Post by bytor on Dec 19, 2016 3:48:55 GMT
For most of us, I would suspect, part of the attraction to making and reading alternate history is not just good fiction of the historical kind, but also what the story's timeline *differences* from reality are.
So for those of you who write AH prose, whether that's a story or that ATL's equivalent of historical non-fiction, how do you indicate those difference from OTL when you don't want to break the fourth wall?
Even for people specifically searching out AH works they might not be familiar with the details of the relevant time period so they aren't going to catch the differences for what's supposed to be historical nonfiction close to the time period of your PoD. Or perhaps your PoD was several generations or centuries ago but you're writing narrative fiction in the present when people's everyday lives are pretty much the same as ours and your story isn't about high-level enough issues that would make the differences from OTL obvious.
Also, I don't mean off-the-cuff remarks, like where a character fondly remembers the high school exchange they did for grade 11 and how they took the high-speed train from Luxembourg through Westphalia and Prussia all the way to the Livonian Confederation one holiday weekend. Or how John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, signed up to be a US Navy air cadet in order to join the US Expeditionary Force fighting alongside Japan and the Kingdom of Hawaii in Malaysia and Siam. That's not really alternate history.
What literary techniques if it's a story, or what organizational techniques if you're writing a pretend Wikipedia entry, do you use to convey the PoD and any subsequent important butterflies to your reader?
So for those of you who write AH prose, whether that's a story or that ATL's equivalent of historical non-fiction, how do you indicate those difference from OTL when you don't want to break the fourth wall?
Even for people specifically searching out AH works they might not be familiar with the details of the relevant time period so they aren't going to catch the differences for what's supposed to be historical nonfiction close to the time period of your PoD. Or perhaps your PoD was several generations or centuries ago but you're writing narrative fiction in the present when people's everyday lives are pretty much the same as ours and your story isn't about high-level enough issues that would make the differences from OTL obvious.
Also, I don't mean off-the-cuff remarks, like where a character fondly remembers the high school exchange they did for grade 11 and how they took the high-speed train from Luxembourg through Westphalia and Prussia all the way to the Livonian Confederation one holiday weekend. Or how John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth, signed up to be a US Navy air cadet in order to join the US Expeditionary Force fighting alongside Japan and the Kingdom of Hawaii in Malaysia and Siam. That's not really alternate history.
What literary techniques if it's a story, or what organizational techniques if you're writing a pretend Wikipedia entry, do you use to convey the PoD and any subsequent important butterflies to your reader?
