CH: An AH Book like LOTR

Okay, what I mean by this is an alternate history novel that popularizes the genre like Lord of the Rings did for High Fantasy. I know there was probably more to the latter than that, however it did contribute at least.

With that in mind, is this possible for AH? Or is this a genre doomed to be niche, because it's too difficult to get into for most readers? It does seem that its popularity seems to be inversely proportional with how well off your country is, judging by how popular they are in Russia, so perhaps this causes a rather epic screw for the world!:eek:

Keep in mind, my criteria are that it has to be well written and be good from an AH perspective in regards to the actual book. Now, GO! Show me that it can be done culture AH writers!:p
 
Depends -- if said AH series is completely ASB, would it still qualify? Then something like Worldwar, or just some effective "steampunk", could do the trick...
 
I think that in order to be an equivalent to Lord of the Rings, the book's author would have to take tremendous liberties. So I'm thinking steampunk with a Nazi-like empire, and some entirely fictional landmasses. Perhaps Atlantis has risen from the sea.
 
The interesting thing is that the way I understand Tolkien's basic concept, LOTR presented an alternate (pre-)history or maybe rather an alternate mythology.
 
Well, if Turtledove and Sterling our the Verne and Wells of AH, and any of half a dozen writers are the various pulp AH writers, the AH genre Tolkien should be a little more then a decade off. could even be a member of this site :eek:
 
The problem with AH doing too well is that sci-fi in general is a bit of a niche market, while Lord of the Rings took a very long time from its publication to become generally acceptable. To find something to popularize AH requires finding a Superman equivalent that strips down most of the basics, oversimplfying, and making it marketable to a mass reading audience. As plausibility only works well with this if you're a damn good writer, that's not the easiest set of things anyone would ever try to do.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I couldn't put up with an AH book as dense as LOTR was. I know there's a lot of people here that would probably really enjoy it: there's a lot of TL lovers as opposed to story lovers.

But I just can't handle books that are 80 percent Exposition and 20 percent talking.


That being said, the closest one for me would be Voyage from Stephen Baxter.
 
I couldn't put up with an AH book as dense as LOTR was. I know there's a lot of people here that would probably really enjoy it: there's a lot of TL lovers as opposed to story lovers.

But I just can't handle books that are 80 percent Exposition and 20 percent talking.


That being said, the closest one for me would be Voyage from Stephen Baxter.

Which is why to me the best option is to work out the timeline, publish the book, and if it sells well use the timeline to work out the stories as essentially a real-time style endless outline in terms of story fodder. I admit that the concept of a gestalt seems more obvious than it's actually been done.....
 
I couldn't put up with an AH book as dense as LOTR was. I know there's a lot of people here that would probably really enjoy it: there's a lot of TL lovers as opposed to story lovers.

But I just can't handle books that are 80 percent Exposition and 20 percent talking.

Maybe an AH Hobbit needs to follow first, huh? A wildly popular, simplified AH that's 80% talking and 20% exposition. Then with name recognition, the AH LOTR comes out.
 
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