Alternate history scenarios, ideas, general questions and miscellaneous points

I didn't thought of the Umayyads conquering Byzantium, I would say... it works on many levels:

- Yes, it can avoid the Great Schism (now I get you were talking about the 1054 schism). Or better, it would happen three century earlier and be more dramatic (see next point).

- The Greeks converting to Islam is a bit of a stretch, but at that time it could work. It was the time of the iconoclastic crisis, when the western and the eastern Christianity were at a crossroads. It have been argued by some historians that Iconoclasm (the refusal of religious images) was heavily influenced by the close contact with the muslim world; disputed, but you can make it canon in your world. Therefore, it is not impossible to assume that, after the conquest, the iconoclastic tendencies in Byzantine culture brought to massive convertions, while the iconodules (the ones favouring the images) would have emigrated en masse in Italy (the Greek element in the Roman Church at that time was already very active and powerful). Note, all of this could not have happened at any time after the end of the iconoclastic crisis, when the eastern christianity took its ultimate shape. But right then, you have the right window to make it work.

- The seat of the Church passing north of the Alps: I think that Rome would retain its symbolic role, but yes: giving the situation at that time, I can accept the real basis of power being in the HRE (actually, this describes exactly what happened in OTL between Charlemagne and the middle of the 11th century).

- No Byzantine empire in the 9th century means no conversion of the Slavic people to Eastern christianity. I can see most of the western Slaves converting to Catholicism, while the eastern and the southern would be attracted by Islam.

- The good news about this POD is that it needs not to invoke dramatic changes in European history. See, commonplaces of popular history notwithstanding, the development of Europe in the High Middle Ages was due mainly to internal causes. You still would have Feudalism. You still would have the Holy Roman Empire, and probably its split in a western (future France) and a eastern (future Germany) part. You still can have norman invasions of Nothern France and later of England. You still would have the development of agriculture and trade after the 1000s. The cultural and linguistic identities of Europe were already in formation at that time, so you still would have an English, French, German, Spanish, Italian etc. area, but you can play a lot with the details.

- The same goes for the relationships of Europe with its neighbours. You won't have the crusades, sure, but people tend to overestimate the role of crusades in putting the european world in contact with the muslim world. Italian city states like Venice and Genoa already started to trade-fight-and trade again with the Muslims, and actually it was their early start which made the crusades logistically feasible in the first place. The flow of translations from Arab came mostly from Spain, not from the Holy Land. And also the rediscovery of Greek culture in the Reinassance was not triggered by the fall of Byzantium: Greek art was rediscovered from roman copies, greek manuscripts were rediscovered in italian monasteries (and Italy was the only area of Western Europe where the knowledge of Greek was not completely lost). Byzantine intellectuals arriving in the 15th century helped to establish the professional teaching of greek, but it is because they were called by italian city-states; that means, the need was already felt. They didn't come as a surprise. So, you can have Reinassance with no problem. (Actually, if a sizeable chunk of the greek Clergy emigrated to Italy already in 718, you woould have more greek manuscripts in western Europe and a more widespread and earlier knowledge of the greek language. Actually, in your world Renaissance can even have an early start).

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that 718 is the only real POD you need.

Your explanation about Southern American nations joining the intellectual and scientific development earlier seems sound, but remember: It's not enough having political independence and material resources, you also need to consider the mental and cultural landscape. From one side, having to do with modern science and its philosophical backgrounds would be a cultural shock no matter what; from the other side, you can find what particular contribution each people would bring to the overall landscape. For example, I can imagine the Mesoamerican astronomers, right after the tolomaic and copernican systems were translated into their language, bringing their considerable observational skills in the controversy. Maybe the laws of the movement of planets can bear a Mayan instead of a German name.

Alternate histories with supernatural elements are not unheard of (see again Randall Garrett), and personally I enjoy mixed genre. About the question if it belongs here, I would ask whether the supernatural element really has an impact on how history departs from OTL. For example, about God being replaced by a nephilim: Is it something that the people in your world knows for a fact? I can't imagine how Christianity and Islam would remain untouched by such a revelation.

It seems to me that you have already a lot worked out, best of luck with the rest.

The part about the Nephilim was something that I intended as happening in the world's "present day" as I plan on having the world act as a setting for plots and characters. What I'm thinking is that I will put the plot and characters in another section, while mentioning the more broad parts about the setting here.

I should also mention that when I spoke about the Latin American nations, I didn't mean that they would remain independent, what I meant was that they would gain independence from Spain and that as a result, they would be more involved in making inventions and discoveries.

For example,in 1712 New Spain is given it's own monarch in the form of the second child of the ruler of Spain. Instead of being a colony, New Spain is set up to become independent kingdom allied to Spain in terms of military and economy. This means that it's allowed to develop its own industry and make an economy that will be able to sustain itself, while also having special access to the economies of Spain and the other Hispanic nations. A bunch of reforms are made and somehow something like the Telegram is invented in the late 1700s by a New Spanish(now Mexican) inventor, so that way Mexico is able to have easier communication within the vast distances within its territories.

Such a process is replicated around the same time in all of the other Hispanic American nations, and it all feeds into itself, resulting in inventions being made faster, since now there are more people being able to make scientific discoveries.

It's not exactly well thought out, but I'm doing it anyways since it's all a stepping stone into having a world in which Mexico is a superpower that has things like Helicarriers and mechs, while the South American nations are pioneering the way towards space, wit the first man in space coming from a Hispanic nation.

Edited by Bornstellar on Apr 11th 2020 at 9:10:42 AM

Anyone have any ideas for how fashion could like in a Hispanic dominated world? I'm making a world with that and I would like to have the fashion be suitably different.

I'm planning on writing a story where the backstory showed that the point of divergence from real life is 1985 because an alien vessel crash-landed into war-torn Afghanistan. How would such a scenario happen? To be specific, would a ceasefire between all the players ensue to allow scientists to study the crash site?

If it crash-landed in territories securely held by the government, then it's possible for scientists to come and study it, sure. There were a number of Soviet-Afghan archaeological projects that went on throughout the entire war, like the Tillya Tepe gold hoard in the government-held Jowzjan province.

The thing you'll need to remember is that Afghanistan is a place with a historically weak central state. The communist DRA regime and their Soviet backers were way undermanned and lacked the number of security personnel needed to hold the countryside. As a result, they mostly stayed in the cities and along the national ring road (where the populace actually cared about their ideology and reforms) and only struck out into rural areas in order to interdict insurgent supply routes and destroy their bases. They rarely had the numbers to hold a rural area long-term after clearing it from the mujahideen. Once the Soviets left to deal with another problem elsewhere, the local mujahideen would quickly swoop back in and bribe or threaten the underpaid local cops into leaving.

For that matter, "all the players" is... well, a lot of players. There were a million tiny mujahideen bands running around the countryside, fighting for loot or an attachment to their native villages, rather than any high-minded ideal of freeing Afghanistan or defeating communism. The largest and most effective groups were the "Peshawar Seven", which operated in the provinces along the Pakistani border and had foreign backing. They all had their own ideologies and special interests that differed quite violently at times; to give an illustration, one group tried to declare itself the ruler of Afghanistan in the ensuing civil war, one group became buddies with the nascent Taliban and the rest became nominal allies to fight the Taliban while also jostling for regional and ideological dominance between themselves.

In this scenario, you could maybe have foreign backers like the Pakistanis, the US or the Chinese taking an interest in the crash and pushing their client mujahideen groups to arrange a deal that would accommodate the study. But it's quite likely that those groups (and their various loosely-controlled cells on the field) would have ideas of their own. In any case, Afghanistan was (still is) a desperately poor country with low educational attainment in the countryside. Your average rural Afghan community figure would probably be more interested in using the thing as a status symbol or selling the parts for cash, rather than giving it up to be taken apart by some foreign nerds.

The government side wasn't much better. Corruption was off the roof. The security institutions were bitterly divided between the hardline Leninist Khalq faction and the more moderate (though also corrupt) Parcham faction, which devolved into shoot-outs whenever an army loyal to one side thought a rival one was pinching its stuff. Policing of the hinterlands was franchised out to tribal militias with interests of their own; the aforementioned Jowjzan province, for example, was held by a nominally pro-government ethnic Uzbek militia (led by Afghanistan's current VP) that mutinied against the regime soon after the Soviets left. And your average Soviet conscript in the 40th Army wasn't terribly well-motivated to begin with and probably had his fair share of experience swiping off and selling contrabands in the local black market.

I mean, most sci-fi media oversimplify the messiness of sociopolitical institutions, anyway. If you want to have a monolithic "Communist" faction brokering a deal with a similarly monolithic "Mujahideen" faction to have the site studied for the good of humanity, then go ahead. But unless the thing lands squarely somewhere the Communists can easily reach it, it's probably going to be way, way more complicated than that. Which would be more fun! You can have a kid from rural Nuristan making off with ET and having a wacky weekend adventure, for instance.

If everyone is convinced that it is, in fact, actual alien technology, top tier militaries are going to get involved very fast. US special forces will show up. The Chinese will start promising bounties, payable upon delivery. No one will be willing to tolerate one of the other nation-states getting that far ahead in technology. A nuclear exchange isn't out of the question.

I have a question regarding the "Nixon wins 1960" scenarios; regardless of how plausible it is that Nixon would find himself in the wrong place and wrong time, would Lee Harvey Oswald have tried to assassinate him?

You're asking us to predict the behavior of a disturbed individual who died decades ago? Impossible. He could have done anything. Handwave whatever outcome your story plot requires.

Nixon's politics were also far different than Kennedy's so it's pretty unlikely. Also, I still don't have a good idea why Lee Harvey Oswald killed the President to begin with.

I'm trying to add Alternate History in my writing / Worldbuilding but for the smaller details rather than big events; how can I ensure it makes sense in my scenario, which is a largely grounded in reality thing?

For example, one idea I had was a large-scale riot in Italy in the 2000s - perhaps in 2004 or 2005, or even 2007-2008, similar to protests over BLM, but with a different cause (not race-related, but an issue that's more relevant to Italy) and how the repercussions could affect Italy?

What could be a realistic cause for large-scale riots across the country, and one that the audience could understand without having to take too much Artistic License – History?

Edited by Merseyuser1 on May 20th 2021 at 5:53:02 PM

In the last twenty years there were various moments of unrest in Italy, which could have theoretically sparked riots. For example:

1. In 2001, during the G8 summit in Genoa, protests of various no-global movements caused a lot of turmoil in the city, with various clashes between protesters and the police. After the facts, many episodes of police brutality against the protesters who were arrested were unveiled.
2. Starting from around 2010 (and with a peak after 2013) the five stars movement rises with a strong anti-system rhetoric, verbally very agressive. The agressivity remained mostly verbal, but it would be thinkable, in an alternate history scenario, a descent into violent protests.
3. The 2018 election campaign was heavily based on immigration issues, with the rise of a xenophobic and frankly racist rhetoric which gained the support of a sizeable chunk of the electorate. There were also violent episodes: for example, there was a mass shooting against african immigrants in Macerata by a man who was involved in right-wing politics.
4. Between 2011 and 2012 there were protests, strikes and roadblocks organized by the so-called "movimento dei forconi" (pitchfork movement), a sort of grassroots movement with an anti-european stance. Not dissimilar from the 'gilets jaune' in France, but in Italy the movement evaporated quickly and with little consequence.

I think you can start from any of these situations. If you need more details I would be glad to help.

Edited by YourBloodyValentine on May 20th 2021 at 2:00:55 AM

"Also, I still don't have a good idea why Lee Harvey Oswald killed the President to begin with."

Well, there's a whole can of worms. If you accept the conventional explanation, it had a lot more to do with Oswald's pathological need to feel significant than anything to do with politics.

Yeah, it's often important to remember that a person who wakes up and thinks "I'm going to murder someone today" often isn't operating with an entirely rational thought process to begin with.

The guy who shot Ronald Regan did it to try to impress Jodi Foster. People don't always have motivations that make sense, and the only reason we don't have a bunch of conspiracy theories about that one is because Regan survived.

I’m reading Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace about the leadup to WWI, and wondering what the world would have looked like if WWI hadn’t happened.

This seems to me like a much more plausible AU than “what if the Confederacy won the Civil War” or “what if the Nazis won WWII” because the industrial resources of the USA make either of those eventualities very unlikely. One thing that standa out in The War that Ended Peace is just how contingent WWI (including all the crises in Morocvo and the Balkans in the years leading up to it) was on so many small events - one person rather than another being a foreign minister, a prime minister, or a ruler; miscommunications and lack of comminication between the foreign ministry and the ministry of war in many countries; who was in contact with whom at a given moment.

One of the questions the author raised was what might have happened if Wilhelm II’s father, who was a liberal in favour of a more progressive and democratic system, had lived rather than dying young, and so had become Kaiser rather than the conservative and bombastic William. Or, alternatively, if Russia had had a different foreign minister during the last few years before the war, who wasn’t anti-German and pan-Slavist. Or if Tirpitz had never been made the German minister of the navy and therefore Germany had never started the naval race with Britain, and the two had stayed on better terms (Or if Franz Ferdineand hadn’t been assassinated, but that seems a little less likely to have made a difference than the other changes - by 1913 it seems like Germany had pretty well already to go to war at the next plausible opportunity, because its assessment was that the relative strength of France and Russia was growing and that, therefore, the sooner the war happened the better).

Obviously it would have been a good thing on a lot of level if the war had not happened, but one negative effect could have been that imperialism might have stuck around a lot longer, because it was the world wars that severely weakened the European imperial powers both materially and philosophically (WWI made it hard to keep up the “progress and civilization” narrative).

And the other possibilities for changes are extremely wide. A large part of an entire generation in Europe was wiped out - how many people died in the trenches who, if they had lived, could have bern pivotal to any number of later events?

What do you think might have been the consequences of there not being a WWI? I haven’t seen any alternate history fiction on this concept, and I find it an interesting one.

Edited by Galadriel on Jun 6th 2021 at 6:52:08 AM

Less American predominance in world affairs, for sure. I gotta go back to Adam Tooze's The Deluge, which explores this in detail, but the Entente Powers already relied heavily on the American banking system to finance the war, years before the Americans got officially involved.

If there hadn't been the WW 1 that we knew, there almost certainly would've been a different WW 1 only years later. Trouble was brewing among empires, and it was going to boil over at some point.

WWI was the event that started the series of events that led to the downfall of agricultural-based gentility and the final dominance of the financial classes, and the eventual leveling of wealth disparity for a century. The really big question is if WWI doesn't happen, does the Great Depression? Or WWII? If those two events still happen, the effects of not having a WWI are greatly mitigated, but if they don't—well, we simply don't live in that world.

To vastly oversimplify a very complex topic, the Great Depression happened because debt rose too high and a number of inter-connected banks failed. Here is an article arguing that WWI largely caused the Great Depression (note—despite it's name, the history channel should not be regarded as an authoritative source on history). That's probably too strong a statement, but there is an argument that the reparations laid on Germany, the loans bankers made back to Germany, American deregulation which may have over-heated the economy, and other factors, had a material effect on the Depression and the lead-up to WWII.

So, to speculate—no WWI, the banking system remains rational, aristocratic elites retain control over significant financial assets (although how long that could continue is a question) and therefore the effects of any global recession are greatly mitigated. If there is no real Depression, would the Nazi party have risen to power? Would the Communists have been able to spread their influence beyond Russia? If Hitler is no longer in power, does WWII still happen? Or the Cold War after it? How does colonialism play out?

One thing I am certain of is that today we wouldn't have "The 19-teens with modern technology." Cultural and social stasis doesn't exist. But how things might have turned out instead is a really open question.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jun 15th 2021 at 1:08:49 PM

I've had to abandon my original idea here for now, but may revisit it in the future.

I'm giving my entire Alternate History work a Continuity Reboot to make it more streamlined.

More of a general question than about any specific point (although I'm looking at late 1990s, 1996-1998 possibly or 2000s, 2002-2005, not sure yet), about writing Alternate History.

The focus of it is either an event that didn't happen in OTL in one of those years, or, since I'm into cars, something automobile-related (probably both, though, to make it as one complete project).

My Alternate History work is being told in webpage format written as if it were from the era, so I've had to write in HTML design format of the era; no webfonts etc. for a work set in the mid-2000s.

The general question is how to do the research and avoid getting too bogged down by sources.

I'm writing this as if it were being told as a news story - from that sort of perspective.

New to writing this sort of thing, so would welcome any advice on both parts, writing as if it were a news story, or more importantly, how to get research correct and not too bogged down by sources.

Also, I'm aiming for a Type I on the Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility, but Type II maybe, although I've not yet decided on the outcome.

Edited by Merseyuser1 on Jun 16th 2021 at 1:58:34 PM

It's not that hard to research old websites on the wayback machine—type in any date you are interested in and maybe some keywords. This site might help. Googling "News Stories 1990's" will give you a feel for what was happening back then. Another possible google search is "Pop Culture 1990's".

I wouldn't get too lost in the weeds—most people don't really remember that far back very well and as long as you don't make any major mistakes, you should be good.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jun 18th 2021 at 8:03:13 AM

Is it possible for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to give birth to an Islamic socialist government rather than a straight-up Islamist one, thus producing an Islamic People's Republic of Iran ruled by a socialist theocracy? Socialists and Islamic socialists have been active in the country for decades by that point, and even participated in the revolution, only to be shafted by the Islamists that rose to power.

Edited by MarqFJA on Feb 6th 2022 at 3:02:54 PM

Kinda, sorta? Islamic socialism had a decent following in urban Iran at the time, particularly the writings of the philosopher Ali Shariati. A couple of things that I remember helped swing the odds in the clergy's favour were:

1. The fact that they had a pre-existing power base in the countryside. Many clerics were formerly landlords who funded their rural madrasas/hawzas with the rents of tenant farmers, before being dispossessed of their lands by the Shah's White Revolution in the '60s and then angrily taking to the cities in protest.

2. Khomeini co-opting a lot of socialist rhetorics, particularly the use of the term mostazafin ("the downtrodden") to refer to the urban proletariat.

Oh, and like the theocrats, the socialists had something resembling a government-in-exile that they maybe could've propped up as a revolutionary vanguard — namely the exiled Tudeh Party, led by one of its original founders, Iraj Eskandari. Compared to the pro-Khomeini theocrats, though, it was riven by infighting and couldn't get itself together in time to present a united front before Khomeini returned to the country and started cracking down hard on rival ideologues.

Socialist revolutionaries had a fairly colourful history in 20th century Iran: from the short-lived Persian Soviet Socialist Republic (aka the Jangaliyan) on the Caspian coast, to the "Fifty-Three" persecuted founders of the Tudeh Party, to the Soviet-backed Azeri and Kurdish secessionist states in the post-war era, to the 1953 coup, urban youth activism and various left-wing insurgent groups like MEK and the Fedais.

The key thing, though, is that the events that ended up toppling the Shah (and the ensuing power struggle) mainly happened in the metropoles, away from the countryside where most Iranians were living then (the country is a lot more urbanised today). So those are some of the things that you could try tweaking if you want a timeline where the socialists end up in power.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 6th 2022 at 5:07:02 AM

Here is one.

What if the Black Plague managed to wipe out 99% of Europe's population rather than just a 1/3 of it as in our history?

What would have changed then in the aftermath of something like this?

Just Europe? I would imagine a massive influx of foreign populations to take advantage of the available land. A wave of Russians coming in from the East, Turks from the Southeast, African Muslums up through Spain.

Europe as we know it would have ceased to exist. Cities would have been abandoned and entire villages would be wiped out. Fields would be left untended and there wouldn't be enough living to bury the dead. Vast swaths of knowledge and culture would vanish simply because everyone who knew about them were dead.

Eventually, outsiders would move in. It would be dangerous at first as the corpses would still be contagious and then there would be wild animals accustom to human meat. However, after a decade all that would be left would be ruins. I really can't say how these immigrants would react or how they'd evolve.

Yeah, a lot depends on whether the Industrial revolution can still happen on a Real Life like timetable. I am not sure if that would be the case.