What Makes Pessimistic Timelines Interesting?

[Beatriz]

AH is known for pessimistic timelines like Man in the High Castle and Decades of Darkness. These timelines are often criticized for indulging in too much grimness such as a focus on or trivialization of atrocities and wanking of particular states.
I want to ask what makes pessimistic timelines interesting, and more than “watching a trainwreck” sense.

Well Enough Alone , the sequel to For All Time had pop culture references at least. For pessimistic timelines diverging further back, there could be cultural changes like different diasporas, changes to cuisine, music, religion and so on.

 

[TheSpectacledCloth]

AH is known for pessimistic timelines like Man in the High Castle and Decades of Darkness. These timelines are often criticized for indulging in too much grimness such as a focus on or trivialization of atrocities and wanking of particular states.
I want to ask what makes pessimistic timelines interesting, and more than “watching a trainwreck” sense.

Well Enough Alone , the sequel to For All Time had pop culture references at least. For pessimistic timelines diverging further back, there could be cultural changes like different diasporas, changes to cuisine, music, religion and so on.

Morbid fascination?

 

[CountDVB]

I don’t really know myself. I do think morbid fascination is part of it and I think of it is also more than a few folk like “edgier” stuff.

 

[Chapman]

People like drama and high stakes situations, but they also like to be detached enough from it that it doesn’t actually impact them personally. Pessimistic/dystopian/“darker” stories offer exactly that. Those stories excite and intrigue without costing the consumer anything. It also helps distract from real world tragedy for a little while - life might be bad, but hey, at least the Nazis didn’t win WW2. Things might suck, but at least you’re not living in a post-apocalyptic nuclear hellscape because the Cold War went hot. These facts are at least a part of the appeal I think.

 

[Canuck Wingnut]

For more "literary" (or perhaps better put as character-driven) TLs, pessimistic settings can generate scenarios which naturally create conflict, be it over limited resources or driven by negative emotions. Optimistic TLs tend not to generate such conflicts so naturally, and neutral and optimistic TLs can also lack the justification for violence which can also generate interesting story tension.

Given that many people's initial exposure to AH comes through novels, I suspect that narrative convenience alone helps to generate significant portions of the public perception. For that matter, since many writers are inspired by earlier stories, I suspect that element tends to drive the AH community overall into a more pessimistic direction.

Another factor, one of which I personally am definitely guilty, is an interest of a certain, large, portion of the popular audience for all sorts of history being concentrated in military history specifically. Since TLs about military history tend to be about wars, there is a certain (not inevitable) tendency for such TLs to also be fairly pessimistic, since the conditions which produce war tend to be unpleasant.

 

[Halagaz]

I can't speak for everyone, but I think there's an aspect of "trainwreck porn" to it.

For me it's not so much about high-intensity grimdark and terrible atrocities. When I like a dark timeline it's usually because the author has the knowledge and imagination to show complex systems breaking down due to the build-up of their internal and external contradictions, and the writing talent to show it in a fascinating way.

Funnily enough, there are one or two real history books that give me similar vibes to such timelines. One of them is Brand's Byzantium Confronts the West, a fascinating in-depth look at Byzantine politics from 1180 to 1204. From the death of the strongman Manuel Komnenos, you witness the whole machine of the realm gradually breaking down under his successors and sliding from one escalating catastrophe to another. Until the empire is in a state of constant convulsion, and there's some new rebel proclaiming himself Emperor on an almost monthly basis as the system desperately tries to produce a solution to its contradictions, but this only makes everything even worse and accelerates the breakdown. And finally it all culminates in the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade.

 

[Hydra1234]

Several factors I've noticed when I'm reading about pessimistic timelines (and dystopias too, for that matter), and talking about the comments too:

1. For some timelines (not all), there's a sense of morbid justice. Country X got off easy OTL, so reading about them doing far worse things in a pessimistic TL and then subsequently getting obliterated off the face of the earth for their crimes satisfies some weird sense of justice for readers. Examples include the Nazis in AANW and Russia in The Death of Russia.
2. There's a feeling of "hey, things could be worse" when comparing pessimistic TLs to our world.
3. Pessimistic timelines raise the stakes significantly. That means more drama, more actions, and more wars, all things that interest the reader.

 

[DocJamore]

There are just more of those sort of timelines. Especially the ones that tend to run longer than a short story.

From the viewpoint of a writer, I think it is partially because dystopian settings are just easier to write than utopian ones. Trying to create a timeline where things went better than ours or creating materially equivalent yet culturally different world to ours requires a lot more thought than just wrecking everything. Utopias are also inherently subjective as everyone has different viewpoint on how a "perfect world" should be. In contrast, it is easier to get everyone to agree that dystopian setting just has to be objectively worse than the one we live in.

In essence, it's the writing equivalent of it being easier to destroy something than to create something new.

 

[MisterP]

I was actually thinking about this in the TL-191 threads: 1. Harry Turtledove's writing gets knocked around (that Custer scene!) but the TL's implicit premise is indeed interesting--"what would America look like if it wasn't 'America'?" you have a North with centralization, revanchist militarism, snitches and stoolies instead of celluloid cowboys, a draftee mega-Army in Feldgrau and Stahlhelme, metric and Celsius, heavens-knows-what Prussian ideologies, barbed-wire camps, and willing to go all the way to kick the Sioux and Apache outside the borders (if they're lucky), and a South repeating (all too closely) the path of 1918-45 Germany; so he takes thinks that are actually inherent in US history and juices them up, implicitly making the reader think "so ... what is 'American'? if our sins and ills are inevitably written in stone since 1619--why didn't OTL turn out the same way?"

1b. on edit: High Castle tries to do this, but ultimately just blows up Lady Liberty and the Bell and slaps Hitler Youth and SS uniforms on everyone, it's too much of an imposition

2. SM Stirling's Draka series even more intentionally creates a complete "anti-USA": Revolutionary-War Loyalists hook up with Boerarchists and Confederado slavelords; this TL is more on-the-nose than Turt, but doesn't really cross-examine "Americanness" except create a conveniently-foreign OPFOR (that AmericaTM teams up with the Nazis to fight)

3. and I've had contrary thoughts about Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials": this TL's supposed to be a Catho-Calvinist theocracy that hauls off freethinkers, jails kings, and sows fanatical hashishin across Europe: it's so oppressive the nominal Bolivar-style liberator can only free his home TL by slaying Jehovah/the Demiurge himself: but Lyra's world also has witches (real witches) that are shocked at the idea of mass persecution, no Shoah, no World Wars, and an industrial base that can *build a Nuke, target it by quantum entanglement across the multiverse, and eventually nuke Hell itself*: one of my notes for this world is "our TL is the one that looks dystopian to other TLs"

 

[Elfwine]

"What do people do when times are dark?" interests me. Stories about heroic sacrifice sort of need situations calling for it, and it's not just "heroic sacrifice" there - it's the whole range of human behavior.

Dystopia as in "let's make this as crummy as possible" does not really scratch that itch, but utopia definitely doesn't.

 

[Beatriz]

Do post-dystopias in the afternath of dystopia but where things are improving interest people?

 

[DougM]

Personally I am not that fond of them.. I get enough doom and gloom in real life.

But I think it is that
A) positive timeline can frankly be dull. If everything goes your way.. where is the story? Much the same logic of why we generally don’t like stories about Mary Sues.
B) It gives some folks a bit of a “well it could be worse” thing. So it make the real timeline look better by comparison.

I do think the morbid curiosity and the train wreck porn argument also have validity .

So like most things. There is no one “right answer” and it will very a bit ftom person to person. But in be the 4 points listed above probably cover most folks.

 

[Fratsup]

It depends but the most likely answer is that they make conflict easy and move the story along compared to some other timelines.

I would say a growing subsection of said scenarios are the ones where the things are awful for the nation/ideology that the author does not like and how they suffer and are humiliated. Unlike most other pessimistic timelines these tend more towards revenge fantasies as they tend towards the same nations without much nuance with the other nations being better off just because.

Full pessimistic timelines where everything is awful are not as common as they used to be in the community if you ask me with most coming from already older and established projects.

 

[jacob ningen]

There are just more of those sort of timelines. Especially the ones that tend to run longer than a short story.

From the viewpoint of a writer, I think it is partially because dystopian settings are just easier to write than utopian ones. Trying to create a timeline where things went better than ours or creating materially equivalent yet culturally different world to ours requires a lot more thought than just wrecking everything. Utopias are also inherently subjective as everyone has different viewpoint on how a "perfect world" should be. In contrast, it is easier to get everyone to agree that dystopian setting just has to be objectively worse than the one we live in.

In essence, it's the writing equivalent of it being easier to destroy something than to create something new.

Also if the PoD is sufficiently modern the question of why you arent actualizing the timeline arises.

 

[Karl der Große]

More realistic. Societies that have been led by psychopaths since at least agriculture was invented can ONLY be pessimistic by requirement.

 

[MisterP]

More realistic. Societies that have been led by psychopaths since at least agriculture was invented can ONLY be pessimistic by requirement.

there's a reason life expectancy actually dropped with agriculture (even if only part of it's self-anointed priest-kings believing themselves the incarnation of Gilgamesh)

 

[Arariboia Guamá]

Conflict.

There's just more to do. Local bandits, warlords seeking to carve domain, monsters, the local evil dystopic government, foreign invaders... there's just more to do, more heroism to act on, more conflict.

There's a reason Post-Apoc is so popular for RPGs.

I think an interesting optimistic timeline can work, you just need for the prosperity and good times to bring challenges. Like, humanity is expanding to space? Well, show some conflict going on because of that! Is there a booming trade between Earth and Space? Well, what if space pirates became a thing somehow? See what I did there? New opportunity, new conflicts.

 

[Jared]

AH is known for pessimistic timelines like Man in the High Castle and Decades of Darkness. These timelines are often criticized for indulging in too much grimness such as a focus on or trivialization of atrocities and wanking of particular states.
I want to ask what makes pessimistic timelines interesting, and more than “watching a trainwreck” sense.

I can't speak for readers (since ironically enough I bounced off Man in the High Castle - due to dislike of the writing style rather than dystopia per se) but I can comment from the perspective of a writer.

My motivation for writing Decades of Darkness came not for "disaster porn" as such, but an interest in an inverted world. Exploring what might have happened if the worst aspects of the American Revolutionary Wars - colonial British North America had been built on the back of white supremacy, racism, slavery, "manifest destiny" etc - had come to the fore and stayed there. Obviously the United States did plenty of that in actual history, but it was seeing how things could have been worse. Extremely unpleasant things flowed from that, both within the borders of the historical United States but also in other places.

That didn't mean an interest in unrelenting horror (some parts of the world arguably turned out "better" than their historical equivalent, though it depends what standards people use), but such an inversion is always going to create a considerable amount of horrific situations around much of the world.

 

[Garrison]

The same reason people like slasher films, the thrill of peril that you know isn't real. Also a bit of a 'there but for the grace of god...' vibe.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

There is the matter of the Jungian Shadow: you have evil inside you as much as good, and you are capable of very evil things. You are an angel and a monster. It is worse when you reject that evil part of yourself or ignore it because it lashes out at bad intervals and can even take over. It can even be distorted as being the good or the ideal. The only true way to deal with the shadow is to recognize it, accept it, face it, tame it and integrate it into yourself as a beast of burden for good.

That has the asterisk of: the biggest problem people have is attaining and having confidence, and not slipping into self lust or self loathing.

Dystopias are fascinating for many reasons. It is a dark mirror of ourselves, and the places we won't admit to or are afraid of. It is places we may not even know are within us.

I don't know about anyone else, but I love ideas. I don't mean that simply as factual, material creations; nor factual material in terms of being fictional but presented as real constructs of people, places and things. I love ideas in terms of their moods. I love ideas in terms of their themes. I love ideas in terms of how they organize themselves and merge with others. I love ideas as the space the tangible moves through and not simply for what moves through that space. Ideas in that way are like music. They are something transcendent where the sum is greater than it's parts. The mood of ideas is like another sense, like sight, smell, sound or taste. Fascination or revulsion (which is another fascination) mixes with mystique and our need to discover, understand and comprehend. And such is despite the fact that we may not be able to fully comprehend something, or it may be staring into oblivion to do so where nothing will be gained because there is nothing to gain; or what is gained is not worth it and will only make you look for even more despite there being nothing more. Even "this is all it is" is an answer that provokes the question (rather than vice versa) and provokes an inward assessment of that. And we rarely simply walk away and stop seeking more meaning because we're not programmed to do that. We are like a cat with a toy.

Spoiler

If I may go off tangent, you are the only one that exists to you. I do not exist to you. Myself to you is a construct within your mind because no one can understand anything that is not within themselves. Nothing outside of you truly exists to you, despite knowing it does, because you cannot be it and can only interpret it. I, anyone else and everything else is simply an avatar created as an approximation of what does exist. That avatar is then layered behind many things such as what I present to you, and how you understand and interpret things within your conceptualization. You can understand the hand print you make in the sand and the shape of the impression but you cannot understand the sand (nor necessarily the hand making the impression).

(If there is a God) the only real relationship that really exists is between yourself and God, whatever that may be. No one else can every truly know you nor can you truly know another because you cannot be another or exist as it / them. (If there is not a God) your only real relationship is between yourself and something transcendent that exists as a convenient and necessary conceit. It is not necessarily transcendent in holiness or mysticism, but rather in being more than you yourself, which we cannot hold in the mind and lack the ability to forge a complete concept of, but which is also more the truth than our ability to conceive. You can view only the spaces between things but not those things themselves.

This is the space that ideas live in. Any interest in an idea derives from grasping at comprehension within and without you in a coexisting and cooperative relationship. It is also whatever those ideas draw from you, provoke in you or nourish in you.