'and wouldn't that be simply awful,' and never get into much detail, but you get the idea. The problem with that sort of scenario is that, in itself, it's very vague. Questions obviously arise; how did he do it? With what? When? How would the Russians react, etc. These questions have to, at least in part, be explained by the very nature of the point of departure. But the same principle follows with another cliche. Take the one i'm most qualified to explain (personally, not on the entire board) out of all the cliches, Nixon vs. Kennedy. Nixon wins. With this scenario often people don't move past 'Nixon wins: we'd probably all get nuked/the world will a worst place,' but no attempt is made to explain exactly often how and why Nixon wins. Personally I think this is because people rarely get beyond the assumption that, since 1960 was a close election- after all Nixon won 49% of the vote despite all the JFK panache- it was just as likely for thousands of people in very strategic states to simply change their mind as much as it was for them to vote Kennedy in our timeline. Often the scenario takes the shape of Nixon winning on the OTL 'Nixon/Lodge' ticket too. This in turn would leave the core flaws of the Vice-Presidential candidate in the campaign- the man was addicted to sleeping in the middle of the day- and merit an outcome similar to OTL. Ok, no headway there. What about a trip-up in the Kennedy campaign? Again, problems. That whole effort was funded with whatever it needed by a determined Joseph P. Kennedy, was run by Robert Kennedy, who at that time by several accounts was doing a very good impression of a short-tempered arse to get things done (and was very successful in doing so), and presented the best candidate a Democratic Party desperate for re-election could present. So even a minor trip-up in the campaign would, arguably, do little to prevent a Kennedy victory. They'd simply adapt. To get to my point: while PODs may be obvious to the author, in some glaring cases the busy reader will just as likely take into account the general direction of the timeline as criticise another for having too many butterflies to succeed in producing the presented scenario. The factor that unites the two is the necessity for a well-presented and (more importantly in my mind) well-researched point of departure to justify where you take the reader. In my view its best that such a POD will not only justify the immediate effects, but take the timeline into new directions, untouched by other works.
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#3
April 8th, 2011, 08:01 PM
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Better trained people with a better trained plan, Operation Pastorius still isnt' going to accomplish jack.
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#4
April 8th, 2011, 08:09 PM
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My Manstein in Africa TL has very effective nazi boom and bang operations take place in the united states
it addresses some potential targets for a couple dozen men in their first round of missions adam's post to you, in your thread on such an operation was a jab at my timeline... your welcome to read it to get a general idea of how it could be run semi competently
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#5
April 8th, 2011, 08:10 PM
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I think the problem is many people on this board are more concerned with being 'reality police' than exploring the consequences of a PoD. It might stem from some ridiculous or overused PoDs just annoying the hell out of people and making them want to stop (Sealion) but it gets to the point where if you post anything less of a historically recent, well-documented counterfactual you're going to end up with a bunch of posts derriding you as ASB (which it may be, but you're not going to find help on any other forum with your topic). Admittedly you have to look at how the PoD came about and its likelihood, but I think among reasonable posters on here (and there are many) they end up getting drowned out by people who are deliberately being unhelpful.
I'm not suggesting we all hug and make friends, ignoring the plausibility in PoDs and such. But I've noticed it in threads, and it gets really frustrating to see good topics get absolutely bogged down in mindless "that's ASB", "no way it could possibly happen!!" "this is just implausible". Even if it is, if the author's making a reasonable attempt at grounding their work in reality: following from perhaps absurd premises what might happen and trying to explain what got it there without using magic, handwaivium or esoteric obfuscation.. I don't see the need to enforce some accepted resolution on it. To add: I'm guilty in this too, and Eurofed and others have suffered through a fair bit of my hostility to threads positing Quebec as part of the U.S. (ignoring the purpose of the thread is to look at what it would be like if it were...) Most of the best AH I've read on here has indeed managed to push some of this aside and find a nice balance between creativity and history. /rant
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#6
April 8th, 2011, 08:15 PM
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Judging by real history, it has it's own "ASB" moments too, but that's convienently forgotten. Improbable and impossible are two completely different things.
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"Yall can go to hell, and I'll go to Texas." -Davy Crockett
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#7
April 8th, 2011, 08:23 PM
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There are different kinds of PoD's, yes, but there are also different tastes. Some people on the board like something that is light and fun to read, while others seem to be stricter than a nun teaching sunday school when it comes to the butterfly effect. For example, if you wanted to do a TL about the civil rights movement in the CSA with OTL civil rights leaders, you're bound to get at least one person saying that they wouldn't even exist with the PoD. You will have critics regardless, but you have to remember that it is your TL, and how the story goes is up to you and you alone. Other members may offer constructive criticism and advice, but it is up to you whether or not you want to listen to them. Just remember that, when you write a TL, have fun and do the story the way you want.
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It's a Washington Life
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#8
April 8th, 2011, 08:25 PM
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I shall advocate Old Nick here, though I think that there are many who take things too far and prefer criticism to exploration:
Alternate history is a parlour-game if we allow PoDs which cannot rationally happen. If we can simply declare "so they win" or "so X reverses his opinions" its hop-skip-jump to giving Alexander the Great an atom bomb. I have no objection to PoD's based on getting events thought unlikely to come about by going back far enough. I also find PoDs which change people's characters and opinions fascinating. But quite often you get PoDs which are just asking "So what is Bismarck was a completely different person?" - and if the PoD is in his university days, whose bright idea was it to appoint the born-again champion of liberal nationalism chancellor?  We've got a section for parlour-games, entitled ASB, but I think our main sections should be for the sort of thing that can make AH a really serious tool for thinking about and understanding history as well as a fun literary exercise, and that means thinking about developments that could have easily taken place, or else going the other way and thinking about how you could arrive at a certain scenario plausibly. Last edited by I Blame Communism; April 8th, 2011 at 09:04 PM..
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#9
April 8th, 2011, 08:29 PM
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#10
April 8th, 2011, 08:29 PM
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 I mean, if you want ASB, then why not write a TL about how a rag-tag group of poorly organized American colonists managed to beat the British Empire, and then manages to take over pretty much the entire continent and become the world's leading superpower. Or how a failed painter took over a small political party made up of batshit crazy radicals, take over almost all of Europe, and managed to exterminate a few million people. (Not to mention ruining a perfectly good holy symbol forever) I agree that OTL is full of things that would have people on this site crying ASB. Sometimes reality is unrealistic.
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It's a Washington Life
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#11
April 8th, 2011, 08:42 PM
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#12
April 8th, 2011, 08:52 PM
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I agree.
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Wonderful creations that I appreciate reading, but historical fiction nonetheless.Which is where I think the problem lies. There's nothing wrong with posting in a non-ASB forum with a highly improbable (but possible) premise you're willing to criticize, attempt to explain and work out historically without resorting to fantasy tropes. Even if it is ultimately ASB, who cares. That's a kind of ASB I value and enjoy reading. If we could I'd love to call it "alternate historical fiction" and counterfactual history can just be "alternate counterfactual history", but that's not going to happen. The reason why I criticize it so much is also a matter of utility. The ASB forum is kind of like AH's Old West: a lot of fun to read about but when you actually go there to do serious business your shit just gets ruined. Not all the time mind, but we all know how it is: posting there you're generally uninterested in AH because the ASB forum is where things like Alternate Harry Potter, Star Trek and "What if Magic Were Real?" live. Whereas on the main forums, you'll at least get people with a historically minded perspective criticizing and suggesting things to your TL. ^ crux of why I think there's value in it being here even if it always isn't incredibly plausible.
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#13
April 8th, 2011, 09:01 PM
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Hear, hear. I personally find the discussion of why certain things couldn't happen just as informative and interesting as they discussion of why they could.
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#14
April 8th, 2011, 09:16 PM
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I look at it this way: the more you're changing things, the more you need to show your work.
If your PoD is that someone who had a fatal heart attack in 1950 IOTL has it in 1949 instead, I'm not going to blink. If he has it in 1920, that's another story. Did he have a long-standing history of heart disease? Did he have a non-fatal heart attack decades before his fatal one? You need some sort of basis for your change or your story is properly fantasy, not AH. There's a couple of great websites about sci-fi that make the point that the more handwavium and unobtanium you use in your story the more problems you create for yourself. I believe this applies to AH as well. We also have a perfectly good ASB section on these fora, so it isn't like there's no other place to put ASB stories. My suggestion to new authors is to either write what you know well, or start by putting up a thread that asks specific questions rather than posting a vague PoD or result. "What if Germany won the war?" is going to, rightfully, draw a lot of flak here. "How might Germany win the war?" is better, though it has been discussed ad nauseum here. "If Manstein is put in command in Africa instead of Rommel, will that improve things for Germany?" is the best. Even if you don't get the answer you were hoping for, someone may post something that helps you towards your goal. Good PoDs, IMO, are either extremely small changes (a British soldier in WWI pulls his trigger a half-second later and the bullet that missed Adolf Hitler kills him) or things that were as probable as what actually happened (a guy who flipped a coin to make a decision and had it come up heads IOTL has it come up tails instead). PoDs must also be SMALL. "Germany wins WWII" isn't small. "Germany wins the Battle of the Atlantic" isn't small. "Hitler appoints a different general for a specific command" is small enough. The PoD should also lead fairly naturally to what comes next, or at least not cause change disproportionate to its size and proximity. If Hitler appoints a different general, that shouldn't cause the Japanese to win at Midway the next day. If he appoints a general and the Japanese win at Midway two years later that might be reasonable.
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#15
April 8th, 2011, 09:17 PM
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#16
April 8th, 2011, 09:20 PM
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I think the big thing is that, even with some of the casual alt history readers, they want to see a certain amount of realism. And they have good reasons.
In fact, let me use your example Craig. First of all, its usually helpful to make it clear before you even start the story, what the POD is. Because sometimes, this is what gets newcomers tripped up. You just start a timeline, without explaining the premise behind the timeline. Now, on to your example. Well, if you have the POD be far enough that it allows a change in personality, its reasonable to assume that that change could make it so Pierce wasn't even in politics. It depends on how big a change, and what exactly it does change. Harry Turtledove (from my understanding) used to be really good with Alternate History, actually taking the time to research most, or some, of the things that would be related to the POD and the story itself. This meant that there was a sense of realism in the story, that made it more than just a fiction story. It made it something that you could imagine having actually happened. Then of course, he moved away from that (I believe most people here on the board who aren't neccessarily happy with his latest stuff are upset because of the latter half of the TL-191 series) and while he still has good stories, they may have lost that realistic feeling that made them GREAT stories. I think part of the problem isn't just the loudmouthed people shouting "Thats ASB!" I think the real problem is that there are plenty of people who are more civil and quieter, but back up said shouters. They won't say "Its 145% ASB" but they'll point out that, with the information we have available of whatever the POD is, that the chances of that happening or either highly unlikely or borderline ASB. I suppose the real thing to do is this. Take the troll-criticism with a grain of salt, and take the constructive criticism as something potentially important that could make you a better writer/historian. Its normally easy to tell the difference.
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#17
April 8th, 2011, 09:20 PM
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Just so you know, I'm new here too, so this is how I understand it.
The point of an alternate history timeline is to create an interesting, engaging story set in a world that resembles ours, but isn't ours due to something happening differently in the past. We can explain the reason for these differences, but the generally accepted way is to have a single event happen differently (i.e. What if Hitler invaded the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union?). The idea of this event, reffered to as a PoD, is an event or series of events that happened one way in our world but COULD have plausibly happened differently in another. Two problems arise due to this. The first is the minuscule size yet huge impact needed for a PoD to work. For example, we can say "What if FDR was a Republican?". Well, why? The answer could be "Because he married a Republican that he dates in OTL." Well, why did he marry her in this ATL? It ends up needing to be so tiny to be realistic that it gets lost. This is directly related to the second problem: psychology. We have no idea how the human mind works. I'm straying into both Science and Philosophy here, so bear with me. If we want someone to do something differently, it ends up with psycological matters. Because we can't justify, through lack of understanding human thought, knowing every detail of one's past and personality, and how they were effected by every single person around them, PoDs where people do something that they didn't do LTL are generally avoided. This doesn't mean that they are impossible - if you can reasonably justify it with a reasonable PoD, then it works just fine. That's the thing though, you generally don't use mental descisions as PoDs, but rather as amplifiers for them. This is because of the unknown functions of the human mind. For example, with the Hitler example, "Hitler invades the Middle East instead of the Soviet Union" isn't a good PoD. "Stalin leaks footage of intimidating Soviet defenses", which leads to dissuading Hitler from invading the Soviet Union, which drives him to invade the Middle East in search of oil, is. For the most part, the fickle human mind and emotions is much less reliable to cause a change that, for artistic purposes, can be used than the luck of a bullet, the chance of a storm, or the life of a bacterium. Or, at least that's how I've understood it.
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No Plague in Athens, 429 B.C. - http://www.alternatehistory.com/disc...56#post4383156
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#18
April 8th, 2011, 09:35 PM
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My thoughts, if others have said much the same thing, well, great minds think alike.
There are basically three kinds of scenarios in alternate history and what if. "What if Joan of Arc, like most kids, died young?" - stuff that with some minor tweaks to what happened could occur. "What if the Confederates won the battle of Gettysburg?" - stuff that is possible but would be hard to set up a plausible situation where it would work. And then there is Sealion and other fantasies, which I'm using as shorthand for any utterly fantasy-land scenario. Whether its truly impossible or merely ludicrously improbable (things would have to go exactly right on several areas leading up to the event mentioned to an extent that is hard to believe, even if any given element working is believable), fantasy scenarios aren't grounded in history - they may be a fascinating thing to explore and fun to read about, but they're not a "could have been" any more than my clone arriving from the future to murder me before I finish this sentence could have been. I managed to talk him out of it.  If you want a type A scenario to be accepted, you just need to offer something interesting - if it isn't interesting no one will care because we have more interesting things to discuss. It'll just be forgotten commentless. If you want a type B scenario to be accepted, you have to set up something to show how it could happen. And the people who say "but I just want to talk about the consequences of if it happened" miss that point. Take a nonhypothetical scenario: Someone wanted a situation where we discussed what would happen if Japan won WWII and how that society would evolve. Well, how does Japan even manage to do that? How did the world come to a place where Japan has a "victory"? What does that "victory" mean they control? There's no way to even begin to talk about it until that's taken care of. This is assuming that Japan even managing such a success is not fantasy, because...well that brings us to that point. Alternate history is supposed to be something that - barring ASB and other fantasies - could have happened. Something where, if the right events occur, is entirely feasible - not necessarily likely, but not something where Hannibal Barca needs to learn how to force choke people (though if someone constructs a scenario where he's able to do that, I may read it because its awesome) in order for what is proposed to occur. That is the thing with plausibility. The person offering a scenario has to convince me that the event could be triggered based on what I know (either before or after reading his or her post) is capable of happening given the capacities of the elements (people, animals, machines...) involved. Personally, I mind "What if X happened?" questions for anything that isn't category A because it neglects that B has to be built up to. HOW did the Confederates manage to take Washington? is vital to a scenario where "What if the Confederates took Washington?" is the "real" question. Plausible or not, I can't do anything with that scenario without knowing how it occurred, because you haven't proposed an alternate course of events, you've just added something that didn't occur with no context and no cause. And as my time traveling clones can testify, that's not a good idea.
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#19
April 8th, 2011, 09:38 PM
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That is exactly the reason why I much prefer the ASB section. When changing one persons view of the world from megalomanic expansionist that listens to advisor A to megalomanic expansionist that listens to advisor B is considered drastic, anything larger than a butterfly is always ASB.
I prefer ASB since people there, as a rule, accept that things are often so far unpredictable that history is at times, a game of pure chance.
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#20
April 8th, 2011, 09:57 PM
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There's a difference between arguing that something is a drastic change and arguing that its an implausible or impossible change.
Assuming you're referring to my arguments, the point was that it would not be "simple" or "easy" to have an Axis-favorable scenario, not that the changes suggested were all inconceivable (some, yes, but not the one involving the megalomaniac deciding between one impossible to make work idea and another). It would be a pretty large change for FDR to be a born-again Christian, but that doesn't mean its necessarily implausible, depending on how one sets things up leading to there.
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