A Shitlib pop history youtuber who makes lowbrow “what if” slop and has been recently getting into obnoxious slap fights with random communists and anarchists on Bird-site also has far right fans? Huh
A Shitlib pop history youtuber who makes lowbrow “what if” slop and has been recently getting into obnoxious slap fights with random communists and anarchists on Bird-site also has far right fans? Huh
Robert Silverberg is a sometimes a good alt-history writer, Christman has praised him. When he's at his best he's drawing parallels between divergent ruling classes and our own. He's at his worst when he's getting deep into the idealism, like his alternate Rome that survives to the modern day because Christianity was never invented, and so the western and eastern Roman Empires never fought one another. You got it right. Alt-history guys usually don't understand materialism.
Kim Stanely Robinson wrote a pretty good alt-history novel, "Years of Rice and Salt." The premise is the black plague kills 99% of Europe, so it's a world without white people. So the whole world is split between various Chinese and Muslim states. It's a good novel because it's from the perspective of two people who keep getting reincarnated. There's a chapter where one of them is a tiger.
omg i forgot about KSR!! i love the years of rice and salt. KSR radicalized me literally my first introduction to socialism from the Mars Trilogy to that.
the only thing about the years of rice and salt is I wish we could get longer stories out of some of the short stories from the bardo group. i really, really wanted an expansion of the japanese diaspora basically arming the Iroquois with steel working, weapons and gunpowder and having political marriages
so much potential for it's own novel