Mister
I have just written a proposal for a sixth entry on the scale. Please let me know what you think and I will respond to any queries regarding your thoughts and opinions, and whether or not you think this would be an appropriate addition to the list.
Type Z: Boltzmann Alternate history
Alternate history In Name Only. Applies to works that seem like alternate history at first, but as the story or 'verse unfolds, it becomes clear that not only is the present different, but also all of history up until that point is of a different world altogether, even in spite of specific things, people and concurrent events inexplicably happening or existing in contemporary time of said setting. Type X-IV can be considered borderline, barring the condition that the setting of planet earth or other contemporary terrestrial or extra-terrestrial setting remain mostly indistinguishable from real life. Named for The Boltzmann brain argument
purposed by physicist Ludwig Boltzmann that a Brain in a Jar-like, self-aware entity that, given enough time, would appear from nothing, complete with false memories and totally oblivious to the fact it's in the middle of the most absolute nowhere, and would be more likely to happen than if another universe, basically through the same process would spontaneously look identical to ours, if not just for the short time frame of a person's lifetime.
Compare: Never Was This Universe, In Spite of a Nail, "Truman Show" Plot, Fantasy Counterpart Culture
Examples:
Film
Bright: The film presents itself as an alternate history Earth where All Myths Are True, and fantasy-like elves, fairies, orcs, centaurs, and dragons have co-existed alongside humans since recorded history. This however does not seem to negate some things that exist in our world as well like the proliferation of Christianity (the defeat of the Dark Lord happened around the time of its founding) or Shrek.
The Truman Show: The film showcases a deliberately constructed example in-universe. Truman Burbank has been born and raised within a domed reality show without knowing it, and all those he knows are just actors of said-show playing along with the facade, making him think that he is just a normal guy living his life no different from un-domed normality...
Literature
His Dark Materials: This is very much intentional throughout the trilogy, given the focus on things like alternate-universe physics, the existence of Daemons, and the logic behind the power of the series MacGuffins.
Video Games
Fallout: Sure, the point of historical divergence can be pinned down to the 1940s, but their laws of physics (especially involving nuclear physics, of course) are different enough that it would mean that the real point of divergence would have to have been sometime during the very formation of the Fallout universe.
Ace Combat: Strangereal in the Ace Combat series is an alternate version of our Earth with virtually identical nature and humans and a roughly Present Day tech level, but the continents are completely different (their shape often hints at an amusingly warped and twisted version of our real landmasses). The countries and nations are completely fictional as well but are all thinly-veiled Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. (Even if our world's landmasses formed as such in real life, it would negate the evolution of mammals as we know them, and thus humanity as a whole.)
Sonic the Hedgehog: In Sonic Adventure, the game's backstory establishes that long before humans were researching the old ruins, they were once a monument to a race of bipedal echidnas that match Knuckles's profile, indicating that funny animals have co-existed with humans for centuries at least. However, The Sonic X adaptation changes this around so that Sonic and his friends herald from a World of Funny Animals, with a short handwave when adapting Sonic Adventure that the two worlds were once one, with little to no explanation of how or why it happened. Granted, It has been established that Sonic and his friends can teleport with the help of the power of the Chaos Emeralds, so Sonic himself might not be the Boltzmann, as much as it is the existence of their two worlds with identical language and biomes. This is averted however in the Archie Comics adaptation, which places Sonic in the setting of a Fantasy World Map where humans and funny animals co-exist across different parts of a future planet Earth (initially called Mobius).
Western Animation
Adventure Time: Earlier episodes lean towards the backstory of the Ice King once being a present-day-looking scientist named Simon Petrikov who lived in an apparently urbanized, present-day-like civilization dating one thousand years before the show's present. However, later episodes reveal a backstory going further back that involves pre-human sapient people using functional elemental magic (made up of fire, ice, slime, and candy) as far back as the age of the dinosaurs.
Edited by larry4163
'''[REDACTED]'''
I moved Fatherland to Hard/Soft. While a "Germany wins the war" timeline may be unlikely, the PODs were plausible, and the period after the war is handled fairly realistically.
Edited by 216.99.32.43 One does not shake the box containing the sticky notes of doom!
I've improved the page's layout a teensy bit, particularly focusing on adding folderization to the examples for easier navigation. Hope you'll like it.
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If I wrote an alternate history where General Motors and FIAT ended up working together earlier, would that be Type I on the scale, or Type II?
Hi folks. I thought I might make a few changes that I thought were necessary. Mainly, I have taken the liberty of moving 'Decades of Darkness' from Type I to Type II as I think it's a far better fit there. While Jared's timeline does have a number of interesting & unique developments there are a number of things that arguably prevent it from quite being a Type 1: Chief among them are the births of a few figures several decades ahead of the POD, almost exactly as OTL. It's also implied in several places in the TL that slavery is still surviving circa 1950 or so in the *U.S.(which would be pretty hard to do in a surviving Confederacy, let alone a *U.S. which also the *North and much of Latin America), not to mention the enslavement of ALL blacks in that country.....There are some other things that I could point out, too, but I don't want to clutter the page here.
If you like unique TL concepts(I know I do!), you'll like it. It's a good read and has some fun twists, but it definitely belongs more in Type II than I, and is definitely more soft than hard overall.
(I'm also considering moving For Want of a Nail, too, at some point.)
I'm taking the liberty of moving Robert Conroy to Hard/Soft, as I feel he's better suited there. While his books do follow a fairly hard approach, they modify just enough to be moved out of hard. For example, in '1942', he postulates a follow-up attack on the fuel depot at Pearl Harbor by Nagumo. This ran counter to Japanese naval doctrine - they liked gloriously destroying fleets rather than mundane things like fuel bunkers - and would have been very difficult to accomplish, given the weapons available, hours of daylight remaining (no WWII carriers were equipped for night operations) and an alerted American defence. There are quite a few other occurences in his books that nudge him into the hard/soft category. Great reads, but not 100% plausible.
Where did the Type numbers go? I know it might be less confusing to use nomenclature instead of numbers, but there's some awkward inconsistency that the article text still refers to type numbers which aren't in the list itself. Also, there are plenty of other scale-like tropes which use alphanumeric labels instead of nomenclature, and considering there are only five levels it's not that hard to remember.