Rules/Cliches of AH

Here are some rules/cliches that I find happen alot in AH:

1. Bismarck's law is never in effect (Otto Von Bismarck once said: "God protects fools, alcoholics, and the United States of America"). I mean, in just about every AH book the US gets beat up, I know this is mainly because the US has won just about every war it was in so a easy POD is "What if the US lost at Gettysburg" or "WI Washington was killed crossing the Delaware", but please people, the US has always been very capable. Why don't I ever see "What if the US won at the first battle of Bull run" or "What if Washington wasn't burned during the war of 1812?".

2. ASBs never help the side that is winning the war.

3. Nobody ever considers that a future political figure may have died in a war, nor does anyone ever considered that a future political figure that died in a war in OTL (like, say, that one Kennedy in the air force) may have survived.

Add your own.
 
A lot of AH involves reversing outcomes, so if side A defeated side B in OTL, you are more likely to see a timeline based on "What if side B defeated side A", rather than "what if side A defeated side B even faster and more completely". Still, I have seen at least a few alternate timelines where the winners of OTL win even more completely.

One rule that I find often applies is that a person's political opinions and opinions about events and developments in OTL has a very deep affect on the alternate timelines that they write. This is very obvious, and provokes plenty of arguments about OTL history and politics, but the phenomenon itself seems to be rarely discussed.

- Just to cite one example, when writing an ATL where the Confederacy wins the US Civil War, somebody who believes that slavery was only one of several major issues and that the Confederates weren't any more racist than most Unionists is more likely to give the Confederacy a relatively benign future - slavery is mostly ended within 20 or 30 years, and the CSA goes on to become a fairly prosperous, democratic society. Racial problems are no worse than in OTL, and quite possibly better.

People who think that slavery was THE issue of the Civil War, and the underpinning of society in most of the Confederacy, tend to have a much more negative portrayal of an independent CSA. In their view, the CSA keeps slavery in at least some of its states well into the 20th century, and keeps a very repressive apartheid-like system possibly up to the present day. Politics are likely to be less democratic and dominated by a slaveholding elite who may seek to expand slavery into Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Well, the main point of Alternate History is CHANGE, and then seeing what effects those changes have. There wouldn't be too much point in changing an already good situation into a very good situation and leaving everything else unchanged as this doesn't lead to anything particuarly interesting in the short term.

I suppose my biggest bugbear about Alternate History is that so-called/assumed historical rivalries/emnities are often seen as inevitable and eternal - e.g. Greeks don't like Ottomans/Turks, ignoring a realpolitik reality where it may have made more sense for there to have been a rapprochement in 1914, or a Greek entry on the side of the Central Powers in 1915

Grey Wolf
surrounded by lively lasses !
 

Xen

Banned
Well things with Washington crossing the Delaware is very plausible he fails, and thus there is no US, thus Bismark might be able to replace United States with United Kingdom or perhaps if Britain retained the American colonies theyd call themselves the United Empire by the time of Bismarck.

I have seen a few timelines where the Union does win at Manassas in 1861, the Union usually goes on to win the war sooner.

As Paul said Alternate Histories are usually effected by the authors opinion, and God forbid they violate someone elses opinion of how things would have gone, too often timelines are derailed before they ever really take off over some trivial BS.

Things I have noticed, and have been guilty of is real life people, including politicians and entertainers still hold the same political opinion, policies and values in a world radically different, or they are born well after the POD. Im doing this in my Making of the Modern World Timeline, many US politicians are going to come into play later in the timeline that was born nearly a half century after the original POD. My justification for this was it effected mostly Mexico and Europe more than the rest of the world, the ripple effects were too small for many years but by the beginning of the 20th century they are beginning to take an effect, as national policies and outlooks changed.
 
I second Paul. In one letter to the editor @ the Atlanta paper, someone claimed that if the South successfully seceded from the Union, "we would be under the rule of Britain or Mexico," while another letter said that "there would be no United States to stop Germany in WWI or WWII."

These people obviously have never heard of the butterfly effect--Germany may never unify in a CSA-wins TL, and Mexico was having enough problems at the time. I started a thread about this awhile back called "Politicized Confederate Predictions," since the letter writers seem to have political axes to grind.
 
1. If US enters the war and Germany survives until autumn 1945 they will be nuked. It doesn't matter if they defeated SU and UK, they will be nuked. Period.

2. People will rather spend page after page describing how the imfamous plan bearing name of a sea creature can't suceed instead of PODing more efficient German economy, better conditions for Germans in Europe or fall of Churchill.
 
If there are two ways for things to happen, one of which involves zeppelins, and the other of which doesn't - then zeppelins win every time... :)
 
Justin Pickard said:
If there are two ways for things to happen, one of which involves zeppelins, and the other of which doesn't - then zeppelins win every time... :)

That's my boy! Although Turtledove himself violated this in the GW and AE series by failing to have an alliance between the victorious zeppelin-building Germans and the helium-producing Americans produce a 1935 filled with 1000 foot long commercial zeppelins and zeppelin aircraft carriers flying everywhere. Bah!

Also, it can be hard to determine what AH writers actually believe based on the alternate histories they present. For example, Turtledove could be seen as racist and sympathetic to the real CSA because he obviously is attracted to histories featuring an independent confederacy which - although strongly racist - is a democracy, perhaps even moreso than his USA (at least until Featherston takes over). On the other hand, the North America and world he has created in this series seems to me to be a much poorer, more violent, and altogether darker world than OTL. So what is he really saying about the wisdom of the southern sucession?
 
Romulus Augustulus's Law: As time after seperation and independence of the CSA increases, the chances of the United States's acquisition of Western Canada increase.
 
Personally I think an American aquisition of Western Canada is unlikely, even if the Civil War is successful. British Columbia, IIRC, is an important base for the British military, for example. Plus, the US, despite being fiercly expansionist at times, never really pushed to get anything in that area (Except for the Northern part of Oregon country, but that's only a small part of Western Canada).

More on-topic, if there's even the slightest hope of it happening, Germany will gain German-speaking Austria. I've even seen this happening in TLs where Austria-Hungary is a victor of WW1... Also, the Habsburg Empire seems to always be depicted as a tottering ruin that will fall apart at the slightest push, no matter what.
 
It seems to me that very many alternative histories have bad outcomes. I, like every African American I know, assume that the victory for the South would be bad in the ACW.

I sincerely hope that nobody contributing to this board would think a Nazi victory would have been anything other that awful.

I also think that King George winning the American Revolutionary war would have been pretty bad.
 

Chris

Banned
Derek Jackson said:
It seems to me that very many alternative histories have bad outcomes. I, like every African American I know, assume that the victory for the South would be bad in the ACW.

I sincerely hope that nobody contributing to this board would think a Nazi victory would have been anything other that awful.

I also think that King George winning the American Revolutionary war would have been pretty bad.

I supose it depends. A Nazi victory where hitler is overthown by the generals in 1941 might be a fit place to live, but would that be a nazi victory? The Nazis might get tired of percusction after a while, but it would still be bad. (On the plus side, a german occupation of the mid east means no saudi).

The world would be better if the british had won the war. The combination of the US+UK in world affairs would have been unbeatable. By 1900, the Empire would have all america, all the far east, and quite possibully most of africa.

Chris
 
Not so sure about King George

A Nazi victory would have been a nightmare. I can see how a triumphant Confederacy could have changed its ways but I wouldn't bet on it.

But an aborted AR might not have been so bad. If the US had followed the Canadian road to independence, slavery would probably have ended sooner, for example.
 

Redbeard

Banned
Like Science Fiction, AH often says more about the age in which it is written and about the writer than about the future/ATL.

By nature, AH has failures become successes and successes become failures - otherwise it wouldn't be AH. But posters from the OTL success nations are often zealously defending what happened and can no way see how that could have been different, and TL's from failure nations pursuit success with a zeal that sometime makes you very happy those nations were failures in OTL.

When good, AH is an extremely fascinating instrument with which to conduct experiments of thought and an excellent way in which to get a grip of how things andevent were connected in OTL - and when realising how lucky I am to live in this TL - or exist at all - I get all sweatty. ;)


Regards

Steffen Redbeard
 
Post-ACW virility deficiency syndrome: The U.S. absolutely has to lose Deseret. And maybe New England, which makes no sense.

The frontier West and the southern Northwest (southern Ohio, Illinois) is more probable.
 
Walk-ins: Historically famous and infamous people showing up in AH novels.

Examples:

JFK as a right-wing publisher in THE TWO GEORGES
Richard Nixon as a burglar in THE PROBABLITY BROACH and an used car saleman in THE TWO GEORGES.
Ambassador Shiklgruber mentioned in OF TANGIBLE GHOSTS.

There are dozens of others. When history is changed, the circumstances that brought people in being change.
 
You'll have to excuse some of them, though. The ones in the Great War are kind of fun, and it's interesting to see OTL people in a different set of circumstances. I'm looking forward to FDR kicking ass with multiple terms if he does get the presidency. Unfortunately, that'll probably be after the war.
 
Top