Shitty Alternate History Thread - If only the Romans had AK-47's they would've survived...

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Dagobert said:
I think a mass slave revolt in the South could be an interesting timeline, but I don't think it would be an Anglo-Haiti. Even in the most slaving of states, slaves barely outnumbered the whites.

That said, I have no doubt that a mass slave revolt could become a very bloody and very insane war as radicals on the rebels part, and the fire eaters would naturally just escalate it. Such a war could drag on in the swamps and woods of the deep south for a decade or more if it was sufficiently bloody initially.

The south ITTL would probably be a shambling wreck by the end, and OTL racial troubles post-Civil War would look mild compared to the end result ITTL.
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Well, that's a big chunk of why it never did happen.
There's a good book called "Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom" that lays out (not as the main point of it, but somewhere in the text) all the reasons slave revolts were ineffective in both places. I think a successful slave revolt looks like a limited war of trying to flee to the Mountains/beyond (if early enough) or to move in to one area and hold it. The Lowcountry is probably swampy and Black enough that it could be a nightmare zone. So could Florida and maybe (?) the Alabaman Appalachians.

I've had an interest in playing with a dystopian Confederate winning setting, because most Confederate timelines are either absurd neo-Confederate wank (Robert E Lee frees the slaves in 1865 and the CSA becomes the USA with a pallette swap but also conquers half the world) or the same shit except with them as the villains (slave markets in 2020 Manhattan). I don't think the CSA would have turned out this way, but I like the idea of a story where the country goes the banana republic and pariah state route and by the 1960s is degenerating into rebellions (mainly of a Pentecostal flavored, Maoist Liberation Theology type, like a very extreme Sandinistas) of both the Blacks and the yeomanry.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Well, that's a big chunk of why it never did happen.
There's a good book called "Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom" that lays out (not as the main point of it, but somewhere in the text) all the reasons slave revolts were ineffective in both places. I think a successful slave revolt looks like a limited war of trying to flee to the Mountains/beyond (if early enough) or to move in to one area and hold it. The Lowcountry is probably swampy and Black enough that it could be a nightmare zone. So could Florida and maybe (?) the Alabaman Appalachians.

I've had an interest in playing with a dystopian Confederate winning setting, because most Confederate timelines are either absurd neo-Confederate wank (Robert E Lee frees the slaves in 1865 and the CSA becomes the USA with a pallette swap but also conquers half the world) or the same shit except with them as the villains (slave markets in 2020 Manhattan). I don't think the CSA would have turned out this way, but I like the idea of a story where the country goes the banana republic and pariah state route and by the 1960s is degenerating into rebellions (mainly of a Pentecostal flavored, Maoist Liberation Theology type, like a very extreme Sandinistas) of both the Blacks and the yeomanry.
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I agree with your sentiment that the CSA timelines are usually absurd. There is one TL on ah.com, I think it was called Dixieland the country of tomorrow, or something like that, which has what was IMO a pretty grounded CSA. I stopped reading it a bit back, but I remember it being pretty good.

I can't help but find the idea of communist rebels in an alt-CSA to be a funny idea, but likely not unrealistic. If they can cross enough of the color barrier, the unification of poor black and white would be a horrid mess for the CSA.

Although, I wouldn't be surprised either if they split along racial lines so the Confederate government is fighting a white communist group, and a black communist group who are also fighting each other. Throw in some radical non-communist groups, a Black Nationalist NOI type and an alt-Klan and the south would be looking like a near copy of the shit that happened in South America or Africa during the Cold War.
 
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Since Spain-wanks the topic now, the Spanish Empire had a while when it was trying to convince Tennessean settlers to join Spain (Spanish Conspiracy). Could perhaps have had Texan culture (a Texan is pretty much a Tennessean mixed with Mexican, so this would maybe be like Tennessean mixed with Creek and Cuban) all the way up to the Appalachians.
 
What if the Narciso Lopez filibuster expedition to Cuba succeeded, but the Confederacy still lost the Civil War, and then Cuba became like a Taiwan situation where a Spanglish Confederate rump government holds out in perpetuity against the United States?

Ignoring butterflies and for fun, could have a Confederate Missile Crisis when whatever rival to the USA installs ICBMs.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
What if the Narciso Lopez filibuster expedition to Cuba succeeded, but the Confederacy still lost the Civil War, and then Cuba became like a Taiwan situation where a Spanglish Confederate rump government holds out in perpetuity against the United States?

Ignoring butterflies and for fun, could have a Confederate Missile Crisis when whatever rival to the USA installs ICBMs.
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So Brazil with better cigars?
 
Another one for Spain what if Spain doesn't execute Dr. Jose Rizal? What if they decide to put his idea to heart as in "they can continue occupying the Philippines just be better and treat the natives as equals", would that stop the revolutions? Would there be peace and would Spain still have a hold of it's last colonies? How would it affect Cuba or Puerto Rico? Would they treat them better? And would that affect the Spanish American War? Would there be any war at all?
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
What if the Narciso Lopez filibuster expedition to Cuba succeeded, but the Confederacy still lost the Civil War, and then Cuba became like a Taiwan situation where a Spanglish Confederate rump government holds out in perpetuity against the United States?

Ignoring butterflies and for fun, could have a Confederate Missile Crisis when whatever rival to the USA installs ICBMs.
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What if the NWA joined the confederacy?

 
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Four alternate history books I read in the past few years, some of them I've talked about before:

CELESTIAL MATTERS
Alexander the Great preserves Hellenic autonomy (for some reason?) and conquers India (somehow?) and his empire lasts to present day, expanding out till only it and its permanent rival the Chinese are left in a death struggle (why and how?).

That all is shit, what's actually interesting here is that this is not just a work of alternate history but of alternate SCIENCE, because it's based on the premise that all of the Hellenic and Taoist scientific theories, even to the extent they are mutually contradictory, are true.

The plot focuses on a secret project of the Hellenic military to send a science ship to steal a chunk of Sun to bomb the Chinese with. Aristotelian physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, spontaneous generation theory, humor theory, and many other things are all true. You like science fiction that deals with actual physics and explanations of how the rockets work? You'll get that here, except instead of rockets, it's chunks of moonstone that follow their natural motion to orbit and are propelled further away or towards the center of the Earth by using self-sustaining fires to create differentials in the air. When the ship captain needs a blood transfusion, he gets uncontrollably giddy from too much blood, and when he needs to focus on his work he takes yellow bile as a drug and becomes a rageaholic. The ship feeds itself by laying out straw and stuff so that the sheep and cows will spawn from it to then be slaughtered.

Where it gets especially interesting is when the Chinese get involved, attempting to sabotage their mission. It ends up being that the Chinese and Hellenic scientists have to cooperate to build a hybrid ship - learning to understand their basically contradictory worldviews (atomic theory vs chi flows) - to do what neither system of science can achieve on its own, and apply the lessons of history to understand how to set a foundation for disarmament and world peace.

It's a goofy pulpy thing, but it is also kind of inspirational to be honest, and I think it is sort of a masterpiece just in how amazingly creative the setting is, I wish there was more stuff like it.

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION
Before WW2, the death of an opponent to the Slattery Report results in it passing and the United States making a major refugee colony for European Jews in Alaska. The lower death toll of the Holocaust then results in a world less sympathetic to Jews, and Israel is destroyed early on by the Arabs, so the Jews of Sitka - a major metropolis - become a sort of resented autonomous minority in an Evangelical Zionist USA and create a Yiddish homeland there that is in conflict with the Tlingit and coexists with Filipinos. (The Tlingit are basically a commentary on how Jews find themselves in conflict no matter where they go.)

Within this setting, a hardboiled detective (who initially reads like a noir archetype, but reveals himself through it to be a much more human and sympathetic character than I would have expected) reeling from a bad divorce finds himself investigating a common murder in the lead-up to Reversion (when the Jews will be expelled again). Along the way he finds that the strange killing involves a Hasidic mob family and the attempts of their sect, in connection with the Zionist alphabet agencies, to fulfill Messianic prophecy.

It's a wonderfully realized setting, rich use of Yiddish language and food, slang that the author made up and then explains the origins of, rich descriptions of the city's layout and geography and quirks from its history. Jewish Sitka feels like a real place. What's especially great is that, compared to a lot of alternate history, the story does 100% depend on its alternate history setting, but it is not just a telling of history through characters, if you know what I mean. It's not the sort of thing where the author has a timeline they want to shove in your face and walk you through it, or present some utopian or dystopian dream based on their biases. Instead, he selectively shares detail. It's a story that is focused on its plot and characters and has themes. Of all the ones on this list, it feels the most real, like things that really could have happened.

THE ATLANTROPA ARTICLES
From Alternate History Hub, the Nazis win and build the Atlantropa Dam for some reason. Thousands of years later, the ecological collapse caused by this stupid idea nobody would do in real life has turned the Mediterranean into a baking sea of sand, across which the Reich sends sandships (tanks the size of ships) to run supplies and wage war on the Jews (Berbers, Jews having become a word like barbarian, applied to any outsiders). A Schutzstaffel knight gets assigned to a ship with his sketchy gruff brother and along the way they discover a shipwreck with an original Mein Kampf copy, setting the knight on a path of terrifying doubt, ending in tragedy, as he realizes that official histories of the Reich are not accurate to the archeologial evidence.

This book is short and weird and sort of not that fun to read - and the thing is very grim - but it is fascinating because it basically tells a horror story that's not about the horror of spooky ghosts or serial killers but of the horror of realizing your worldview is based on falsehoods. In the book, the Reich at some point apparently did like a lot of empires and started rewriting its history to downplay martial glory and play up their civilized nature. Hitler got rewritten from a conqueror into something more like a Confucius or Buddha-style philosopher. I was a little disappointed when this came out, because Cody was encouraging his audience to play with the Atlantropa subject, and I had my own ideas (also, i think a socialist Europe would be a lot more likely to do something retarded like this), but I would have never actually written anything anyways much less something that clever/thoughtful. But it's a work that's much more interesting for its high concept than its prose, and I suspect his ghostwriter probably did most of the work.

THE PESHAWAR LANCERS
An asteroid storm (not a historical one, just one the author made up) strikes the Northern Hemisphere and wipes out most Western civilization. Nuclear winter then causes extreme cold and crop failure, so Britain evacuates its useful population to the Raj to live off of the people there. Hundreds of years later, the British have gone native and the Angrezi Raj (centered on the Indian Ocean) is in a Great Game with a cannibalistic neo-Gnostic/neopagan Tsarist Russia, technology level mild steampunk (airships in common use, for example, but it's not science fiction for the most part). A British officer and his astronomer sister are targeted for assassination attempts, and that kicks off the plot which involves the officer and his Sikh subordinate trying to save the Peacock Throne.

The book is very pulpy, and I found it riveting at first but as it went on just got more and more tired of it. I think it gets particularly absurd when there is a literal fighting princess near the end. But it is kind of fitting, because the whole book is basically just an excuse to explore a colorful setting. The author uses foreign words too liberally, makes it slow to read and not smooth like the use of Yiddish in the first one mentioned. Overall it is a good book to read but it doesn't really feel like high art if you know what I mean?
 
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What if Charlie Manson and Allan Ginsberg got involved in La Raza and the hippies and Chicano movement merged into a neo-Aztec death cult? Flower Power meets Flower Wars


Edit: Since I made my review of books, there's also one television show:

FOR ALL MANKIND
Some people slagged this off because women and Blacks and negresses, but I think it's really good. The premise of the show is that the Soviet Union (somehow) lands on the Moon first, I think Armstrong scrubs Apollo 11 (based on real life problems, I think, involving the fuel supply being low after missing the target; in real life, Armstrong risked it and found a new site) and then the Soviets get there. Rather than accepting failure in the Space Race, the Americans do what they did every other time they lost the Space Race: doubled down and shifted the goalpost, not to first man on the Moon, but to first MOONBASE. So you get a Space Race that never ends, where shitty 1960s NASA technology is used to keep space stations and lunar colonies in an era before we even had the shuttle.

The show is wonderful, but I'll say it's not what I expected because I was expecting a show focused on heroic problem-solving and the thrill of watching NASA blow astronauts up doing rush-jobs and shootouts on the Moon. You sort of get some of that, but it's mostly an astronaut soap opera, an entertaining one. The focus is really on the politics of NASA administration, the personalities of the astronauts, and the stresses on their lives and interpersonal relationships. But despite that it never forgets that it is supposed to be an alternate history story. By the end of Season 2, there has been warfare on the Moon as the US moon Marines retardedly shoot down some cosmonauts, ending in a moon Spetsnaz raid (these are just guys in normal bulky spacesuits shooting each other with rifles), a desperate standoff in space between two spacecraft armed with missiles, and shuttle diplomacy between astronauts and cosmonauts resulting in the Apollo-Soyuz handshake preventing nuclear war.

Meanwhile, events go on elsewhere in the world, but like the aforementioned The Yiddish Policemen's Union, you only see what you need to, and things change but not drastically so, and it brilliantly uses either real audio or impressions put over real life photos of presidents like Nixon to make it feel like real documentary cut in.


A lot of conservative types seemed upset about women and Blacks being shoehorned in early. I actually like it because it's all justified in-universe in an intelligent way. The Equal Rights Amendment passes (plausible) under Ted Kennedy (plausible) and the Soviets land a woman (a real-life cosmonaut) before the Americans even get there the first time, so the Americans are operating in a world that's a little more ahead on schedule on gender relations and under media pressure. Additionally, women and Black astronauts came along not real long after in our time, so I don't think it's bad. What I do think is unnecessary is shoehorned lesbo/gay subplot and I really dislike the bitchy Black woman astronaut (she plays the racist card on the administrator who personally fights for her to be included), but overall not a problem for me. I do think it would have been better if it had shown some consequences to the women being fast-tracked through.

Compared to a lot of media including Nixon, it is surprisingly not bitchy.

Overall, I just love this show, I haven't watched Season 3 yet but I do expect it to sour real fast as soon as the historical stuff runs out.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
What if Charlie Manson and Allan Ginsberg got involved in La Raza and the hippies and Chicano movement merged into a neo-Aztec death cult? Flower Power meets Flower Wars


Edit: Since I made my review of books, there's also one television show:

FOR ALL MANKIND
Some people slagged this off because women and Blacks and negresses, but I think it's really good. The premise of the show is that the Soviet Union (somehow) lands on the Moon first, I think Armstrong scrubs Apollo 11 (based on real life problems, I think, involving the fuel supply being low after missing the target; in real life, Armstrong risked it and found a new site) and then the Soviets get there. Rather than accepting failure in the Space Race, the Americans do what they did every other time they lost the Space Race: doubled down and shifted the goalpost, not to first man on the Moon, but to first MOONBASE. So you get a Space Race that never ends, where shitty 1960s NASA technology is used to keep space stations and lunar colonies in an era before we even had the shuttle.

The show is wonderful, but I'll say it's not what I expected because I was expecting a show focused on heroic problem-solving and the thrill of watching NASA blow astronauts up doing rush-jobs and shootouts on the Moon. You sort of get some of that, but it's mostly an astronaut soap opera, an entertaining one. The focus is really on the politics of NASA administration, the personalities of the astronauts, and the stresses on their lives and interpersonal relationships. But despite that it never forgets that it is supposed to be an alternate history story. By the end of Season 2, there has been warfare on the Moon as the US moon Marines retardedly shoot down some cosmonauts, ending in a moon Spetsnaz raid (these are just guys in normal bulky spacesuits shooting each other with rifles), a desperate standoff in space between two spacecraft armed with missiles, and shuttle diplomacy between astronauts and cosmonauts resulting in the Apollo-Soyuz handshake preventing nuclear war.

Meanwhile, events go on elsewhere in the world, but like the aforementioned The Yiddish Policemen's Union, you only see what you need to, and things change but not drastically so, and it brilliantly uses either real audio or impressions put over real life photos of presidents like Nixon to make it feel like real documentary cut in.


A lot of conservative types seemed upset about women and Blacks being shoehorned in early. I actually like it because it's all justified in-universe in an intelligent way. The Equal Rights Amendment passes (plausible) under Ted Kennedy (plausible) and the Soviets land a woman (a real-life cosmonaut) before the Americans even get there the first time, so the Americans are operating in a world that's a little more ahead on schedule on gender relations and under media pressure. Additionally, women and Black astronauts came along not real long after in our time, so I don't think it's bad. What I do think is unnecessary is shoehorned lesbo/gay subplot and I really dislike the bitchy Black woman astronaut (she plays the racist card on the administrator who personally fights for her to be included), but overall not a problem for me. I do think it would have been better if it had shown some consequences to the women being fast-tracked through.

Compared to a lot of media including Nixon, it is surprisingly not bitchy.

Overall, I just love this show, I haven't watched Season 3 yet but I do expect it to sour real fast as soon as the historical stuff runs out.
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I remember being amused by the fact that in the 1st Season, I was able to completely skip through all of the "illegal immigrant, future rocket scientist" B plot segments and not miss anything from the A plot. You'd think they'd tie the two plots closer together so you'd be forced to watch all the sappy illegal immigrant character development stuff.
 
millais said:
I remember being amused by the fact that in the 1st Season, I was able to completely skip through all of the "illegal immigrant, future rocket scientist" B plot segments and not miss anything from the A plot. You'd think they'd tie the two plots closer together so you'd be forced to watch all the sappy illegal immigrant character development stuff.
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It’s sappy and stupid and there for propaganda, but I found it kind of pulled on my heartstrings because my Mom would talk about seeing the Moon Landing on TV as a little girl and her father (who actually did some minor tinkering related to the Rover) died when she was young (like the mother in the show).

The character grows up to be a bitch and I don’t like it, I was hoping she’d grow up to be a waifu and she did not.
 
Yiddish Policeman's Union really is just a fantastic work and it was to my great disappointment that the author's books aren't really like that. It's really one of those great books where the setting just feels so real and you're absolutely right about how the exposition is given. More alternate history writers should study Yiddish as well as Fatherland which also does it great.
 
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