the hard and the lite
As touching the nature of EA, the hard and the lite.
Should any of you all be unfamiliar with alternate history, here is a nutshell description. Alternate history is the mental exercise or the conduct of a "thought experiment" of What If. In other words, proposing or discussing an alternate history (AH) involves thinking about two things (1) how history could have gone differently; and (2) what would have followed a particular event going differently.
Let's take a common example: the Nazis win WW2. The first question is: how could the Nazis have won WW2? Perhaps by refraining from attacking the USSR. But how could that have happened? Perhaps if Hitler died before the invasion, the leadership that took over would have been loath to take on such a project. First you need a Point of Divergence - something that happened in the Alternate Timeline (ATL) that did not happen in Our Timeline (OTL). Perhaps someone ATL acquires some nerve that they did not have OTL and manages to carry out an successful assassination attempt.
To make an informed speculation about what happens then, we take a look at the people, resources, etc in OTL and figure out (among other things) who would have taken over in Hitler's stead, whether there would have been a contest for power in the upper echelons of the NSDAP heirarchy, what the role of the Army would be in determining who wound up in power, and so forth. Then we move on to what the new German leader would do to at least to try to finish off the war with the UK, what the reaction of the US and the USSR would have been and other events. We can even extend the story - because that is what AH is, a story of events that did not happen OTL - up to the present day, in which the Third Reich either collapses or endures. Soon you have a full-fledged ATL.
Which brings us to Empty America. The POD in EA is the paleo-Americans never cross the Bering land bridge from Asia over 10,000 years ago and settle North and South America. As a result, the megafauna which inhabited America and were (according to some theories) wiped out by the humans, endure and are still running around when the Norse arrive around 1000 a.d. Because there are no Amerinds, the Norse colony in Vinland is not wiped up, but instead thrives, and word of a major new world spreads (slowly) throughout Medieval Europe and to Song China.
Much wackiness ensues.
So, where is the POD? At first blush the POD looks like a handwave, a major change in history not the result of anything that was happening at the time, but simply the action of the author. Well, there is a POD based upon actual OTL events, which will be revealed at the end of the Empty America story. It is not as neat and tidy as, say, McClellan not finding the battleplans for Lee's invasion of the North during the American Civil War, but it is something besides the snap of my fingers. Readers more knowlegeable than myself will probably riddle it full of holes, but it works for me.
Here, I would like to get into a distinction between "hard" AH and (to borrow a phrase attributed to Harry Turtledove by S.M. Stirling) "AH lite." To qualify as hard AH, I would say that an ATL has to have a very well defined and plausible POD and logical, coherent consequences that flow therefrom. In other words, something that really could have gone the other way is the POD, and there is a good reason for it happening otherwise in ATL. I would submit that some of my previous writing (such as How the West was Wierd, or German Military Regime) qualified as hard AH.
Another attribute of hard AH is the presence of ripple effects. Not all events flow logically from a POD, but a major disruption in the chain of events kicks off other changes in sort of non-linear ways. A particularly good example of butterfly effects is the birth of people conceived after the POD. The odds against any given person being born are astronomical. In order for, lets say, Hitler to be born, sperm X has to fertilize egg Y. Some other sperm fertilizes Frau Hitler's egg and we have Gerta, not Adolph, and the world is a much different place. It is my thinking that any significant event that differs from OTL will likely "ripple out" and prevent the birth of just about every OTL person who was conceived after the POD. I do think geography and other factors regulate the speed of the ripple effect, but over time none of the major personalities who dominate the headlines will be alive in an ATL. Thus, in my opinion, completely changing the cast of OTL characters who were born significantly after the POD is an indicator of hard AH.
What, then, is AH lite? It can be defined negatively - any AH that does not qualify as hard AH is AH lite. The absence of ripple effects is a good indicator. A published example of AH lite (and the book that Turtledove was talking about when he used the phrase) is 'The Two Georges.' TTG features appearances by John Kennedy (an ATL magazine editor) and Richard Nixon (a used car mogul). Now, obviously, any POD that caused the American Revolution not to happen would undoubtedly be big enough, over the course nearly two centuries, to prevent the conception and birth of both JFK and RMN. So, TTG can properly be classified as AH lite.
Is hard AH superior per se to AH lite? Having gone back and forth on the subject, I would say no. Every ATL has to be judged on its own merits and how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. Some are for mere entertainment, others strive to illuminate OTL events by showing what would have happened if they had not happened. Some readers will have a personal preference for hard AH and having JFK show up in a North America still dominated by the British Empire would ruin the experience. There is nothing wrong with that - far be it from me to argue that someone's personal preference is somehow incorrect. For me, it is how it is done. If something sets out to be hard AH and has a jarring moment there in the middle where some utterly implausible person suddenly shows up, that could wreck the experience for me.
Is EA hard AH or AH lite? Well ... to be honest, any POD that was large enough to prevent the settlement of the Americas 10 or 13 thousand years ago would probably ripple out to make the rest of the world look utterly alien by 1000 a.d. There would likely be no Norse, as we know them, to settle in Vinland. The rest of the European cast (William the Conqueror, Prince Madoc, Frederick II, St. Louis, Simon de Montforte, Batu Khan) would likely be gone, too. So, by a strict definition, EA would probably qualify as AH lite. Essentially I am sticking with the OTL Eurasian events up until 1000 because creating the utterly alien world that the POD calls for would not be my idea of fun. Also, one of the challenges of AH is to predict and plausibly show how OTL characters would react in ATL situations. If you conjure up an entirely different society, you can basically do whatever you want and you have largely taken the 'History' out of Alternate History. Keeping the cast largely the same is also a literary device as it keeps the reader somewhat grounded in known personalities. People can argue with me about the plausibility of, say Frederick II acting the way I have him acting. They could not do so if I created the entirely different Europe, Asia and Africa which the POD probably calls for. So, the presence of post-POD OTL figures in an ATL that involves a major change in human history is a literary device rather than a comment on how history would actually have happened 14,000 years after the POD.
That being said, I am not entirely eliminating ripple effects, but I am limiting them to the fields of action that are most intimitely tied to the discovery and settlement of Ultima Thule. The history of Scandanavia and the British Isles progressively diverges from OTL as the effects of the Norse settlement of Vinland spread. Similarly, the discovery of Ultima Thule causes not-insignificant changes in the trading cities of the Italian peninsula - new trade patterns monkey with their history in serious ways before the establishment of the first Italian colonies and in major ways thereafter. And, of course, the major butterfly effect that impacts the rest of Europe is the chance survival of Ogedei Khan, due to a timely swig of Ursuline rum. (Accidental events, in my opinion, are vulnerable to a little non-linear happenstance flowing from the POD. In fact, I think they lend a certain plausibility to a TL. That is, after all, how OTL works.) The history of mainland China is largely plowing along as in OTL, even after the discovery and settlement of Mu-lan Pi. My theory is that even a major influx of gold would not have totally derailed China from its OTL domestic history. But things are diverging, just more slowly than in, say, Norway. Blue Cathay - the overseas Song - of course are an entirely different story.
Since I am proceeding from what I will concede is not an ironclad POD, and according to at least some rules, that (to me, anyway) make some sense, I would like to classify EA as AH "medium." I think that I am tying it into OTL history closely enough to not to consider it 'lite,' but the fact of the matter is that I have European and Asian history continuing on its OTL track long after the ripple effects of the POD would likely have washed away any recognizable traces of OTL. But it serves the purpose of EA, and that is the way it is.
So, what is the purpose of EA? First, I want to tell an interesting story. Second, I want to create an interesting world - a combination of medieval European and Asian influences injected into an environment populated by mastodons, giant sloths, dire wolves, sabretooth tigers and so forth. In the final analysis, I think this world will kind of have a Tolkeinesque feel to it, without the exclusive emphasis on northern European myth-forms. Swords, monsters but no sorcery. The One Eyed Wanderer but no Gandalf. I also am by nature an optimist, so no one should be suprised if the world of Empty America turns out to be better than this one.
Comments, questions?
On the reading desk:
[caution, some of what I have been reading will necessarily give away clues as to where EA is going]
Reilly, "The Medieval Spains" (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks 1993). Good book, if a bit dry.
Should any of you all be unfamiliar with alternate history, here is a nutshell description. Alternate history is the mental exercise or the conduct of a "thought experiment" of What If. In other words, proposing or discussing an alternate history (AH) involves thinking about two things (1) how history could have gone differently; and (2) what would have followed a particular event going differently.
Let's take a common example: the Nazis win WW2. The first question is: how could the Nazis have won WW2? Perhaps by refraining from attacking the USSR. But how could that have happened? Perhaps if Hitler died before the invasion, the leadership that took over would have been loath to take on such a project. First you need a Point of Divergence - something that happened in the Alternate Timeline (ATL) that did not happen in Our Timeline (OTL). Perhaps someone ATL acquires some nerve that they did not have OTL and manages to carry out an successful assassination attempt.
To make an informed speculation about what happens then, we take a look at the people, resources, etc in OTL and figure out (among other things) who would have taken over in Hitler's stead, whether there would have been a contest for power in the upper echelons of the NSDAP heirarchy, what the role of the Army would be in determining who wound up in power, and so forth. Then we move on to what the new German leader would do to at least to try to finish off the war with the UK, what the reaction of the US and the USSR would have been and other events. We can even extend the story - because that is what AH is, a story of events that did not happen OTL - up to the present day, in which the Third Reich either collapses or endures. Soon you have a full-fledged ATL.
Which brings us to Empty America. The POD in EA is the paleo-Americans never cross the Bering land bridge from Asia over 10,000 years ago and settle North and South America. As a result, the megafauna which inhabited America and were (according to some theories) wiped out by the humans, endure and are still running around when the Norse arrive around 1000 a.d. Because there are no Amerinds, the Norse colony in Vinland is not wiped up, but instead thrives, and word of a major new world spreads (slowly) throughout Medieval Europe and to Song China.
Much wackiness ensues.
So, where is the POD? At first blush the POD looks like a handwave, a major change in history not the result of anything that was happening at the time, but simply the action of the author. Well, there is a POD based upon actual OTL events, which will be revealed at the end of the Empty America story. It is not as neat and tidy as, say, McClellan not finding the battleplans for Lee's invasion of the North during the American Civil War, but it is something besides the snap of my fingers. Readers more knowlegeable than myself will probably riddle it full of holes, but it works for me.
Here, I would like to get into a distinction between "hard" AH and (to borrow a phrase attributed to Harry Turtledove by S.M. Stirling) "AH lite." To qualify as hard AH, I would say that an ATL has to have a very well defined and plausible POD and logical, coherent consequences that flow therefrom. In other words, something that really could have gone the other way is the POD, and there is a good reason for it happening otherwise in ATL. I would submit that some of my previous writing (such as How the West was Wierd, or German Military Regime) qualified as hard AH.
Another attribute of hard AH is the presence of ripple effects. Not all events flow logically from a POD, but a major disruption in the chain of events kicks off other changes in sort of non-linear ways. A particularly good example of butterfly effects is the birth of people conceived after the POD. The odds against any given person being born are astronomical. In order for, lets say, Hitler to be born, sperm X has to fertilize egg Y. Some other sperm fertilizes Frau Hitler's egg and we have Gerta, not Adolph, and the world is a much different place. It is my thinking that any significant event that differs from OTL will likely "ripple out" and prevent the birth of just about every OTL person who was conceived after the POD. I do think geography and other factors regulate the speed of the ripple effect, but over time none of the major personalities who dominate the headlines will be alive in an ATL. Thus, in my opinion, completely changing the cast of OTL characters who were born significantly after the POD is an indicator of hard AH.
What, then, is AH lite? It can be defined negatively - any AH that does not qualify as hard AH is AH lite. The absence of ripple effects is a good indicator. A published example of AH lite (and the book that Turtledove was talking about when he used the phrase) is 'The Two Georges.' TTG features appearances by John Kennedy (an ATL magazine editor) and Richard Nixon (a used car mogul). Now, obviously, any POD that caused the American Revolution not to happen would undoubtedly be big enough, over the course nearly two centuries, to prevent the conception and birth of both JFK and RMN. So, TTG can properly be classified as AH lite.
Is hard AH superior per se to AH lite? Having gone back and forth on the subject, I would say no. Every ATL has to be judged on its own merits and how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. Some are for mere entertainment, others strive to illuminate OTL events by showing what would have happened if they had not happened. Some readers will have a personal preference for hard AH and having JFK show up in a North America still dominated by the British Empire would ruin the experience. There is nothing wrong with that - far be it from me to argue that someone's personal preference is somehow incorrect. For me, it is how it is done. If something sets out to be hard AH and has a jarring moment there in the middle where some utterly implausible person suddenly shows up, that could wreck the experience for me.
Is EA hard AH or AH lite? Well ... to be honest, any POD that was large enough to prevent the settlement of the Americas 10 or 13 thousand years ago would probably ripple out to make the rest of the world look utterly alien by 1000 a.d. There would likely be no Norse, as we know them, to settle in Vinland. The rest of the European cast (William the Conqueror, Prince Madoc, Frederick II, St. Louis, Simon de Montforte, Batu Khan) would likely be gone, too. So, by a strict definition, EA would probably qualify as AH lite. Essentially I am sticking with the OTL Eurasian events up until 1000 because creating the utterly alien world that the POD calls for would not be my idea of fun. Also, one of the challenges of AH is to predict and plausibly show how OTL characters would react in ATL situations. If you conjure up an entirely different society, you can basically do whatever you want and you have largely taken the 'History' out of Alternate History. Keeping the cast largely the same is also a literary device as it keeps the reader somewhat grounded in known personalities. People can argue with me about the plausibility of, say Frederick II acting the way I have him acting. They could not do so if I created the entirely different Europe, Asia and Africa which the POD probably calls for. So, the presence of post-POD OTL figures in an ATL that involves a major change in human history is a literary device rather than a comment on how history would actually have happened 14,000 years after the POD.
That being said, I am not entirely eliminating ripple effects, but I am limiting them to the fields of action that are most intimitely tied to the discovery and settlement of Ultima Thule. The history of Scandanavia and the British Isles progressively diverges from OTL as the effects of the Norse settlement of Vinland spread. Similarly, the discovery of Ultima Thule causes not-insignificant changes in the trading cities of the Italian peninsula - new trade patterns monkey with their history in serious ways before the establishment of the first Italian colonies and in major ways thereafter. And, of course, the major butterfly effect that impacts the rest of Europe is the chance survival of Ogedei Khan, due to a timely swig of Ursuline rum. (Accidental events, in my opinion, are vulnerable to a little non-linear happenstance flowing from the POD. In fact, I think they lend a certain plausibility to a TL. That is, after all, how OTL works.) The history of mainland China is largely plowing along as in OTL, even after the discovery and settlement of Mu-lan Pi. My theory is that even a major influx of gold would not have totally derailed China from its OTL domestic history. But things are diverging, just more slowly than in, say, Norway. Blue Cathay - the overseas Song - of course are an entirely different story.
Since I am proceeding from what I will concede is not an ironclad POD, and according to at least some rules, that (to me, anyway) make some sense, I would like to classify EA as AH "medium." I think that I am tying it into OTL history closely enough to not to consider it 'lite,' but the fact of the matter is that I have European and Asian history continuing on its OTL track long after the ripple effects of the POD would likely have washed away any recognizable traces of OTL. But it serves the purpose of EA, and that is the way it is.
So, what is the purpose of EA? First, I want to tell an interesting story. Second, I want to create an interesting world - a combination of medieval European and Asian influences injected into an environment populated by mastodons, giant sloths, dire wolves, sabretooth tigers and so forth. In the final analysis, I think this world will kind of have a Tolkeinesque feel to it, without the exclusive emphasis on northern European myth-forms. Swords, monsters but no sorcery. The One Eyed Wanderer but no Gandalf. I also am by nature an optimist, so no one should be suprised if the world of Empty America turns out to be better than this one.
Comments, questions?
On the reading desk:
[caution, some of what I have been reading will necessarily give away clues as to where EA is going]
Reilly, "The Medieval Spains" (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks 1993). Good book, if a bit dry.
posted by Doug Hoff at 3:33 PM
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