AH Challenge: Make AH popular

Adam Parsons

Yes, I've done this before, but I felt it was time to polish it off and give 'er another spin.

Goal: With a POD of 1800 or later, make alternate history about as popular as science fiction is today. Failing that, make it as popular as fantasy is today.
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

I could think of 2 possible ways into this

1. Make it a recognised doctrine, a sort of Klausewitz-meets-Machiavelli-and-has-tea-with-Sun-Tzu kind of thing

2. Have a century of less dramatic events so that instead of speculating about the future the 20th century-ians speculate about what might have beens... e.g. damn that fool Princip in 1914 who bottled it and missed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, just think what an era of peace and progress could have been brought on if the Habsburgs had fallen...

Grey Wolf
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Mikey said:
Dude, don't hijack another guy's topic.
Click to expand...

Um, it seemed entirely on topic to me

If History is as important as Mathematics, then theoretical History would be as important as theoretical Maths

Grey Wolf
 

sunsurf

After WW I, a retired German general gets into frequent discussions about what went wrong during the war, and is frequently asked what he would have done differently. He finally writes a textbook full of counterfactuals, and he or a friend writes or collaborates on a popular AH novel which becomes controversial.

Maybe Hitler tries to have it suppressed, which only makes it more popular.

Socialists do similar counterfactuals which are popular among the
intellectuals of various countries.

One of the few SF genres which HG Welles didn't write in was alternate history. He might have written an alternate history which becomes popular. Let's say, The Missing Archduke, in which Ferdinand is not assassinated, WW I is avoided, and in 1925 the novel becomes a movie starring Rudolf Valentino and Mary Pickford.

Later, when she marries Douglas Fairbanks, she's interested in this AH business and does some movies with him with an AH Civil War, (Lee is the Confederacy's first president), AH Indian Wars, (Custer survives), AH British India (India gets independence sooner--not historically accurate, but it wins a 1929 Oscar.) They also produce an AH movie about Benjamin Franklin negotiating a settlement which averts the American Revolution.

The Marx Brothers make fun of the genre with Romans discovering gold in California in Roman Scoundrels.

In Bob Hope's Casanova's Big Night he inadvertantly prevents the French Revolution.

The AH content of all these is fairly minimal, but the movies are popular and the genre is more familiar.
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

sunsurf said:
After WW I, a retired German general gets into frequent discussions about what went wrong during the war, and is frequently asked what he would have done differently. He finally writes a textbook full of counterfactuals, and he or a friend writes or collaborates on a popular AH novel which becomes controversial.

Maybe Hitler tries to have it suppressed, which only makes it more popular.

Socialists do similar counterfactuals which are popular among the
intellectuals of various countries.

One of the few SF genres which HG Welles didn't write in was alternate history. He might have written an alternate history which becomes popular. Let's say, The Missing Archduke, in which Ferdinand is not assassinated, WW I is avoided, and in 1925 the novel becomes a movie starring Rudolf Valentino and Mary Pickford.

Later, when she marries Douglas Fairbanks, she's interested in this AH business and does some movies with him with an AH Civil War, (Lee is the Confederacy's first president), AH Indian Wars, (Custer survives), AH British India (India gets independence sooner--not historically accurate, but it wins a 1929 Oscar.) They also produce an AH movie about Benjamin Franklin negotiating a settlement which averts the American Revolution.

The Marx Brothers make fun of the genre with Romans discovering gold in California in Roman Scoundrels.

In Bob Hope's Casanova's Big Night he inadvertantly prevents the French Revolution.

The AH content of all these is fairly minimal, but the movies are popular and the genre is more familiar.
Click to expand...


A ice lot of ideas, I commend you

Grey Wolf
 

Torqumada

Would "Shape of Things to come" by Welles be considered an AH novel or speculative fiction? Its hard to say from our point in history, but couldn't that be an AH novel?

Torqumada
 

sunsurf

Thank you, I'm glad to suggest A ice lot of ideas :D

Some of the earliest AH were in French, about Napoleon. If they'd been in English, they might have been more popular in English-speaking nations. Maybe Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters might have written on.

Disraeli wrote a novel which was either AH or hidden history, and chose a really obscure incident, for some odd reason. If he'd been more daring, extrapolated more, and used a more familiar POD, his work might have been more popular.
 

panzerjay

Mikey said:
Dude, don't hijack another guy's topic.
Click to expand...



hijack hell,

some people today think WWI was between russia and england or dont give a shit. this a cultural disaster that can or should have been combated by education. how can people get into AH if they dont give a shit about real history?
 

Melvin Loh

Guys, couldn't you argue that in some respects AH already IS as popular as sci-fi a la the likes of HT, whose books are found in the sci-fi/fantasy section of bookshops ?
 

Adam Parsons

The Roadblocks of AH

As I mused on this matter, it struck me that, in order to make AH more popular, certain problems/tendencies/ideas need to be dealt with. For your convinence, I have listed several of them below.

1. General lack of knowledge about real history

Throughout the last few decades, the amount of science the general person knows has increased. Today, any person on the street can tell you what DNA is, or what an electron is. An increase of general knowledge like this hasn't occurred in history. Without a greater background, a lot of subtler AH will simply shoot over people's heads.

2. Silly AH

Alternate history, like sci-fi and fantasy, does have an unfortunate tendency to become, on occasion, very silly very fast. A quick scan of the ASB section of the board can easily confirm this.

3. Determinism

The belief that history is controlled by great social-economic movements, in which individuals play only a small part, is not really compatible with alternate history, a living, breathing validation of the "Great Man" theory if there ever was one.

4. Politics

More so than science, history ties into politics quite tightly, so a historical discussion can easily get sidetracked into a political fight. This, of course, is proven by the various threads that have been transformed into Iraq flame-offs on this board. Also, revisionism can very easily slip into AH, leading to AH stories becoming Holocaust denial works and so such.

Just some thoughts on the matter.
 

Dave Howery

AH could be made into a worldwide sensation in 2 days:
day 1. get one of the supermarket tabloids to publish a story that one of the big AH writers (HT, SMT, whoever) is having an affair with one of the OLsen twins (even better, both of them).
Day 2. AH is being talked about all over the place.
ta-dah!
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Dave Howery said:
AH could be made into a worldwide sensation in 2 days:
day 1. get one of the supermarket tabloids to publish a story that one of the big AH writers (HT, SMT, whoever) is having an affair with one of the OLsen twins (even better, both of them).
Day 2. AH is being talked about all over the place.
ta-dah!
Click to expand...

Are they legal now, or is he heading off to jail ? I doubt a statutory rape charge against a major writer would make the genre popular though, as R Kelly found out, it may boost his own sales for the moment

Grey Wolf
 
tom

tom

Maybe if the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics had been proposed and became the "party line" instead of the Copenhagen Interpretation. Or if there were no Space Race to make Space Opera so popular for Science Fiction?
 
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