Discussion: What was your first Alternate History idea?

[isabella]

I can not remember the first idea here and I had started to imagine alternate histories long before that, when I had no idea of the existence of alternate histories so the first one likely must have been something about ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome.
My first tentative of writing a TL on the forum was a not too serious one as I am the first to say who its POD is not much credible and I must say who usually i do not plan too much my TLs (or if I do it, I will likely end changing a lot of things while I wrote, at least that is what happened with my first serious TL and is happening with my current ones,, who were both completely unplanned as they were both born from plotbunnies who tormented me until I started to write (like my first attempt)… Still I am always interested in so many scenarios who I will do better to not make long term plans and is not unlikely who I would end fully reworking some already partially developed scenarios in transforming them in TLs

 

[sarsenapati]

When I was 8-ish I was introduced to the idea of kids being captured and raised by Indians and it seemed like a good idea. So I wrote a story where the Pilgrims are massacred, except for the kids.

I got some strange looks from my teacher.

Sorry but this is hilarious

 

[ramones1986]

When I entered this forum back in 2012, I thought of creating scenarios related to the broadcasting industries of various countries, both RL and ATL.

 

[AztecXVII]

I don't really remember when it started but I think it was sometime during lockdown and I had nothing to do so started exploring european history a bit out of curiosity...... Was obsessed with the Tudors during this time especially Katherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor Jr.... Don't know when the obsession shifted to Katherine's family but here we are..... My first thread was about Isabel Jr surviving (cause I couldn't find a TL that could satisfy me)

 

[Aluma]

Back when I was just a young pre-teen and was getting into history, I (as so many others) watched The Tudors and was devastated when Jane Seymour died in childbirth. Finally there was a happy ending but then she dies! The Tudors was sorta my frame of reference for the period (lol), and I wanted to write a story of how England would be if Jane hadn’t died. I think I still have it lying around somewhere ~15 years later hahah. I believe I called it “The Phoenix Queen”. Ofc, it would probably be very different today.

For less serious stuff, when I was a kid in school, and we learned about Danish history, I probably often wondered things like “What if we hadn’t lost Norway/Sweden/Scania/Slesvig-Holstein/England” when we were taught about these things in class.

But Jane Seymour was my first real attempt at something with AH. I think it was shortly after that when I also discovered this website. The first TL I read was an old legend “Now Blooms the Tudor Rose”, which old-timers might still remember… Oh, simpler days

Now you made me imagine Jane not only surviving but setting up a personal union with Denmark

 

[Curtain Jerker]

Somewhere in my storage unit is an external hard drive and on that hard drive is the first true AH story I ever wrote - a July 20, 1944 TL where Hitler is killed, Rommel takes over and the German government survives WWII. Eventually, I was aiming for a tri-polar world - the Allies in one corner, the USSR/Communists in another, and Germany sorta in the middle. I wrote some 150 or so pages, all narrative style (my preferred writing style) before I got bogged down in how exactly Germany wouldn't get steamrolled no matter who was in charge mid-1944. I did appropriate some of the scenes and ideas for "Honor and Profit" so it wasn't all a waste - plus it was good practice to write dialogue and set scenes, so it definitely helped make me a better fiction writer.

 

[Marko]

Oh wow

It was way back in 2005 while studying for the national medieval history exam at the university I encountered a title used by the Kings of Hungary. It was Rex Rama. Traditionally it is considered to be an alternate name for medieval Bosnia even if it only refers to a small region that at the time of the title being introduced by Bella II was most likely outside the area considered as Bosnia in the early 12th century. It isn't even certain whether it was territorial affiliated with Croatia-Dalmatia or Duklja at the time. So I imagined a small "hidden" mountain kingdom that existed for almost 50 years between the start of feudal anarchy in Croatia (cca 1089) and the Hungarian conquest (cca 1137). It had 4 generations of rulers and tried to avoid attention from its larger neighbours Hungary-Croatia and Duklja.

 

[AltoRegnant]

For me it was probably some random power colonizing somewhere they didn't get otl, which my thread history details I still do

 

[DanMcCollum]

First idea? As someone else has said, most likely the idea of France willing the French and Indian War, when i was in 5th grade.

Didn't really grt into AH proper until Middle School when I - like so many others here of my generation- stumbled on Turtledove.

My first attempt to write anything in another world, though, wouldn't be until High School when I penned a story about Brennus and the Celts slaughtering Rome and the survivors fleeing to form a new city elsewhere in Italy. Not the most realistic or likely but, hey, I was 16. And I got an A, so huzzah

Oddly enough, I was just thinking about that story the other night ...

 

[AlfLandonFan]

I have fond memories of a "Napoleon Wins" TL I wrote when I was around the age of 9.

Inspired by my brother reading me the timelines of Tony Jones, I wrote a disorganized mess where Scandinavia controlled all of Russia, Japan owned all of China, and of course there was a Prussia wank.

 

[treefreak32]

I think it was probably something related to Superheroes. I was a comics fan, and I read 1602 at a young age, which probably left me with a sense that alternate history and superheroes were inherently connected.
The first tangible idea I can currently remember was based on my interest in mythology. If Arthurian Myth states that Arthur will return when Britain is most threatened, surely Britain's greatest threat must have been World War II (I was a kid, so I didn't know a lot about history yet, and that was the main conflict I knew of that involved Britain), right? So the idea emerged of Arthur returning in the Second World War to prevent some kind of Operation Sealion-type invasion.
I distinctinctly also remember thinking of a lazy World War II reversal with fascist Britain and an Imperial US attacking a Japanese base ala Pearl Harbour. Again, I was a kid. Another that came to mind as a youngster was a world where Japan won World War II using alien technology.
My actual understanding of history coincided with my interest in this genre: I got really into Crusader Kings II in either my 8th or 9th grade. I definitely also had a notebook where I wrote a horrible timeline where the so-called Confederacy won the US Civil War and became a fascist dictatorship allied with the Nazis. Again, and I cannot stress this enough, I was a kid.

 

[treefreak32]

As a child I wanted to be a superhero and I took all those events described in biblical cartoons very literally, so in a way I was into AH from the get go since I pretty much wanted to change everything(my first reaction to learning about historical tragedies growing up in the early 2000s was pretty much "Can I change that? Because I want to") albeit definitely not fictionally

Of course as a young person studying history at that age I also ended up with some "Mandela Effects" about reality that I have described before, such as an idealistic-messianic Alexander trying to find the greek gods in India(totally wasnt projecting there), Jesus meeting Augustus Caesar prior to his Crucifixion, Atila bringing down Rome by sacking Constantinople which led to a Europe-sized Holy Roman Empire led by the Pope and everyone speaking different dialects of the same language with just different words

But my first serious AH scenarios not based on historical misunderstandings or giving me Creative Mode were more recent with teenager me speculating about stuff like "What if the Carolingian Empire had not broken up and instead achieved the world dominance that the later european colonial empires did?" "What if Great Britain was like the Imperial Federation from the get go and treated all newly acquired territories like the homeland?" and of course the first proper "ISOT" I imagined in response to someone asking "if you could add or remove anything from the past what would it be?" to which I replied with "I'd remove slavery and the other atrocities commited during the colonisation of Brazil, then I'd add that Utopic Brazil to as far back it's safe to send it back in the timeline to aid the past humans"

This last one in particular is the one that made me curious about if there were more people interested in messing around with the chronology, even if just for fun and not because their kindergarten selves thought that being Moses was a career choice, which led me to this community

A lot of these concepts are now timeline ideas I might explore in the future, albeit with a lot of refinement needed

With the later one in particular being the basis for the current idea I have for a book I hope to someday publish about a indigenous civilisation creating their own "Brazil" in Antiquity without the advent of european colonisation

Your childhood understanding of things would make for an excellent fantasy world. That way, suspension of disbelief and mutially-exclusive elements wouldn't be as much of a problem.

 

[HortenseMancini]

I've had a lot of alternate history ideas but...none of them were that credible. Before joining this site, the two I developed most were 1) Henry VII having a son by some Breton noblewoman he married before Bosworth who marries Margaret of Austria and 2) Anne of Brittany having a brother named Richard who succeeds their father as Duke of Brittany and marries Margaret of Austria. Another one was Marie-Zéphyrine of France eloping with a Swedish prince (brother of Gustav III) who visits Versailles. My first tl idea that I published on here was, I think, philip the handsome dying in 1496 and margaret of austria succeeding him as duchess of burgundy and marrying charles of guelders.

 

[BlueFlowwer]

My interest started when I brought my book about Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy. And then it snowballed from there.

 

[traminer]

I can't recall what was first.

The kid in me that always stared at maps always wanted to see North America with its borders redrawn according to watershed boundaries, both between countries and subdivisions. A bit naïve, but I still stare at maps the same way.

On the ASB side, I tried to think of the most unobtrusive possible use of a Time Machine. I imagined a team of time travellers zipping back into the past to preserve knowledge - never lives - that would otherwise have been destroyed, right before the moment that destruction would have happened.... say at the sack of Timbuktu, or the library of Alexandria.

And after (slowly) reading Guns, Germs and Steel, I thought of what might be the least-conspicuous contact with European or African peoples might be required to "inoculate" the Americas to better survive diseases brought by Europeans come colonization time. I still may write a version of that.

 

[Well]

I was quite into political history as a young person, so I think my early ideas was all British-political; I remember one about Callaghan calling the 1978 election, and one idea about Blair joining the Conservative Party instead of Labour. I think I had him winning Enfield Southgate instead of Portillo in 1984 in one draft, and another where he wins Darlington (and holds it in *1992) before becoming leader in the late 90s.

A little later I got into the American Civil War, but didn't really care about the military side of things so I spent a while thinking about changing the political background in the 1850s, potentially trying to avoid the war altogether. Gradually, I wanted to understand the political background of that and so I've just worked backwards through American history getting interested in each decade in turn.

If Order 191 hadn't been found, then the CSA wins the American Civil War. This leads to a balkanized America since the principle of secession is legitimized, which leads to Germany and Japan conquering the entire world, Man-In-The-High-Castle style.

At least, that's the first one I have a clear memory of as something resembling a timeline.

I like the idea of a 'Man in the High Castle but with the Confederacy', in the sense of 'this isn't primarily an alternate history but a fever dream'. I don't know whether that's basically Bring the Jubilee; I haven't read it, but I understand it was one of Dick's inspirations for High Castle. There'd be something nicely circular about doing a High Castle-style Confederacy, but I think one of the dangers would be that it's misunderstood as just bad AH.

 

[Hearkener]

When I was fourteen, I wrote my first TL about a world where the Chinese discovered America in the 1460s - very original, I know. Basically, I wanted to present a world where European imperialism did not grow to encompass the entire world as it did IOTL.

It was a way for me to express my disappointment in our world, especially the way that so many diverse cultures had been conquered and essentially destroyed by the Western empires.

So I created a world that was basically a kitchen sink, a series of loosely connected storylines about different parts of the world. This timeline was Pluralist in the extreme, to an almost utopian degree at times. I only got as far as the 1840s before abandoning the project - one of the last storylines I wrote was about the sessesion of Texas from the Aztek Empire, backed by the French Empire and the American Commonwealth (basically the 13 Colonies). Emblematic of the whole setting, the Republic of Texas was a Constitutional Monarchy ruled by a former Mexica general and a democratic senate, with a population consisting of various indigenous groups, Mexica settlers, French immigrants and African-American refugees.

Edit: I think it's still someplace on the internet, but honestly I can live without people reading it until I can revise it sometime in the distant future

 

[HyperMuscularDemon]

Honestly, I have had alternate history ideas for quite some time, but the first question I ever asked here was how would the Pacific Northwest change if one of the Native American tribes of the region invented the outrigger canoe, and boom, that led to me asking more questions and even me eventually writing my first timeline called When the Tlingit Embraced the Seas: A Pacific Northwest Timeline. It is still ongoing and people can check it out if they want to.

 

[Aluma]

Your childhood understanding of things would make for an excellent fantasy world. That way, suspension of disbelief and mutially-exclusive elements wouldn't be as much of a problem.

Thank you!

I think a few of the PODs could've worked reasonably well together as a Pre-1900 timeline provided there was a very big butterfly net over them

Like my view on Alexander didnt change much of how his life went, his campaigns would have gone very much the same other than perhaps he being more merciful and not burning Persepolis, as his end goal would still be to reach the end/peak of the world to encounter Zeus and return as a god to Greece to "fix everything", and if Augustus lived longer he could have been in Judea at the time Jesus was judged and interacted with the "King of the Jews" because if nothing else it would ease his boredom(though I also thought Rome converted to Christianity after seeing the supposed eclipse that happened during Jesus's cruxification so that definitely would have caused some shockwaves, this makes Nero a Super Julian I guess?) and Atila did get close to Constantinople IOTL but didnt have the tools required to take the city, otherwise we might have seen an early end to the ERE

Which - in my kid logic- resulted in it being added to Latin Europe after the hunnic collapse which would have provided the Catholic Church with more firepower necessary to launch a Mega Crusade(since I, like many people, thought they were on a much larger scale than they actually were) against the Middle East(which I guess remained pagan because I had no clue to what Islam was) that would have brought as result a Mega Renaissance/Enlightenment(thought those were the same thing really, just synonymous words) from all the plundering and an even worse Black Plague putting an end to the mediterranean-sized HRE that I thought to exist, setting up the colonization of the Americas(which ironically would have been much less brutal than the Crusades as the former I believed to have been conducted by desorganised civilians fleeing Europe while the later I thought to be existential war of anihilation) as the survivors fled to the New World following Columbus(also an idealist in this world instead of a coldblooded killer)'s discovery to rebuild their idealised version of feudal society using imported african slaves to replace the peasants in the farms(no plantation economy based on working people to death to produce goods basically) as the european population would have been to small to recreate everything from scratch with abolitionism being more akin to the end of serfdom in Russia but with racism still being present due to the european upper class perceiving themselves as superior nobles ruling over the enslaved people and equalled to 17-19 century elitism rather than the pseudo-scientific ideology it became in our world

Of course there's still the language issue but if we assume Latin Europe remained somewhat unified for over a millennia(including Britain) it's believable in my opinion that lingua franca would have became the standard from which other locals tongues would have been dialects with a sightly different lexicon of and with the europeans still "taking over the world" so to speak it'd possible that variations of such language would also be spoken in other continents such as Asia as a second language(kinda like English but on overdrive)

It's for this reason that learning more about how our world is and how OTL history actually took place(according to modern archeology) fucking weirds me out, as it is completely different from the world history I grew up with and a lot of times it really feels like I was transported to a whole different world(that, granted, still had a similar outline) without my consent and I had to re-learn everything again

However! Of course, if my magical thinking was applied then it would definitely be in ASB without a shadow of a doubt since not only all the events in the Hebrew Bible would have happened word for word(or, well, the saturday cartoon version of them) but also suddenly in 2005 you'd have a 7 years old with the catholic equivalent of the Infinity Gauntlet showing up in the middle of the War on Terror wanting to "fix the world" just like the macedonian emperor they were named after

 

[aoifeloveskhoward]

Alternate history is a fun idea. Trying to map out the PODs, the changes in a timeline, and the butterfly effects that could cause in history. However, at the end of the day, alternate history is merely fiction, and sometimes in fiction, it's up the writer to decide what happens.

Now, this is a general and more personal discussion, to look back at our alternate history ideas. Looking back, what was your first alternate history idea that you came up with? What made you want to choose that specific time in history to alter and write a timeline about? Did you every write a timeline about? And if so, how well does it hold up, or has it aged well? Would there be anything you would change about it?

I'll start with mine: When I was a kid in middle school, we we're learning about the French and Indian War- where the British colonies fought the French and their Native Allies in North America, culminating in the British taking Canada from the French. My history teacher gave us a question for fun and asked my class "What if the French won the French and Indian War".

For my idea, I came up with a scenario where the roles were reversed, and the French taking all of the British colonies and later giving the Natives some of their lands, which eventually leads to Independance...

...Boy, that idea was terrible. I now know that there no possible chance of France taking the British colonies (Due to how populated the English were compared to the French), and most likely it would go back to Status Quo before the war, with some minimal territorial changes. Cut me some slack, I was a kid.

Now, what was everyone else's first alternate history idea?

I was 9 years old and wrote a story where Mary I had twins Edward and Catherine and if I hated someone in history I killed them. I think I still have it in my drawer