I had an idea for an Alternate History novel the other day.
The Time: Victorian Era England/India
The Plot: A series of err bad events revolving around the founding of the Indian Parliament and the crowning of Queen Victoria as "Empress of India"
Characters: A snarky ex-scotland yard investigator-reads lots of current novels and likes to style himself as a "living" Holmes...at which he fails horribly his accomplice is feisty Indian Women....they fight crime.
edited 3rd Mar '12 8:41:54 AM by syvaris
You will never love a women as much as George Lucas hates his fans.My favorite AU breakpoint is 1485. What would have happened if Richard III had won the battle of Bosworth? (Andre Norton dealt lightly with possible developments in Quest Crosstime - though that wasn't her primary interest. She added a second breakpoint that made the Spanish conquest of Mexico fail, and spent rather more page-time exploring the consequences of that.)
My favorite Nazis-win AU is Fatherland. Midway through, but it's fantastically character-oriented and only throws you the AU bones a character would realistically think or talk about. (My favorite bit of exposition is when they're watching the American President on television. Gold.) Also, it's Nazis-win-but-Axis-loses, which doesn't happen as often as one would think.
Hail Martin Septim!Personally, I'm kinda fond of Eric Flint's AH writings, both solo (Trail of Glory, Sixteen Thirty Two) and with others (Belisarius Series, written from story outlines by David Drake).
I may not agree with his politics,* but I do like his writing overall, AH or otherwise.
Also, at the risk of being accused of being a Baen shill, they have three anthologies of AH short stories under the title of Alternate Generals edited by Turtledove, with PODs mostly of the mundane variety (IIRC, it's been a while since I've read them). AG1
, AG2
, and AG3
Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon is by far the best I've read.
"You want to see how a human dies? At ramming speed." - Emily Wong.
x4 I have another favorite that comes close. What if Henry V hadn't died having just been accepted as King of both England and France, leaving a 1 year old (who grew into a very inefective king) on the throne.
Also do you go with the Shakespearean view of Richard as a Complete Monster or the revisionist view that he probably wasn't that bad and probably didn't kill th young princes.
edited 5th Mar '12 10:55:11 AM by tricksterson
Trump delenda estI was always fascinated by the possibility of the Central Powers' winning WWI. It came far, FAR closer to actually happening than a Nazi victory in WWII did, and its implications raise huge questions about how the 20th century might then have played out.
How would a German-led "counter-Versailles" have gone? Might a victorious Kaiser have ended Communism in Russia by installing a German puppet as restored Tsar? How would Germany's keeping and expanding their African holdings have affected that continent? Would the decrepit Austrian and Ottoman empires have been kept artificially alive, or would they have been divvied up on their fellow victors' terms?
If the British Empire crumbles twenty years ahead of schedule, what are the implications for America (a late entrant to the war, and not likely to bear heavy postwar burdens in any case)? What about Canada?
Another issue—the global depression of the 1930s seems likely to have happened regardless of who won the war. Would Weimar Germany have been avoided, or would we simply have had a bigger & more powerful version of it? Would something like the Brownshirts have arisen anyway—only stronger? Compelling stuff.
Finally: even in our own timeline, before the Nazis rose to power, several half-prescient observers feared that something like the Holocaust might occur—but they thought it would happen in FRANCE. How much more so in a defeated, bitter, postwar France?
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tricksterson: I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Ricardian and think he got a really raw deal from the "historians" (most of whom were being paid by the Tudors to write nasty lies about their predecessors).
IMHO Richard's biggest problem is he wasn't ruthless enough. If he had executed more of the ringleaders in 1483 (the Buckingham rebellion), they wouldn't have been able to betray him again in 1485.
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Jhimmibhob, Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain explore something like that - it features an alternate 50s Paris where the Ardenne's offensive in 1940 was a failure and WW 2 ended before it really began. There, the state of technology is behind were it 'should' be and French society is oppressively right-wing and xenophobic.

Who is your favorite author in this sub-genre? Your least? What alternate history would you most like to read about?
My favorite is probably Stirling because he shows serious imaginative chops although sometimes, as with the Draka he gets too implausible for the purpose f making a point, but I still like what he did with it.
I don't actually dislike Turtledove but he's probably the most overrated. I think he comes up with wonderful ideas but then, wth the excepton of World War doesn't do enough with them. I think Robert Conroy, who has a similar writing style is better at it.
What historical event would I most like to see go off the rails? Saul of Tarsus' trip to Damascus. What of instead of being temporarily blinded and converted to Christianity by flash lightning he'd been fried? What would havehappened to Christianity then?
Another I'd like to see is what if the Tunguska event, whatever it was, had happened not to an isolated stretch of Siberia but to St. Petersburg, then the capital of the Russian Empire?
Trump delenda est