why always a dystopia?

Indeed, and as H.G Wells postulated in The Time Machine who's to say a utopic society would actually be good for mankind (who eventually evolve into small rabbit like creatures in that timeline due to the elimination of a need for innovation)

Well... Evolution doesn't work that way for one. A 'Utopia' would be a good thing.

Agreed on Utopias being boring though- hell, the very original Utopia itself wasn't a Utopia in the way we now mean it. It was a boring, bland place.

Though its likely the future will be a rather nicer place or at least just as good as today there's no fun in that. Stories need a challenge, a threat or somesuch. Hence future worlds are never perfect.
AH follows the same rules.
 
Conflict is the essence of drama.

I should note that modern literature seems to have no problem writing tragedies set in the richest and greatest society to ever exist.

I'll grant that a romance set in the Bonapartist space colonies might not be the traditional AH, of course.
 
I actually think it's the exact opposite. Most TLs are crazy-utopian. People have a favorite country, make it do better than in OTL, and Utopia results.

In the TL I'm writing, I'm really having to work hard to not make it utopian - and that's a tall order since a lasting Ottoman Empire would probably solve a lot of problems. On the other hand, not so good for Balkan and Greek nationalism...

It has occurred to me that the vast majority of TL's and AH fiction I have read always seem to end in a dystopia. In fact the only AH I have read that didn't turn out considerably dystopian were Ring of Fire books, and the Belisarius series(didn't read the last two books though). So it seems that short of ASB intervention any serious alternate historians seem to consider an altered history to be a worse one.

So are there any decently researched TL's or fictions that don't make the world a total crap hole to live in?

Also, why is it that so many people have this tendency to make things so much worse? Is it so hard to believe that the world could be a better place with a few changes to history?


P.S. I am excluding short time lines where somebody made it up in 20 minutes.
 
I actually think it's the exact opposite. Most TLs are crazy-utopian. People have a favorite country, make it do better than in OTL, and Utopia results.

For some reason I just remembered my first big TL, where the Ottomans got a late term abortion and Venetian starships set out around 2020.

Good times.
 
I actually think it's the exact opposite. Most TLs are crazy-utopian. People have a favorite country, make it do better than in OTL, and Utopia results.

In the TL I'm writing, I'm really having to work hard to not make it utopian - and that's a tall order since a lasting Ottoman Empire would probably solve a lot of problems. On the other hand, not so good for Balkan and Greek nationalism...

Lasting Ottoman Empire? Well, as you say, the situation in the Balkans would lead to perennial bloodshed. This empire would surely be pulled into both world wars, - in WWII in particular, it'd be near guaranteed to get at least half conquered, regardless of which side it was one. In the Cold War, it'd be in a situation similar to Poland, if it's within the Soviet Sphere, or to OTL Turkey if it's in NATO. Not to mention, Arab nationalism and Secularism would still be huge issues.

So yeah. Hardly utopic, though not dystopic either.
 
Lasting Ottoman Empire? Well, as you say, the situation in the Balkans would lead to perennial bloodshed. This empire would surely be pulled into both world wars, - in WWII in particular, it'd be near guaranteed to get at least half conquered, regardless of which side it was one. In the Cold War, it'd be in a situation similar to Poland, if it's within the Soviet Sphere, or to OTL Turkey if it's in NATO. Not to mention, Arab nationalism and Secularism would still be huge issues.

So yeah. Hardly utopic, though not dystopic either.

But, uh, the, you know, the butterflies?

Even saving the Ottomans as late as WW1 inherently butterflies WW2 as we know it. Pasha's PoD butterflies both.
 
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