Most bad AH novels are some variety of this. E.G. 1901 and Southern Victory, the latter of which becomes ever more egregious as it goes.
True. I mean, Southern Victory is a bit less obvious a case in that it starts as a Confederate-wank and indeed the premise involves the CSA being stronger and lasting longer than they ever could have, but at the end alt-USA has stomped them into the dust and is going to sit on them until Doomsday and shoot anyone who even looks
sideways at black people if that's what it takes to pacify the South. Of course, arguably long-term it's a US-wank in that the US ends up including most of Canada and three Mexican provinces, so...I suppose...
Harry Harrison's The Stars and Stripes Forever is basically an guy writing a lurid Anglophobic screed about America thrashing the cartoonishly evil British up and down the Atlantic while Union and treasonous slavocrat rebellion make peace and reunite, because...because...who the fuck knows.
And pretty much the only recognition it makes of the
reason the US and CS were fighting in the first place is when Jeff Davis, after re-integration, tries objecting to black people being given any kind of rights and when shot down, founds the alt-KKK...then gets shot, and Southerners' only reaction is 'He should've known better at his age'...
literally those words are used.
Arguably, any Nazi victory timeline is something of a wank.
It's one thing I like about people on this site, they recognise the actual odds stacked against the Nazis... A lot of popular writers don't. As one example, it's one (of the many) issues I have with Garth Ennis. His WWII stuff is epic, but he seems to genuinely believe that it was only through pure luck and dogged heroism that the Allies won WWII (I'm with him on the second part, of course, but the first part not so much), that the Nazis always had better stuff and were generally better, and according to one thing I read he seems to think anyone who downplays their chances of winning is either hopelessly naive or is probably a Fascist sympathiser trying to make them look less bad than they were.
My point is, I do like actually interacting with people who have a more nuanced view than a lot of popular writers
The Ring of Fire series can be argued to be a form of wank, albeit a justified one due to the ASB premise. Most ASB works are by default some form of wank.
This is true. And, arguably...it's both part of their appeal and the reason that a lot of ISOTs lose steam quite quickly, IMO. We all love seeing Nazis or other evil down-time factions getting curb-stomped with advanced weaponry, but quite often ISOTs seem to gradually peter out after some initial curb-stomping.
Hell, it's one reason I started the Calming Sea-verse. Setting the story thirty years after the ISOT both let me look at what I think is the most interesting part of an ISOT,
long-term socio-political-technological development, and it made it less of a wank in that the tech lead the ISOT brought has shrunk and the playing field is a lot more even now...
