POLL: For how long after the POD should a TL go on?

For how long after the POD should a TL go on?

  • I do not care about the Butterfly Effect, so this discussion is pointless

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    111
The so called Butterfly Effect makes any (good written) TL diverge more and more from OTL as time passes, eventually leading to an unrecognizable World.
If, just after the POD, (almost) everything could be rationally deduced from the POD, as the TL progresses the author eventually has to start making stuff up (new characters, events, wars, etc).


Just vote according to your preference.
Feel free to add anything in the comments.

Thanks.
Amber
 
Between the third one or fourth, with some 6 and 7th on it. You shouldn´t respect the butterfly effect on its entirety, you can have pseudo communism at some point in time in industrialized Song world, or colonialism in the New World with a different migration period. There are underlying features of our world that it´s hard to change and those should make your world fairly recognizable. You change names, actors and places but you can diverge only that much.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
Generally, if you only want to test certain POD (what happen if A have a son, B killed in battle, or C and D married) then from several years to one generation (until people mentioned in POD died) .

Special exception happen when you backtrack Pod, if you have certain goal in story (Venice survive to modern age, more industrialized Africa) and work POD backward, you should continue the story until the Goal achieved.
 
I voted "Just make it interesting," but wanted to share my specific philosophy, too.

As you'll note in my longest ones, "Sweet Lands of Liberty"(Waldensian reformation) and the one with Jefferson winning in '96 whose name I forget, I went about a century because it's still more plausible that the same nobility and such would be born and it remained int he same era historically. It is harder for me as a writer - maybe due to very mild Asperger's - to keep coming up with totally different systems, people, etc..

So, because of that, I sort of prefer TLs where the Butterfly Effect isn't as huge, where it's not "everything changes" but "things only change if it's impossible for them not to." In other words, if A could hve married B, they do and hve C, D, and E; more of a historical determinism. This is especially important in sports - hence my "If Baseball integrated Early," where baseball integrated from the start, has the same players but in different situations on different teams.Obviously, they have to be born to play.:)

That gets back to the just keep it interesting part, though. Sports are more specialized than general history and it's harder to have it be interesting unless you really limit the Butterfly Effect to what must logically be different from the POD. So, if "interesting" to you means keeping some form of socialism when your POD is the 12th century, that's fine, in my view. Or you want to have a genius appear named Ben Franklin in that same TL doing different things, that's fine, too. It's really however you want to do it. As long as there are enough differences to make it interesting, too, the further out you go; in my Waldensian one, for instance, had I continued, having Savoy (which encompasses Switzerland and is a neutral) with a League of Nations prototype housed in it but with a different name and at a different time would have been quite plausible, too, as long as other stuff about it was different.

Edit: It's probably keeping that in mind that keeps me from worrying about being overly zealous in worldbuilding, too; a good majority of the time I'm just using wikipedia or baseball-reference.com (Which is, admittedly, ls better than Wikipedia.)
 
Last edited:
For modern day stuff (say, WWII or later), only about 5 years. Medieval era stuff should go on for about 2 generations' worth, I reckon.

- BNC
 
I read AH for the same reason I read sci-fi. I'm interested in seeing how humans behave in wildly different circumstances from OTL.

Because of that, the earlier the POD and the longer the time line goes, the more I enjoy it. I rarely enjoy the first bit of a TL where everything follows logically from the POD because it seems too much to me like ordinary, OTL history. I enjoy it much more once things becoming highly divergent from OTL.

For example, when I was reading Look to the West, I sorta skimmed over the first 50-60 years. It was only when the ATL French Revolution hit and all the alternate revolutionary ideas started popping up that I really go interesting. I fell like it's only gotten more and more interesting since then as Thandie has been focusing more and more of the ATL ideologies of societism and diversitarianism.
 
If you can manage it, "as long as possible." For ex, I'm doing a TL with a POD in the 970s but my real interest is in building a history that carries through at least to the *colonial age, possibly even to modernity - but it's also a huge project and time-consuming.

I don't think AH writers should be afraid of original characters. Even when you've changed the world and populated it with people who are different than their OTL counterparts, those alt-history OCs are still bound to the ripples in history caused by the POD. To toot my own Moonlight in a Jar horn, even if the current King of Galicia is a son of Vermudo II who isn't Alfonso V, there's still a story there in how he responds to the historical pressures facing his kingdom, even if the POD has changed some of those pressures in unexpected ways. And how he responds will create new pressures. Is it an insanely complex web to weave? God yes.

But navigating the tangled web is half the fun.

There are some acceptable steps you can take, in my mind, to make the future somewhat recognizable - science is still science, for ex, so things that resemble modern ships and even aircraft are inevitable, while a lot of our educational philosophy comes from Socrates, who isn't going to be lost because of the POD, so you can get away with writing things as academic documents. But I'm personally enamored with the idea of building a world which, geopolitically, isn't recognizable.
 
Depends on your ability at world creation and the pace of butterflies. If the progression makes sense and the story evolves logically in an interesting fashion, then why not go on?
 
I voted "Just make it interesting," but wanted to share my specific philosophy, too.

As you'll note in my longest ones, "Sweet Lands of Liberty"(Waldensian reformation) and the one with Jefferson winning in '96 whose name I forget, I went about a century because it's still more plausible that the same nobility and such would be born and it remained int he same era historically. It is harder for me as a writer - maybe due to very mild Asperger's - to keep coming up with totally different systems, people, etc..

So, because of that, I sort of prefer TLs where the Butterfly Effect isn't as huge, where it's not "everything changes" but "things only change if it's impossible for them not to." In other words, if A could hve married B, they do and hve C, D, and E; more of a historical determinism. This is especially important in sports - hence my "If Baseball integrated Early," where baseball integrated from the start, has the same players but in different situations on different teams.Obviously, they have to be born to play.:)

That gets back to the just keep it interesting part, though. Sports are more specialized than general history and it's harder to have it be interesting unless you really limit the Butterfly Effect to what must logically be different from the POD. So, if "interesting" to you means keeping some form of socialism when your POD is the 12th century, that's fine, in my view. Or you want to have a genius appear named Ben Franklin in that same TL doing different things, that's fine, too. It's really however you want to do it. As long as there are enough differences to make it interesting, too, the further out you go; in my Waldensian one, for instance, had I continued, having Savoy (which encompasses Switzerland and is a neutral) with a League of Nations prototype housed in it but with a different name and at a different time would have been quite plausible, too, as long as other stuff about it was different.

Edit: It's probably keeping that in mind that keeps me from worrying about being overly zealous in worldbuilding, too; a good majority of the time I'm just using wikipedia or baseball-reference.com (Which is, admittedly, ls better than Wikipedia.)
I agree with your view on "things only change if it's impossible for them not to" and don't like the opposite view from that, that many on AH.com have- "nobody after the POD could possibly still be born!" Maybe it's a trait of asperger's or ASD thing as I, too, have Asperger's.
 
For most of the length of the White Huns, I always meant to wrap it up. But then I just never did, and it went on indefinitely. It's kind of weird but I'm happy with the result. At this point I'll probably just keep it going as long as Im able, and I'd encourage others to speculate/keep the world going if I were to tire of it.

The problem with ending a timeline, in my view, is there's always more history. It doesn't just stop. Unless you plan a timeline thematically, the ramifications of a change will always spiral out in a way that defies simple and tidy narratives. But that's life. Those who tell narrative and story based timelines I think have it easier because personal stories can always provide resolution and closure even as grander narratives escape such tidiness.
 
I don't really know how long is too long for a TL. But as someone who is now 200 years past my POD in Edward Clever Handed, I'm certainly interested in everyone's opinion.
 
It really depends on the goal of the TL. If the goal is to test consequences of the POD, a generation is enough, the readers will deduce the rest. But if the goal is to "create "an alternate world, you can go to modern time if you desire - the farther you go, the more unrecognizable it is but that's exactly what's interesting anyway.
 
With TLs the problem isn't generally time, it's scope bloat. A POD in one country has ripple effects that eventually cover the whole world and writing updates about the whole damn world is a pretty herculean task that only a bare handful of TLs have been able to pull off.

This kind of scope bloat has either killed off or slowed some of my favorite TLs to a crawl.

Would really like TLs to be formatted as one single book of history instead of the standard grab bag of excerpts so that they could focus as bit more. Then the author could write sequels if the concept still had legs.
 
I voted for 'it depends', but in practice my preference falls squarely between 3 & 4 (until present unless we're talking yuuuge spans of time). For instance, I plan to take my Egyptian TL at least to 1st century BC (when Ancient Egypt fell IOTL) with a POD in 1284 BC.

Speaking of formatting, I love the way @Sersor formats his TL.
 
I agree. I have a fairly good end date for my Amalingian Europe timeline (since the main focus is the Gothic Roman Empire, I plan on going until that is no longer a thing), although I've also developed some events and details that will happen after that time, meaning I will be posting some epilogues. Although I think the butterfly effect makes things 'fuzzy' within a few years from the POD I also feel as if the best timelines develop an internal logic and consistency and propels events forward. Eventually, you do run into the trouble of dealing with entirely fictitious characters; however, if you have created the world well enough, these actors are going to be constrained by the expectations and limitations of their time, just as OTL actors are.
 

jahenders

Banned
It really depends on the scale and the scope of the issue. In some cases, the effects are likely to be largely "spent" within a decade, while in other cases there could be (semi-predictable) implications millenia later.
 
Top