alternatehistory.com

DISCLAIMER: The following is my opinion. You are free to disagree.

Tony Jones is perhaps the best author of alternate history on the Internet. His page can be found at:
http://www.wolfram.demon.co.uk/alternate_history_top.html

I do not know of a better author who publishes his alternate history scenarios online, available free of charge. Tony Jones vividly creates worlds, with detailed timelines and maps. Unfortunately, most of the worlds seem like hell to live in. Puritan World, and Superpunk (a cyberpunk Axis Powers victory scenario) both seem like a living hell. Monarchy World and Clive-Less World (where Robert Clive committed suicide before becoming the mighty British general who expelled the French from India) seem similarly unpleasant.

At first, Clive-Less World seemed to be a pleasant alternative, as the French supplanted the nefarious British Empire as an imperial power early on, but then when I remembered that the France was not the advanced, progressive, Revolutionary France, or the French Empire of Napoleon I. Rather, the alternate French Empire was the reactionary, absolutist pre-revolutionary France. In Clive-Less World, the French Revolution never occurs and Napoleon Bonaparte fades into obscurity. Nevertheless, Clive-Less World has a very fascinating and weird alternate technological development.

Tellus is so exotic, and foreign, and strange, that it almost appears downright silly. It is just too different from our world to compare. I can not decide if the world of Tellus would be a better place or worse place than OTL Earth.

The two more pleasant scenarios are Gurkani Alam and Wolfworld. In Gurkani Alam, the Mughal Empire survives much longer than it did OTL, and the Indian subcontinent is thus shielded from incurisions by European colonial empires. Mughal India becomes a counter to the Nations of Europe, but this more multipolar world leads to more cultural, political, scientific, social, and technological progress overall than OTL.

In Wolfworld, the last Ice Age never ends. Struggling Ice Age populations continue in the subglacial areas, but they must share the land with a species of sentient wolves called the Tathol. Further south, human cultures thrive in tropical and temperate climates. This is probably the most interesting of the Tony Jones alternate histories, but unfortunately, it is also the most premature. I wish he continued working on the scenario, providing more details about the human cultures, their society, their science and technology, and politics. While Tony Jones provided detailed timelines covering a few centuries of events, he rather briefly summarized over ten thousand years of history.

What became of the old Vahaplan Empire? How long did the sentient Tathol take to evolve in their present form? Did anyone ever attempt to domesticate the Tathol? These and other questions went unanswered. Also, the author mentioned "sixteen major wolf groupings," four in Eurasia and eight in North America. (That is only twelve, where are the other four?) Errors like that indicate that Wolfworld is a work in progress prematurely discontinued by the author. Apparently North America is uninhabited by humans. If the POD is merely a continuation of the last Ice Age, then it is probably too late to prevent human migrations across the Bering Strait into the New World. (The ancestors of the Amerinds arrived in North America before the Last Glacial Maximum, probably between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. (Perhaps a little earlier?) But maybe in Wolfworld, humans never permanently inhabited most of North America due to competition with the Tathol so they continued southward.)

I am curious if anyone else is familiar with the works of Tony Jones, and I would like to hear some opinions on the various scenarios.

Personally, I found something very odd about the Gurkani Alam scenario. See if you can spot a rather obvious oddity on the map below:







Anybody notice it? The Ottoman Empire somehow managed to survive AND thrive despite the fact that the Holy Russian Empire managed to annex Anatolia, now known as TURKEY, which the Russians conquered from Persia, and the Persians in turn conquered from the Ottomans. I can not imagine how an Ottoman Empire would survive, let alone thrive if Asia Minor was taken from the Turks. Perhaps an Ottoman successor state would rule much of the Middle East including Egypt, northern Sudan, and Lybia (the green area on the map so labeled Ottoman Empire), but there is no way they would hold the Southern Balkans after losing Anatolia, the stronghold of Ottoman/Turkish power.

In such a scenario, one would expect the Southern Balkans to break away almost instantaneously and the land to be divided between Greeks and Bulgarians. A super-Bulgaria and super-Greece would emerge, with Greece annexing all lands it did IOTL (though the northeastern frontier would look different) plus Cyprus, part of the Turkish Balkans (OTL) and perhaps the southern part of Albania. Bulgaria would keep the indigo area on the map plus FYROM, its OTL lands (though its southern border with Greece would look different) formerly occupied by Ottomans, and part of the Turkish Balkans. Essentially, Greece and Bulgaria would divide up Balkan Turkey in such a scenario and Greeks would claim Constantinople. Would war ever break out between a restored Greece and a resurgent Bulgaria? I am not sure as the author avoids that possibility, keeping the Southern Balkans as an Ottoman territory.

...Unless the Hellenic and Slavic people of the Southern Balkans were converted to Islam and assimilated into the Turkish population. That is the only way I can see such an Ottoman Empire existing. Apparently, in the world of Gurkani Alam all the Greeks were Turkicized.
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