My fondness for Turtledove can quite easily cause me to wax boring concerning him – apologies in advance, if I’m about to !
Hasn’t that short story (which I’ve read) also been expanded by the author into a full-length novel, also called In the Presence of Mine Enemies? I haven’t read the novel, having heard – including from Turtledove fans – that parts of it anyway, are very tedious.
With the inclusion of RftF, this one being not about a Nazi victory as such – more a stalemate with Nazi Germany (and the USSR) still in the game: might a case be made for mentioning HT’s Worldwar novel series – aliens from elsewhere in the universe invade Earth in 1942, bent on conquest and subjugation of the human race. After a couple of years of havoc including much use of nukes, an all-round truce is reached: the most technically advanced human nations (The Third Reich, the USSR, USA / Canada, Britain, and Japan) remain independent – the aliens get everywhere else. (In Worldwar, rather poignantly, the reptilian invaders are considerable nicer and more ethical beings, than those humans running things in the Nazi and Soviet states.)
I think this zeros in on what the problem was. The ideas (in Man in the High Castle) are so horrible to her that they were taboo. Just as most of us would have difficulty reading really graphic “snuff” porn, no matter how evil it was portrayed to be and no matter how emphatically the author condemned it. Just the very existence of a “snuff” scene in a story would make it almost impossible for me to read it.
Condemnation helps a lot…but it won’t get me past some conceptual antipathies.
Another mild defense of my friend is that this was the first she’d heard of the A.H. concept as an organized genre of sf/f. She might have been better off starting with the two short stories Baker linked to. Instead of the kiddy pool, she got tossed into The Maelstrom.
(Could have been worse… Could have been David Brin’s “Thor Meets Captain America.”)
Lots of people have problems comprehending that Hitler got elected (or similar things, I could write a list) because of this kind of mental setup. They can’t understand that there’s a difference between “whomever writes history will portrait whomever they happen to like as a helluva nice guy” and “the guys I like always win”.
In the same sense one can think contemplate what if the US had supported Vietnamese independence back in the 1940’s which would have meant no Vietnam war. Or if the US had embraced democracy and liberalization over fascism in Cuba which would have meant no Cuban revolution. The US did alot of stupid things in the name of fighting communism.
There was a very good graphic novel (collection of comic books) depicting the ground invasion of Japan in WWII, when the atomic bomb didn’t work. A truly hellish premise, leading to horrors beyond the horrors seen in reality.
(“Storming Paradise,” written by Chuck Dixon.)
What I thought was admirable is that the writer treated both sides with honor, and showed both heroes and villains on both sides. (Yes, the U.S. won in the end – it was written for American audiences.) The writer explored, as best he could, what really might have happened. (Okay, and then indulged himself in some wild-eyed extrapolation, too…)
I think this one is free of being a wish-fulfillment premise.
The closest I can think is Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card.
Pretty good book about a collapsing society in the future with time look-back technology, trying to find a way to change the present for the better. In exploring various scenarios, they start to look at Christopher Columbus’s life and try to figure out what would happen if slavery hadn’t happened and all societies started on a more level playing field.
(Spoiler deleted…) What kind of book is it? I followed the link, but can’t figure it. Is it one that “celebrates” bad things, or just depicts them as A.H.?
Obligatory tongue-stick-out at OSC for being a poopy-head…but, yeah, that was actually a very good book. It had one or two A.H. “punch-lines” that I thought were truly elegant. The guy may be an s.o.b., but, doggonit, he really can write.
Its not really a book as so much a “timeline”-largely matter-of-factly and chronological vignettes of an alternate history (which is quite a common format on the Alternate History com where its from and obviously in general the alternate histories there are far better in terms of plausibility and originality compared to the generally implausible settings of published alternate history) and obviously not particularly fond of the Third Reich.
Indeed, as Qin Shi Huangdi notes, the conceit is that it’s excerpted from a 2010s history book, chronicling the (alternate) history.
I wouldn’t say it “celebrates” bad things—though I wouldn’t say that about a lot of AHs, like the ones in your OP—but that it lays out “point of divergence, then bad things happened (that benefited bad guys). This led to other bad things happening, then more bad things. Then even MORE bad things, and finally some other bad things. Not all of these bad things benefited the bad guys. Oh, and some other bad things happen, too.”
Another fun A.H. experiment is trying to figure out the origin of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” universe. It’s clearly the United States of America in the 1930s or 40s or maybe 50s, but it isn’t “our” universe.
There was a great European War, but it didn’t end in a victory for the western democracies, and, instead, seems to have instituted pan-European socialism. Maybe Russia took everything?
There’s no atom bomb and no atomic power.
In the U.S. no one speaks of The President and The Congress. The terms are The Executive and The Legislature. The Executive seems very weak. Perhaps there was no FDR and no “Imperial Presidency?”
The best guess I’ve heard is that the U.S. went isolationist and weak in the Great Depression, and stayed out of WWII entirely.
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