Damned Turtledove
- Thread starter Lemont Elwood
- Start date
Thank you. In fact, I did do research on the Mexican family. I wasn't sure if Carlota was sterile, so I assumed she wasn't, and my timeline had them having a child before the adoption.
Grandsons of the first emperor? That somehow got past me; it makes perfect sense.
What.
Why do so many people seem to think Utah was a hotbed of sedition and rebellion?
OTL's Utah war was caused by James Buchanan acting like James Buchanan.
What.
Why do so many people seem to think Utah was a hotbed of sedition and rebellion?
OTL's Utah war was caused by James Buchanan acting like James Buchanan.
I'm the first to castigate HT when he makes a mistake or does something plain stupid, but he was fairly careful to make the Mormon rebellion in 1915 plausible. In TL-191, you have the Utah War, a successful secession by the Southern states, as well as a second crackdown by John Pope in 1881. This is on top of the general disdain that the American public had for Mormons in the 19th century, which is likely intensified here.
Do you know the difference between constructive criticism and just being a rude dickhead? Based on your posting history, I have my doubts.
Very true. Though there is some good WW2-centric stuff on this site.
Can you deny that it is poorly thought out? Being a dick would have been calling him an idiot which I did not do. I'm stating a fact when I say it is a poor TL.
I don't mind you're criticism, but I request that you explain how it is poorly thought out (based on the scant information I've given).
I haven't read the timeline so I have no idea if it is poorly thought out or not. I have little basis for saying that based on the very little which has been presented to us.
How does simply stating that its a "poor timeline" constitute constructive criticism? Especially since you haven't even read the timeline and have scant basis for making a judgment like that?
Basically what you did is said "I don't think you're a plagiarist, I think you're just a crappy writer." With no basis for such a statement. That is a dickish thing to do.
Based on the scant information you've given, you don't know much about history. You have only (bad) parallels. You have only bad ideas. Based on the scant information you've given, you didn't put much thought into it other than "Oh, cool! I remember something like that from history class/Wikipedia!" Based on the scant information you've given, you decided to go for a broad overview instead of going step by step, piece by piece. Going from a Confederate Victory to WWI is a lot more than just, "Britain and France and the CSA VERSUS Germany and the USA". In order to get anything even vaguely resembling OTL's WWI would take a lot of contrived circumstances (and having a USSR led by OTL's Josef Stalin would be outright impossible)
In short, it sounds like you didn't try to write an alternate history TL. You have approached like it is a fantasy story instead of a history. The fact that similar methods would get you something like Turtledove's story isn't surprising- his methods gave us poor AH too.
That better? If you want to have anything resembling a good alternate history timeline, throw out your little contrived "Oh cool!" moments, throw out what you think are inevitable events and stop striving for parallels- simply let them happen. Build forward in small steps, instead of backwards in large steps.
In short, it sounds like you didn't try to write an alternate history TL. You have approached like it is a fantasy story instead of a history. The fact that similar methods would get you something like Turtledove's story isn't surprising- his methods gave us poor AH too.
That better? If you want to have anything resembling a good alternate history timeline, throw out your little contrived "Oh cool!" moments, throw out what you think are inevitable events and stop striving for parallels- simply let them happen. Build forward in small steps, instead of backwards in large steps.
Anything resembling a good alternate history timeline? By whose criteria? Yours?
Alright, this has to be said and sorry if it gets a little "ranty"...
I commend the back-peddling constructive criticism about small steps you tried to make at the end (and you're absolutely right about that) but seriously, you haven't read his TL and I doubt your books are bestsellers so mind your tongue. This is a friendly forum and, personally, my place to unwind and enjoy some good speculative fiction, friendly disagreements, and stimulating conversation. I don't come here to pretend I'm a professional critic, a college professor, or a gifted author. If you do, then it's time to reexamine reality.
Let's take a step back here for a moment. On history: We don't know what exactly would have happened. Ever. We just do not have that capacity. If there is a higher being, we are not it. We are all just as ignorant to "ALTERNATE history" as everyone else. Which is why we...
Class?
Speculate.
Are there more or less likely directions for this speculation? Yes. Are his ideas terribly plausible in the context of what we know about our own history? Not incredibly. But it could have happened. If our own timeline has taught us anything it is that literally anything can happen. That's what makes AH so fantastic, entertaining, and engaging.
The "ASB" forum and the term itself does not exist to degrade anyone's ideas, lest we forget. It essentially exists to specify the output of ideas and organize them into "Most Plausible" and "Just For Fun." This is important to remember because there can be such unmoderated cruelty on this forum. But just because his ideas seem implausible does not make your ideas on why they are implausible any better educated guesses than anyone elses. We are all human, history has it's own ideas about how it's going to progress, and this is something we all enjoy doing, speculating on, and talking about. I get serious about TL's I enjoy reading and writing, but overall, this isn't something that we should get too hung up about. Alternate history is technically a fantasy genre, or, if that doesn't sit well with you, then we'll say speculative FICTION.
The Butterfly Effect is basically a theory and on this site should be considered little more than a literary device. Yes things will change. How severely those things change should be (within reason) at the mercy of the author and Goddamn anyone who says otherwise. The Snobberati can shove that one as far as I'm concerned, I'm tired of Butterfly Police being outright offensive to writers on this forum.
I'll put it this way: Only people who can accurately predict the future in detail are truly qualified to have the final answer on alternate pasts. None of us qualify.
You have the right to your opinion, but careful about being a damned troll because no one is impressed with you when you are.
And I'm not singling you out, Jester, sorry if it seems that way. This is something that's needed to be said on this forum for a while.
Lemont: Turtledove sold very well with a story that was not even as well researched as many on this site. Don't lose hope! I enjoy Turtledove. I don't care if he's the Beatles of alternate history and it's cool to find him overrated. I like a lot of his stuff. I'd love to read your TL sometime as alternate 20th centuries following PODs in the mid-19th Century are always fascinating to me, no matter who wrote them or how likely I find them to be.
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On the contrary, I gave you scant information because I only needed to give you scant information. I have a shitload of stuff typed up, fairly detailed descriptions of wars. In fact, in my first attempt, I even wrote detailed descriptions of individual battles (until I realized that Dixie didn't have a chance in Hell of defeating Mexico, and had to erase my whole history). I have the background stories of my OTL-Unknowns and ATL characters.
I do occasionally indulge myself in "cool" events (Deseret independence, Hispaniola), but it's also all plausible given the butterflies I created. For example: CSA (with lots of French help) take Colombia and Venezuela. Latin America is set on edge. Increased integrationist movements, eventually Hispaniola is formed.
Or for Deseret: Mormons emboldened, Yankees butt-hurt from their loss in the Civil War. Increased persecution. World War I breaks out and the USA has to fight on three fronts; Deseret rebels and wins.
I never even considered what my map would look like by 2011. I've gone step-by-step.
My Bolshe Semshya ("Greater Family") and Matvei Zolnerowich are not the USSR and Josef Stalin, they are just fairly close to them. For one thing, the Bolshe Semshya is Fascist. Zolnerowich has what I call "Dictator Syndrome", something he shares with Stalin, but otherwise he is a different person.
I will admit that I have a bad problem with parallels (I imagine most people do), but I don't aim for them. I just have trouble thinking of ways to avoid them.
Oh, and this is NOT my first attempt, not by far.
ATTEMPTS
1. "OMG, I'll SUBVERT the silly Gettysburg victory and have ANTIETAM! LOL it's so original!
"My timeline started with a plausible POD, the Union failing to take Dunker Church. It went to hell as soon as I started writing, with hot air balloon bombers, the USA annexing Canada DURING THE CIVIL WAR, etcetera. I realized what an ungodly abomination I wrote, and restarted from the beginning.
2. "Oh, Profirio Diaz was COMPETENT. That ruins it for me."
3. "Ooh! Deseret would be cool! I'll just insert that.... damn it, I have to delete everything I wrote after."
Nobody can avoid the Butterfly Effect. I don't think anybody has the capacity to imagine an entire history, without the framework of existing history. For writing Alternate History, I imagine "Butterfly Effect" as meaning no OTL people, and that what happens in one place will effect another.In the spirit of the "friendly disagreements" and "stimulating conversation" and, my thoughts on the issue of Alternate History as they relate to this (if you don't mind me stepping in to share some observations from a different perspective):
Could it have happened? See the bottom part of this for my feelings on plausibility explored in more depth, but the short form is that unlikely does not necessarily mean implausible, but implausible is generally a bad thing.
Speaking for myself: ASB is fantasy. Sometimes good fantasy, and meeting the verisimilitude desired in a good fantasy novel. Sometimes...its just fantasy.
But outside that: There's a difference between "This would be a reasonable construction of events from the POD, which could have gone a certain way if certain reasonably constructable events occurred" and "If you got the jackpot six hundred times in a row, this could happen."
pquote]
We are all human, history has it's own ideas about how it's going to progress, and this is something we all enjoy doing, speculating on, and talking about. I get serious about TL's I enjoy reading and writing, but overall, this isn't something that we should get too hung up about. Alternate history is technically a fantasy genre, or, if that doesn't sit well with you, then we'll say speculative FICTION. [/quote]
Which still needs to be founded on a historical foundation to be taken seriously as a genuinely-possible road-not-taken, as opposed to an entertaining story which may or may not be well written (we haven't seen anything indicating one way or another on 90% of what that entails), but which exists on a fictional world which resembles ours more by coincidence than anything else.
I hate to sound repetitive, but I like my phrasing: There's a difference between random butterflies running amok and attacking Austria-Hungary, and how a world with a different US won't go in identical directions to one with the US of OTL in some areas because the US's impact will lead to a different world.
For instance, Austro-Russian relations may be essentially identical in this timeline. On the other hand, the US's policies between 1865 and 1914 will probably have some impact on Great Britain and its empire, on Spain and its empire, and so on. Drop a rock in a lake and it has ripples.
And this is where I'm going to take the opportunity to comment on unlikely vs. implausible.
If the possibilities of history are a many-branched road, with each branch leading to its own branches...
At some point, any significant POD will not lead to the same place. It will not travel through the same places, which makes it even less likely that it will reach the same destination as those places and the circumstances in which the "travelers" (the nations and people of Earth) experience them make it even more likely that decisions will be made that aren't identical to OTL until at some point you wind up in timeline #36626 instead of timeline #1 (arbitrarily assigned to OTL for the sake of convenience on the part of the writer of this post).
Could you still have a Great War between Austria, Germany, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, Imperial Russia, France, and other nations? Definitely. Could it be in the 1910s? Certainly. Could it be a defeat for Germany? Undoubtedly. All are plausible, some are more likely than others, depending on the details, but so far events with a POD in the 1860s can easily go through the same general landscape that lead to WWI.
But it is not merely unlikely but not plausible that you would get George D****** M***** (the person writing this) as the same person in all particulars if you had his maternal grandfather die yesterday instead of twenty-six years ago and if he (said grandfather) had been a deeply religious man with deeply religious children.
The impact said changes would have would make for an entirely different environment for George - for good and ill. He would not have been exposed to the same things, and would have been exposed to things that in OTL he wasn't.
This is assuming that his mother and father still meet and have children at the same time and so on.
Good AH takes this into account. Without a more detailed knowledge of the timeline we are looking at, I can't say if it has reached the point where the differences cause the travelers to take another path from OTL as of WWI's conclusion. Maybe they're still on the same path as OTL, and will be taking another path in the 1930s instead. But you can't say that a world with a surviving Roman Empire would be like OTL, except with a surviving Roman Empire, as if that had no impact on the world it was present in from the POD to the present any more than if it was suddenly ISOTed into being and placed over OTL Italy and France and Spain (among other places).
That's not how things work in history. Again, rocks make ripples. Sometimes small ripples. But those ripples hit things and those things will react to being hit by them...in ways that they wouldn't have done if they were never hit by them.
Screw butterflies. Randomness can lead to you winning the jackpot 600 times, theoretically. But it can't cause lobsters to sprout wings and if you do have lobsters sprouting wings, they won't be "lobsters, but with wings".
Again, all of the above stated in the interests of discussion and creating of enjoyable (for both the writer and the readers) AH. As you said, there is no way we can predict exactly what will happen, so maybe lobsters with wings won't lead to any particularly interesting changes to polar bears.
Not that I'd mind reading one where it was part of something that lead to Polar Bears in Space doing battle with cliche Space Opera Martians. That would be pretty funny even if (and probably more so if the author embraces this) its batshit insane.
TheInfiniteApe said:
Could it have happened? See the bottom part of this for my feelings on plausibility explored in more depth, but the short form is that unlikely does not necessarily mean implausible, but implausible is generally a bad thing.
Speaking for myself: ASB is fantasy. Sometimes good fantasy, and meeting the verisimilitude desired in a good fantasy novel. Sometimes...its just fantasy.
But outside that: There's a difference between "This would be a reasonable construction of events from the POD, which could have gone a certain way if certain reasonably constructable events occurred" and "If you got the jackpot six hundred times in a row, this could happen."
pquote]
We are all human, history has it's own ideas about how it's going to progress, and this is something we all enjoy doing, speculating on, and talking about. I get serious about TL's I enjoy reading and writing, but overall, this isn't something that we should get too hung up about. Alternate history is technically a fantasy genre, or, if that doesn't sit well with you, then we'll say speculative FICTION. [/quote]
Which still needs to be founded on a historical foundation to be taken seriously as a genuinely-possible road-not-taken, as opposed to an entertaining story which may or may not be well written (we haven't seen anything indicating one way or another on 90% of what that entails), but which exists on a fictional world which resembles ours more by coincidence than anything else.
I hate to sound repetitive, but I like my phrasing: There's a difference between random butterflies running amok and attacking Austria-Hungary, and how a world with a different US won't go in identical directions to one with the US of OTL in some areas because the US's impact will lead to a different world.
For instance, Austro-Russian relations may be essentially identical in this timeline. On the other hand, the US's policies between 1865 and 1914 will probably have some impact on Great Britain and its empire, on Spain and its empire, and so on. Drop a rock in a lake and it has ripples.
And this is where I'm going to take the opportunity to comment on unlikely vs. implausible.
If the possibilities of history are a many-branched road, with each branch leading to its own branches...
At some point, any significant POD will not lead to the same place. It will not travel through the same places, which makes it even less likely that it will reach the same destination as those places and the circumstances in which the "travelers" (the nations and people of Earth) experience them make it even more likely that decisions will be made that aren't identical to OTL until at some point you wind up in timeline #36626 instead of timeline #1 (arbitrarily assigned to OTL for the sake of convenience on the part of the writer of this post).
Could you still have a Great War between Austria, Germany, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, Imperial Russia, France, and other nations? Definitely. Could it be in the 1910s? Certainly. Could it be a defeat for Germany? Undoubtedly. All are plausible, some are more likely than others, depending on the details, but so far events with a POD in the 1860s can easily go through the same general landscape that lead to WWI.
But it is not merely unlikely but not plausible that you would get George D****** M***** (the person writing this) as the same person in all particulars if you had his maternal grandfather die yesterday instead of twenty-six years ago and if he (said grandfather) had been a deeply religious man with deeply religious children.
The impact said changes would have would make for an entirely different environment for George - for good and ill. He would not have been exposed to the same things, and would have been exposed to things that in OTL he wasn't.
This is assuming that his mother and father still meet and have children at the same time and so on.
Good AH takes this into account. Without a more detailed knowledge of the timeline we are looking at, I can't say if it has reached the point where the differences cause the travelers to take another path from OTL as of WWI's conclusion. Maybe they're still on the same path as OTL, and will be taking another path in the 1930s instead. But you can't say that a world with a surviving Roman Empire would be like OTL, except with a surviving Roman Empire, as if that had no impact on the world it was present in from the POD to the present any more than if it was suddenly ISOTed into being and placed over OTL Italy and France and Spain (among other places).
That's not how things work in history. Again, rocks make ripples. Sometimes small ripples. But those ripples hit things and those things will react to being hit by them...in ways that they wouldn't have done if they were never hit by them.
Screw butterflies. Randomness can lead to you winning the jackpot 600 times, theoretically. But it can't cause lobsters to sprout wings and if you do have lobsters sprouting wings, they won't be "lobsters, but with wings".
Again, all of the above stated in the interests of discussion and creating of enjoyable (for both the writer and the readers) AH. As you said, there is no way we can predict exactly what will happen, so maybe lobsters with wings won't lead to any particularly interesting changes to polar bears.
Not that I'd mind reading one where it was part of something that lead to Polar Bears in Space doing battle with cliche Space Opera Martians. That would be pretty funny even if (and probably more so if the author embraces this) its batshit insane.
The concept that things change further (Butterflies) once you have changed them initially (POD) is unavoidable and essential to the genre.
However, the idea that nobody in the world falls in love and has the same babies because history has changed is absurd. The idea that they absolutely will is absurd as well...
I think my point is this: The fact that anyone in the AH community finds anything inevitable is absurd.
And what I wrote, I wrote in defense of people who create and then have to deal with the rudest of snobby pricks on this wonderful site. A few bad apples can put a bad taste in people's mouth. It's not just Jester, there are so many who have delusions of importance or brilliance or whatever it is they think they have that makes them the expert on not only history but the art form of speculative fiction. Criticism is one thing but "You're just a shit writer" (paraphrased) is something else entirely. He didn't have to comment at all.
I vote that people only be allowed to troll once they have presented their credentials.
Very well said, and I don't think we really disagree. I understand the usefulness of these guidelines and the importance of their existence, I just hate it when people disregard others for hitting the jackpot not six hundred times in a row... but twice.
Also, this:
'Screw butterflies. Randomness can lead to you winning the jackpot 600 times, theoretically. But it can't cause lobsters to sprout wings and if you do have lobsters sprouting wings, they won't be "lobsters, but with wings".'
Is sig-worthy.
Thank you. I'm kind of inclined to call foul on lucky things because well, luck rarely happens. And some writers seem to think that getting lucky means all the problems go away. Getting lucky can provide an opportunity, but you have to have H20 to get water no matter how lucky you are. On the other hand, not having the occasional thing like the Habsburg inheritance good fortune is probably more improbable than any given event like that happening.
Thus the need for a good, constructive critic. Some ideas, however cool, don't work. A writer should be prepared to deal with that.
But the critic should be prepared to present that in a way that...well, Jester didn't do it, sufficient to say.
Thanks again.
Too long for this forum, sadly.I hope Lemont continues with his idea. It sounded like it had some promise if the author observed the "rules".
Maybe some of his events would be hard to have happen with his POD, but we don't have enough to go on to judge that.
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Thanks again.
Blast.
I agree. We can't judge until we see the TL. Post what you have so far, Lemont? If it gets bogged down in criticism, there's always the opportunity for a "Mark II" with some adjustments.