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

[ICametoLurk]

Alternate History is the ultimate Fan-Fiction. You watch shows on History Channel about Romans, Spartans, and Nazis and like them and start to wonder "IF ONLY THEY DID THIS THEN THEY WOULD'VE WON" and then start creating a fan-fic in which they do exactly that and manage to conquer the world because they did what you thought of doing.

This is the thread where you post and talk about shitty Alternate History you've read.

I made this thread cause I recently read an Alternate History forum's creation called Green Antarctica.

For those who haven't read it, basically Abbos land in a Green Antarctica (Original Name. Don't steal) via drift wood after a flood and they create a civilization that is full of zoophilia, necrophilia (with an entire empire called point blank Necrophilia Empire), cannibalism, torture, and every single edgy shit you can imagine and manage to create Gunpowder while everyone else is in the Iron Age. After James Cook lands on Antarctica the Abbos suddenly assimilate Western Tech so fast that they manage to conquer the UK at their height under Queen Victoria and eat the British and Irish and continue their 69edgy48me civilization by eating South Americans (sadly not Brazilians) and create Intercontinental ballistic missiles that use children to steer instead of computers and so on and so on.

Here's a link to it
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lLnX36YVSCsq-TjqeNErG9lS7jMITHDKXfufM9Vw3DY/edit

And it's TV Tropes page (Cause OF COURSE it's gonna have one)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/GreenAntarctica

 

[millais]

Frisian Islands 1944

 

[Ravenor]

These guy's used to have a Fiction section with a lot of content like this - What if the South in the American Civil war where given AK47's by some south africans using a stolen time machine, What if Hitler was Jewish and such other dross.

Looking at the website they seem to have cleaned up a lot of that stuff but some of the authors of that stuff seem like they would make for good threads.

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

These guy's used to have a Fiction section with a lot of content like this - What if the South in the American Civil war where given AK47's by some south africans using a stolen time machine, What if Hitler was Jewish and such other dross.

Looking at the website they seem to have cleaned up a lot of that stuff but some of the authors of that stuff seem like they would make for good threads.

I've actually read Guns of the South and have a copy of it, alongside several books by the excellent S.M Stirling on my bookshelf.

The actual plot is a bit more interesting than you'd first think in Guns of the South and isn't as basic as "hur durr tha souf wins" there's a lot of questioning of "Southern Values" and suchlike and which part of the argument, states rights or right to own slaves, should win out.

Not a fan of the same authors "Timeline 191" however as it just lazily moves events of WW2 from Europe to North America.

Personally I prefer S.M Stirling as a writer because he tends to do the opposite of what you'd expect. Both the Dies The Fire/Changeverse and Peshawar Lancers are excellent examples of this, in the former all electronic technology and most chemical reactions stop in 1998 resulting in a chaotic fallout and eventual rebuilding of society mostly driven by SCA members, larpers and other people slightly better adjusted to having to shit in buckets and it's insane for the first few books but sadly falls down into being a simple fantasy novel series by the start of the fourth book.

The latter a meteor shower hits the earth in the 1860s and triggers a severe ice age across most of the Northern Hemisphere so both the French and British Empires government and royalty simply fuck off to the colonies. The UK comes out of it a little better thanks to basically sodding off to India and winds up mixing with the locals, becoming the Angrezi Raj, the French simply set up shop in Africa and become France Sur Metre.

A lot of thought goes into how technology and life would likely work as well, with a significant bit at the back of the book being dedicated to explaining how the world would work rather sensibly.

 

[Ravenor]

I forgot the name of it but I read the first few chapters of Guns of The south and I found it just badly written (it could have just been his writing style) and it's not my normal fair when it comes to fiction so that might have been part of it.

I think my dad has read the other series you mentioned and to be honest it doesn't sound like the kind of series I'd like so I doubt I'll pick it up. But that sort of premise does interest me, I've wrote a sci-fi story with something like that happening but only as a McGuffin for my main character to have a discussion with god.

The second series does sound interesting though I may pick that up.

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

I forgot the name of it but I read the first few chapters of Guns of The south and I found it just badly written (it could have just been his writing style) and it's not my normal fair when it comes to fiction so that might have been part of it.

I think my dad has read the other series you mentioned and to be honest it doesn't sound like the kind of series I'd like so I doubt I'll pick it up. But that sort of premise does interest me, I've wrote a sci-fi story with something like that happening but only as a McGuffin for my main character to have a discussion with god.

The second series does sound interesting though I may pick that up.

Sadly Peshwar Lancers is a single book, but it's thick enough to kill a man at about a thousand pages. I'd still actually reccomend having a little go at the Changeverse's first three books as its kind of fun watching the world scramble about and Stirling actively take the piss out of Alt-History tropes at every turn. (He actually uses the term 'Alien Space Bats' when they're trying to figure out what the fuck happened)

Also, Prince Charles Marries some Icelandic bint and goes completely insane.

 

[Ravenor]

Peshwar Lancers

Just to confirm this is the one your talking about?

Stirling actively take the piss out of Alt-History tropes at every turn. (He actually uses the term 'Alien Space Bats' when they're trying to figure out what the fuck happened)

You had me at Alien Space Bat's.

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

Just to confirm this is the one your talking about?

That is indeed the one.

You had me at Alien Space Bat's.

One of the factions winds up building the Magic Kingdom Castle as their main doomfortress in Portland, Oregon as well.

Also a mentally ill guy starts wearing green and firing a bow off in Seattle, but that's just mentioned and is in a different short story.

As said, the first three books are actually really quite good, but the "second cycle" of books (4-10) start to faff around with magic swords and I frankly stopped reading after the main character gets back from his transcontinental journey.

 

[Ravenor]

That is indeed the one.

Cool buying now.

One of the factions winds up building the Magic Kingdom Castle as their main doomfortress in Portland, Oregon as well.

Also a mentally ill guy starts wearing green and firing a bow off in Seattle, but that's just mentioned and is in a different short story.

I'll give the first few a try then.

 

[millais]

I liked Peshawar Lancers, though it is more of a swashbuckling Kipling-esque adventure that happens to be in an alternate history setting. Imo, it is in the vein of the French literary tradition of uchronie, which uses alternate history settings to facilitate unconventional exploration of ideas, virtues, and cultural concepts that would be otherwise difficult to address in regular historical fiction. Think how Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" uses a WWII Axis victory setting to spend most of the book exploring how American culture could incorporate elements of Taoist philosophy into everyday life, instead of simply getting bogged down in the nitty gritty minutae of how the Allies get defeated by the Axis.

Another silly alternate history novel series that I think is pretty fun is Eric Flint's 1632 series. The premise is that a West Virginian coal mining town from the late 1990s gets transported through space and time to the middle of Germany at the height of the Thirty Years War. Cue American rednecks armed with the best in 20th century small arms firepower siding with the Protestants, upgrading their armies with their hands-on knowledge of modern gunsmithing and tactics, and dishing out some serious whoop-ass on the Catholic armies, bringing the American revolution to Europe some 150 years early. Stirring reading for any redblooded, papist-hating American patriot

 

[Syaoran Li]

If I had the writing ability, I would totally write a shitty Alternate History about the Russian Civil War in which the good guys actually won and the Whites were able to repel the filthy Reds out of the country, instead of the horrid tragedy that the Russian Revolution/Russian Civil War was in real life.

Of course, I would go full Alien Space Bat and include magic and some light steampunk and dieselpunk elements.

Semi-off topic, but I might actually run this as a modified old-school D&D play-by-forum campaign titled "Romanovs & Revolutions", if anyone is interested.

I got this idea because apparently Pathfinder did a series of adventure modules involving an evil Rasputin and the Russian Civil War (unfortunately, the Whites were among the bad guys instead of the Reds. I assume it's because there's a lot of SJW's who buy into the "Lenin and Trotsky were good guys because Stalin was bad " myth on the payroll at Paizo). I never actually got to read or play these modules, but I've read reviews and heard some things about them, even reading the stats for WWI-era weaponry in Pathfinder on their open reference site.

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

If we're gonna bring up TV Tropes there's actually a good page about this kind of shit:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateHistoryWank
Most of this alternate history is hardly plausible at all because someone wants to hammer in a statement.

 

[Techpriest]

The Anglo-American Nazi War isn't bad but it's certainly worth mentioning in terms of alternate world war history. There's some interesting stuff in it at the very least.

The bad ones though, those are the fun ones to hear about. WWIII 1946 I think takes the cake, though "The Big one" is also pretty bad.

 

[Syaoran Li]

If we're gonna bring up TV Tropes there's actually a good page about this kind of shit:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlternateHistoryWank
Most of this alternate history is hardly plausible at all because someone wants to hammer in a statement.

I forgot to mention that the title of "Romanovs & Revolutions" is not meant as a TV Tropes reference, but a reference to Dungeons & Dragons and more importantly, the naming schemes of many of its retro-clones (Castles & Crusades, Swords & Wizardry, etc.)

 

[millais]

The French were so traumatized by the Blitzkrieg defeat of 1940 that there is an entire genre of French uchronie/alternate history that deals with how France could have survived the invasion and turned the tide in 1940

this is one of the main online hubs of this genre: http://1940lafrancecontinue.org/

If you're like me and get a headache from reading too much French, one of the more popular series is available in graphic novel format: http://www.soleilprod.com/serie/194...tinue-la-guerre-01-le-grand-demenagement.html

That one is played pretty straight though, there's another graphic novel series called "La Grand Guerre" which throws in some good old Indiana Jones-style Nazi occultism into the mix.

 

[millais]

Alternate History is the ultimate Fan-Fiction. You watch shows on History Channel about Romans, Spartans, and Nazis and like them and start to wonder "IF ONLY THEY DID THIS THEN THEY WOULD'VE WON" and then start creating a fan-fic in which they do exactly that and manage to conquer the world because they did what you thought of doing.

This is the thread where you post and talk about shitty Alternate History you've read.

I made this thread cause I recently read an Alternate History forum's creation called Green Antarctica.

For those who haven't read it, basically Abbos land in a Green Antarctica (Original Name. Don't steal) via drift wood after a flood and they create a civilization that is full of zoophilia, necrophilia (with an entire empire called point blank Necrophilia Empire), cannibalism, torture, and every single edgy shit you can imagine and manage to create Gunpowder while everyone else is in the Iron Age. After James Cook lands on Antarctica the Abbos suddenly assimilate Western Tech so fast that they manage to conquer the UK at their height under Queen Victoria and eat the British and Irish and continue their 69edgy48me civilization by eating South Americans (sadly not Brazilians) and create Intercontinental ballistic missiles that use children to steer instead of computers and so on and so on.

Here's a link to it
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lLnX36YVSCsq-TjqeNErG9lS7jMITHDKXfufM9Vw3DY/edit

And it's TV Tropes page (Cause OF COURSE it's gonna have one)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/GreenAntarctica

from the same forum, peak autism was achieved in the informatively named "Sonic the Hedgehog World Collaborative Timeline" https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...dgehog-world-a-collaborative-timeline.250200/

There were several incarnations of the abomination created by different likeminded individuals that were so roundly detested on that site for "debasing the level of discussion" that most were deleted and only one seems to remain. Pretty impressive to be deemed too autistic for alternate history . com the website

 

[Hui]

Ancient Aliens

 

[Caesare]

I've actually read Guns of the South and have a copy of it, alongside several books by the excellent S.M Stirling on my bookshelf.

The actual plot is a bit more interesting than you'd first think in Guns of the South and isn't as basic as "hur durr tha souf wins" there's a lot of questioning of "Southern Values" and suchlike and which part of the argument, states rights or right to own slaves, should win out.

Guns of the South is Harry Turtledove isn't it? I never read that one, but his Worldwar/Colonization series is excellent for a casual read. It's not groundbreaking or anything, but they're definitely fun to read. Stirling is the guy that writes the Super South Africa that eventually gets so big that they beat the Nazis and enslave Europe right? I read a few chapters online, I kinda want to read then but they seemed a little too rapey for me.

 

[millais]

Guns of the South is Harry Turtledove isn't it? I never read that one, but his Worldwar/Colonization series is excellent for a casual read. It's not groundbreaking or anything, but they're definitely fun to read. Stirling is the guy that writes the Super South Africa that eventually gets so big that they beat the Nazis and enslave Europe right? I read a few chapters online, I kinda want to read then but they seemed a little too rapey for me.

Turtledove is a professor of Byzantine history by training, and it really shows in his work. Anything he writes that isn't (loosely) based on Belisarius and Justinian kind of misses the mark. But both he and Stirling are guilty of adding excessively gratuitous sex scenes into their alternate history novels, making many of them nigh unreadable to me. If I wanted gratuitous sex scenes that don't detract from the main plot, I would read some of the more graphic titles of French uchronie.

 

[Sanshain]

One word:

Draka.

Lol.