Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

So there is a fairly big and active community about Alternatice histories. AlternateHistory.com is by far the biggest and there are active youtube channels

One of the biggest you tubers recently got outed following a white supremiscit rant - and that is one of the bigger "smells" around the community - histories of "what if the Nazis won and what if the South won US civil war" can spring not from curiosity but yearning.

I personally enjoy WhatIfAltHist as a channel, partly because he is fairly front and centre about his own political (rather centrist and boring) (small p) views.

The big takeaway I have found is that I learn something interesting about our real timeline history and about our real geopolitics - how England supported the creation of Portugal through the middle ages, or the extent Tamerlane changed Europe by killing everyone. And just how contingent the world is.

So yeah it's a fascinating area, tread carefully, I have only dipped my toes in, but it can be very eye opening.

I'd be more interesting in alternate histories where, for example, western Europe never rose to power (it was pretty much a backwater during the Roman age and only crept forward slowly during the Middle Ages; it was colonialism that made it insanely rich and influential).

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson may fit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt

> The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2002. The novel explores how world history might have been different if the Black Death plague had killed 99% of Europe's population, instead of a third as it did in reality. Divided into ten parts, the story spans hundreds of years, from the army of the Muslim conqueror Timur to the 21st century, with Europe being re-populated by Muslim pioneers, the indigenous peoples of the Americas forming a league to resist Chinese and Muslim invaders, and a 67-year-long world war being fought primarily between Muslim states and the Chinese and their allies. While the ten parts take place in different times and places, they are connected by a group of characters that are reincarnated into each time but are identified to the reader by the first letter of their name being consistent in each life.

> The novel explores themes of history, religion, and social movements. The historical narrative is guided more by social history than political or military history. Critics found the book to be rich in detail, realistic, and thoughtful. The Years of Rice and Salt won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2003. In the same year it was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a Hugo Award, and a British Science Fiction Award.

Yep great book quite an interesting read it was.

The article in OP has a link to such a map too.

"just how contingent the world is"

I must admit I have a morbid fascination with alternate histories of the Cold War and all the terrible things that almost happened in that period but for the good judgement of people on both sides of that conflict. We were so close on so many occasions to utter oblivion...

[NB I'm in the UK - which would, like most of Europe, come out rather badly had the nukes started flying].

You might appreciate the seminal amateur work on that subject, 1983: Doomsday

https://althistory.fandom.com/wiki/1983:_Doomsday

It's one of the most massive collaborative world-building projects of its kind.

If by "appreciate" you mean "work out how quickly I die in that scenario" then yes :-)

[26th September 1983 was not long after my 18th birthday and a few days before I started a course at a university in the centre of Edinburgh].

Alternate history fosters systemic thinking to understand outcomes and consider how they could have been altered to create other realities. In doing so, it teaches amateur history, sociology, economics, and other subjects through the reverse-engineering of historical events, to different extents of rigor. Along the way you definitely spot interesting overlooked patterns, such as the long-lived ancient Anglo-Portuguese alliance.

It's also the basis for a lot of creative works. DeviantArt not only plays host to a ton of alternate historical maps, but flags and other graphics.

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