Alternate History (Fictional; Literary)

[Anonymous]

Just adding to my thread. I just bought a copy of the Final Countdown with Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen. The flying scenes are excellent, F14 Tomcats vs Mitsubishi Zeros! Interesting subject, crap time travel effects. For those of you who haven't heard of it, and I hadn't, which is strange for any sort of movie, its about the USS Nimitz getting zapped back in time from December 6th 1980 to December 6th 1941. Their problem is, interfere in the course of history as they know it OR as a ship of the US Navy they have the duty, power and the knowledge to stop an enemy force... perform their duty to country or try not to change the world as they know it. They also get to rescue a damsel and shoot a couple of Zeros down along the way.

Love that film!! i saw it in the Cinema as a kid, i think it was a double feature with some shit main feature. Kirk Douglas seems a bit lost though

Eburacum Doubtful the Mayans would have got into a nuclear war with anyone but themselves! they were never an empire as such, just a bunch af warring city states sharing a language and culture.

 

[Anonymous]

Yep, Stephen Baxter is also a good author, although I find the sequences going through space pretty boring although his manifold series are very good

I, on the other hand, regard the Manifold series as part of a downturn in the quality of his work (a downturn that began with the dreadful disaster-novel (in every possible sense) Moonseed), and feel what he's been producing lately is not a patch on the Xeelee Sequence of books (particularly my favourites, Ringand Timelike Infinity), nor on Anti-Ice, and especially not a patch on The Time Ships. That said, his short stories are still good, his AC Clarke collaboration The Light of Other Days was excellent and I've yet to start Evolution, but I've got my fingers crossed. His non-fiction futurology thing Deep Future was a bit lightweight, I thought.

 

[ramonmercado]

Interesting article on some contemporary alternate histories and older ones.

Americans Are Living in an Alternate History
As the pandemic has raged on, popular culture has found new ways to ask an old question: What could have been instead?

... The alternate history, as a literary genre, often accompanies moments of transformation and trauma. So it makes a grim sense that its logic would be resurgent right now, as the alternate paths have played out in the urgent present. Over the past several months, Americans have watched as other countries have successfully contained their outbreaks of COVID-19, and as headlines and cable-news chyrons have turned the alternate timeline, typically the stuff of science fiction, into a matter of daily journalism: “It Didn’t Have to Be Like This,” “100,000 Americans Didn’t Have to Die.” Last week, Barbra Streisand tweeted, “Can you imagine how President Hillary Clinton—a Woman with a powerful mind—would have handled this pandemic?” She is one of many who have engaged in such wondering. After an election that functioned as its own sliding door, many people on social media began talking about the “other timeline,” the “other universe,” the rude fickleness of “the writers.” The jokes acknowledged how possible it is for the conditional to be lived in the present. The alternate history is doing the work it always has: helping people grapple with history’s cold contingencies. But it is doing something else, as well: providing a space to mourn the futures that never came. ...

The Trump presidency has engendered many other alternate histories. The Plot Against America, David Simon and Ed Burns’s serialized treatment of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, brought to the screen a dire exploration of what might have happened had Charles Lindbergh—and his fascism—risen to power in America. The Man in the High Castle, the Amazon show taking on Philip K. Dick’s alternate history from 1962, wondered aloud what might have become of America had the Axis powers won World War II. Those revisitations are part of a broader impulse in popular culture to play with plots and possibilities—among them episodes of shows such as Black Mirror and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that adopted a choose-your-own-adventure approach to storytelling. Interactive episodes share the ethos of video games, but you can also read them as responses to the chaotic nature of history. They use fiction to acknowledge how little it takes for imagined futures—whether of a Hillary Clinton presidency or a competent response to the pandemic—to dissipate into the fog of the Might Have Been. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/alternate-history-pop-culture-pandemic/613783/

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Interesting article on some contemporary alternate histories and older ones.

Americans Are Living in an Alternate History
As the pandemic has raged on, popular culture has found new ways to ask an old question: What could have been instead?

... The alternate history, as a literary genre, often accompanies moments of transformation and trauma. So it makes a grim sense that its logic would be resurgent right now, as the alternate paths have played out in the urgent present. Over the past several months, Americans have watched as other countries have successfully contained their outbreaks of COVID-19, and as headlines and cable-news chyrons have turned the alternate timeline, typically the stuff of science fiction, into a matter of daily journalism: “It Didn’t Have to Be Like This,” “100,000 Americans Didn’t Have to Die.” Last week, Barbra Streisand tweeted, “Can you imagine how President Hillary Clinton—a Woman with a powerful mind—would have handled this pandemic?” She is one of many who have engaged in such wondering. After an election that functioned as its own sliding door, many people on social media began talking about the “other timeline,” the “other universe,” the rude fickleness of “the writers.” The jokes acknowledged how possible it is for the conditional to be lived in the present. The alternate history is doing the work it always has: helping people grapple with history’s cold contingencies. But it is doing something else, as well: providing a space to mourn the futures that never came. ...

The Trump presidency has engendered many other alternate histories. The Plot Against America, David Simon and Ed Burns’s serialized treatment of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, brought to the screen a dire exploration of what might have happened had Charles Lindbergh—and his fascism—risen to power in America. The Man in the High Castle, the Amazon show taking on Philip K. Dick’s alternate history from 1962, wondered aloud what might have become of America had the Axis powers won World War II. Those revisitations are part of a broader impulse in popular culture to play with plots and possibilities—among them episodes of shows such as Black Mirror and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that adopted a choose-your-own-adventure approach to storytelling. Interactive episodes share the ethos of video games, but you can also read them as responses to the chaotic nature of history. They use fiction to acknowledge how little it takes for imagined futures—whether of a Hillary Clinton presidency or a competent response to the pandemic—to dissipate into the fog of the Might Have Been. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/alternate-history-pop-culture-pandemic/613783/

It's all down to the large hadron collider...

 

[Dinobot]

The Temeraire series of books by Naomi Novick are brilliant. Set during the Napoleonic war in the nineteenth century with an air force of dragons. Brilliant read, I cannot recommend it enough...