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HistoryRedone In reply to menapia [2019-11-23 06:37:26 +0000 UTC]

It was an interesting development. Not really a conscious move, but more like an overzealous France which attacked first, and invaded Belgium, forcing Britain and Germany into an uneasy alliance.
Basically, it was the Treaty of London at work again, just like in our timeline. 

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menapia In reply to HistoryRedone [2019-11-24 00:06:11 +0000 UTC]

been working on an alt-hist timeline since start of year. title The Red Post Box, an ordinary guy Johnny Connors is an Irish postman who by accident slips from our world into an alternate history where thanks to a few little kinks is different from our own.

Got most of an A4 notepad filled now running from the 1920's to the present with little snapshots of people and places at different points of the timeline.  The P.O.D. is after the Irish War of Independence and the Chanak Scandal, basically Lloyd George & Churchill do some stupid, ill planned things albeit credible stuff......hey I mean these were the people who thought inflicting undisciplined thugs like the Auxies and Black & Tans on the mostly civilian population was a bright idea ~ check up the burning of Cork City centre etc.. 

As our old history teacher pointed out these guys were a walking recruitment poster for the I.R.A, take wexford county as an example ~ the locals had voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party the peaceful constitutionalists at Westminister but due to these thugs and martial law they flipped to being radical republicans.

In this timeline a member of a French ultranationalist group called La Cagoule assassinates the exiled Kaiser at his estate in Doorn, on a cheerier note Hitler ends up as a journalist & photographer.....better paid than being a crap artist and occasional stringer spy keeping an eye on the various Freikorps group and assorted loony tunes politicos. 

Stalin gets bumped off by his wife in this timeline by his wife....late one night she finds a) his stash of Georgian Chacha(homebrew brandy), b) a blond hair on his coat and c) that, that blonde bimbo Magda in the Kremlin typing pool has got mysteriously accelerated promotion.

In short the Commonwealth evolves into a political confederacy, think supersized NATO with the Imperial preference system, bill of rights to provide a yardstick for civil liberties and a High Court serving rather like the I.C.J. regards civil rights and to keep govts. on the straight and narrow.

No world war 2 but there is a close nazi analog in France with the Cagoule & Action Francaise and Gabriele D'Annunzio in Italy with a regime based on the Canaro regency.  Prussia still exists in the modern era acting as Germany's home to Freethinkers, artists, writers and exiles from the Soviet Union, also home to German jazz and with so many exiles it's a hub for international espionage.

Britain thanks to certain unpleasant experiences now has a written constitution to back up civil liberties, if you want to know why check up the D.O.R.A legislation and the Emergency Powers Act and imagine politicians who are a) high on powers they assumed during ww1 and b) not that keen on going back to civilised ways of doing things and have become quite content to censor or ignore little things like habeas corpus and the freedom of speech.

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HistoryRedone In reply to menapia [2019-11-24 12:26:47 +0000 UTC]

Sounds interesting.

What do you intend to do with that timeline?

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menapia In reply to HistoryRedone [2019-11-24 20:00:29 +0000 UTC]

I posted a small intro on my page, just a simple little thing, the distance between realities is as thin as a shadow, Connor's slipping into the other timeline doesn't have to make sense or have a rational cause behind it.

Basically a callous universe has picked out some poor sod of a postman and decided "It's You!", if you've ever read H.P Lovecraft or Dahl's "Tales of the Unexpected" you'll understand the sort of atmosphere I'm aiming for.


Instead of just changing one p.o.d. in a story like let's say "*the confederates win the civil war"     yeah right, and having the story covering just one place (mostly in Ireland & Britain at the start), I'm trying to cover what changes might occur in the rest of the world.  So as the timeline progresses I'll have little snapshot stories seeing the world thru a man on the spot. 

One scene I've written out involves an Irish writer and part time stringer spy having an interview with T.E. Lawrence now a professor of history and part time archaeologist at Trinity College ~ imagine a panelled office with the bald, hawk nosed Lawrence, his watery eyes glaring over half-moon spectacles as he gives an interview that will be locked up in the "official records".  On his desk is a photo, Michael Collins(bald as an egg in old age) grinning nest to Lawrence with the Newgrange archaeological dig looming in the background.

Everything is interconnected, lets say we dodge WW2, Stalin gets bumped off, Nazism never takes place....but rest assured Germany goes thru nastiness "Die blutigen Zeiten" basically a nastier civil war with ultranationalists like Kapp, republicans, monarchists and anarchists raising hell. 

Incidentally with a more chaotic Germany next door with ultranationalist Freikorps running around Europe and a new Soviet regime in the East, well lets say Poland, Lithuania & Latvia are going to get a bit nervous. I'm just trying to imagine plausible knock on effects 

I can't see how an alt-hist can change just one thing and ignore the wider consequences - e.g. no WW2, ergo no massive boost to the military industrial complex to lift the U.S. out of depression as early as it did, no Yanks, oversexed, overpaid and over here, no massive Americana cultural influence breaking out across the world, probably no Rock and Roll, and thank christ no rap music. 

Another interesting point is that Britain actually had a treaty with Japan, with a less hectic half century that'll probably remain in place - the First Anglo-Japanese Alliance 1902, formed because both of them were worried about Imperial Russia and with a more stable sanely ruled Soviet state in place they'd probably continue it.

Result no Kokoda trail, no concentration camps, no vicious hellraising in the Far East, Japan would be kept firmly in the international community and basically have a damn good reason to behave.

Another consequence would be that the Empire would be able to do a damn decent effort of decolonising India instead of the shit rush job Mountbatten did. A united Indian federation with no mad mullahs and a weak federal govt. where loony nationalists don't have half as much opportunity for mayhem? sounds good to me.


I've got it all written out longhand ~ I've got a start, I've got ideas for a middle and I've got a snapshot story for the end where we see the present in the alternate world









*seriously one of the alternate history story websites has a whole folder of stories consisting of the plucky Confederates whupping the North....I swear while reading some of them I could hear the music from "Gone With the Wind" playing 

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