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I liked it. I think people who are disappointed because the AH is unrealistic are kind of missing the point, a bit like someone who dislikes Star Wars because the science is unrealistic. It's pretty clear from both watching the movie and reading interviews with the director that the whole point...

What evidence is there that computers would make a command economy efficient? What algorithms would they use, exactly? Can a computer predict what R&D programs are more likely to yield valuable results, or what new products are likely to be in high demand among consumers? The strength of...

But most economic systems throughout history have been "inherently inefficient" in comparison to modern capitalism and it didn't cause the societies to collapse (and perhaps economic historians in 2500 AD will say our capitalist system was 'inherently inefficient' compared to whatever system...

Soviet communism wasn't a total failure as an economic system, the average standard of living was probably better than it was under, say, feudalism...it's just that in comparison with capitalism (or more accurately, in comparison with 'mixed economies' that are mainly capitalistic but involve a...

Mary Sue is usually taken to mean a sort of cheesy and embarrassing wish-fulfillment fantasy on the part of the author--see the wikipedia entry on 'Mary Sue'

I don't think he was "rabid" like his friend Henry Ford, but he was somewhat anti-semitic nevertheless. For example, this page quotes a letter of his: I guess it's good that he has no problem saying Jews regularly make valuable contributions in art and science and such; a truly rabid...

I was talking about the "original" timeline the cop came from--it would be hard to imagine going from the real 1981 (when the story was first written) to that near-totalitarian dystopia in just 6 years, and if it was supposed to be the future of OTL's 1981 why was the political party there...

Yeah, but it obviously isn't the 1987 of our history, so maybe you could say that Turtledove started earlier there. The book was written in 1981, so even then it was probably a little too soon to have been intended as an ordinary dystopian future. Redem, I'd like to see your breakdown of this...

"Access denied" past 1938, maybe that's when the aliens arrive...up until then I didn't notice any differences from real history, although I just looked at a few random dates.

Er, the policy with nukes was "if a foreign government targets one of our cities with one, then we'll hit one of their cities with one". Not "if a terrorist network made up of people of a certain ethnicity/religion attacks us, we'll attack a bunch of unconnected people of the same...

I don't think you can assume that the terrorists' goal was as simple as just maximizing the number of kills--the symbolic effect of destroying the towers may have been more important to them than the number of people who would be killed as a result (certainly if a huge death toll was their goal...

What about Nixon? Anyway, I think the situation is a little different with Gore since he won the popular vote, so he's not as much of a clear loser.

Well, if we're talking in terms of actual theories of parallel universes used by physicists, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says the universe is constantly branching anyway, even without time travel--every seemingly random quantum event actually happens in all possible ways...

You can call it a "stupidity tax" if you like, although this particular brand of stupidity is strongly dependent on a person's understanding of statistics, which is obviously going to be affected by education level so it'll disproportionately be a problem for people born poor. And as long as...

Ah, you're right. Somehow I had thought they left the flashback and returned to the 'present' at some point, but looking back I guess not.

This confused me earlier too given the title, but it's not 1947, it's 1964--see the opening here.

The culture wars are a lot about rural vs. urban as well as north vs. south...the bigger cities in the south are often more liberal, rural areas in the north more conservative. And the cultures in such an alternate timeline couldn't be expected to be a mirror image of the north and south in...

If that's really true, then does that mean you would be equally offended by a movie/TV show which showed the assassination of an entirely fictional president a la President Bartlett from "The West Wing"? If not, why not?

It was produced by Spike Lee, but not directed by him.

I dunno if this is really a sign of bad AH, you could just say that out of all the possible infinite timelines spawning from the POD, they are picking one where these people were still born, not saying it's likely they would still be born. After all, even if the writer uses completely made-up...