Tag: alternate history

Quote of the Day, It Can Spoil You For BEING An Author Too, Tom edition.

Although Tom Anderson already knows that. Dude’s in the same boat as me: writing books in a world where Terry Pratchett existed.

Mort is a great book for many reasons other than the intelligent way it writes about AH, and only as a secondary plot at that. It is a good illustration in how reading Terry Pratchett at a young age will spoil many other authors for one, for all the things one takes for granted as a result.

(I assume you have all already read Mort. If not… what a nice thing you have to look forward to!)

#commissionearned

An alternate-history map, circa 1924 or so.

Ties in with the books I was asking about earlier. The divergence point is the American purchase of Alaska; supposedly, the Russians also half-seriously offered parts of Kamchatka, since the USA was buying useless frozen wildernesses anyway. As the map below suggests, the prospect of having an actual land border with the Bolsheviks did wonders for the USA’s willingness to set up a White Russian client state in the region*…

Continue reading An alternate-history map, circa 1924 or so.

Slowish night.

Spent a bit of it trying to figure out the best breakpoint for an alternate timeline where, for reasons never really explained, nation-states above a certain population level tend to break in half.  I was using the USA for my target number — I wanted to get about five countries out of it — but that leaves a paradoxical amount of too many countries being affected, and not enough.  Turns out that using a number of about 70,000,000 million leaves Europe (outside of Russia) pretty much intact, and gives India/China both just not enough countries that I’d have to do something more than make up lines on a map.

So, yeah, I’ve been playing with spreadsheets.  Ah, the glamorous life of the amateur gaming writer.

Go check out my alternate history map quandary on Patreon!

Found here. I put it up there for two reasons: one, I needed the practice in embedding images to Patreon posts.  The process is not entirely intuitive.  Second, it’d be awesome if I made it through the next checkpoint, which would be the point where the monthly short stories hit 3K words.  So, hey, tell your friends!  Buck a month is all it takes, folks.

Are you a publisher trying to flog an alternate history novel? Read this!

I understand that the alternate history genre appears complex to people who aren’t, well, steeped in its little ways and assumptions. That’s fine; those of us who are fans of alternate history are used to folks who – through no fault of their own – don’t really groove to such things. Even fellow science fiction readers.

But for the love of everything that’s holy: if you’re trying to sell a particular book in the genre, compare it to something that fits. Continue reading Are you a publisher trying to flog an alternate history novel? Read this!

I need to pick somebody’s brain on tracking down an alternate history story.

It was a short story, based on the premise that Marxism actually worked and set in an alternate, mirror-universe end of the Cold War (so it was written in the 1990s*). It got anthologized, so it was mainstream; and I thought that I knew the title (“Dispatches from the Revolution”), but that’s an entirely different short story.

Help? This is driving me nuts.

Moe Lane

*It held up NYC as NOT being a hellhole (specifically because the City was more socialist than the alternate’s USA), so the story clearly predates Rudy Giulani’s tenure as Mayor (and subsequent repair) of the City.