Alternate History Outside Europe/U.S.?

[AdAstra]

I read Pavane by Keith Roberts, which is a set of related stories set in a Catholic England. After Queen Elizabeth is assassinated, the Spanish and others conquer England and beat the nascent protestants later. So Europe (and the rest of the world) are stuck in a steam-powered, feudal and Inquisitorial system. Quite the interesting read.

 

[Hyperspace05]

Thomas Harlan writes an interesting alternate history Sci-Fi series collectively titled "In the Time of the Sixth Sun" where the Aztec and Nippon (Japanese) empires together became the dominant force (the Mexica Empire), and eventually became a new interstellar empire in a universe with of lots of ancient and powerful races. The main character is a woman archeologist investigating artifacts on ancient worlds.

I think the books are quite interesting and well recommended:
- "Wasteland of Flint"
- "House of Reeds"
- "Land of the Dead" (just came out - I have not read it yet)

If I remember right, one of the things which causes his history to diverge from ours is that Christianity remains a small cult, so eventually the Aztec conquer Europe instead of the other way around. But that is just my simplistic recollection. Note that the books do not dwell on this history much - the setting is in the future.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Granted, I'm biased because I edited the trilogy, but I thought THE HAMMER AND THE CROSS series was fascinating. (And it didn't really take much editing!)

Okay, I ordered the first book through Amazon Marketplace. I read up on it at Wikipedia; co-authored by Tolkien-scholar Tom Shippey, so that's a point of interest in itself.

Haven't read the STARS & STRIPES books

Don't. Really. Don't.

 

[Blue_Trek]

I read book where the Confederates won the American civil war and General Lee went on to be President of The United Confederate States of America, it was very interesting.

In his last term President Lee ended slavery.
Can't remember what that book was called.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

That sounds roughly like The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove.

 

[Mistral]

Id love to see an alt history movie or book about China continuing its naval exploration and possibly finding the Americas. I dont think anyone has ever tackled that though

Actually, Poul Anderson touches on this with his Time Patrol stories, at least in part. Also, H Beam Piper in Paratime handles this and a lot stranger. One of the best alt hist writers ever.

Check out the Hugo-winning novelette by Harry Turtledove called Down In the Bottomlands. It's set in a world where the Med never filled with water. China is very important in this one.

Without Warning by John Birmingham is an alt history novel (first of a series) set in 2003 just before the Iraqi invasion and has a mysterious accident that wipes out most of the continental US. It basically deals with how the characters and the world deals with the sudden disappearance of the only super power.

I haven't read it but I have read his Axis of Time trilogy, which is an alt history WWII series where the timeline diverges after a multinatioanl naval task force (mostly US with the flagship the USS Hilary Clinton) from the not too distant future is accidentally sent back and trapped in 1941.

Um, Battle of Midway-'42.

Without Warning seemed like a hokey idea but I loved AXIS so much I gave it a chance. Result? WOW. Just WOW. Can't wait for the sequel...

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Id love to see an alt history movie or book about China continuing its naval exploration and possibly finding the Americas. I dont think anyone has ever tackled that though

Uh, given the historical evidence, there is a slight, to very good chance they did find America first.

I don't find the evidence all that convincing, but it's certainly not impossible. The fact that the Confucians at the court had issues with the Chinese navy meant they destroyed records of their accomplishments, so, if they did, it could be lost to history.

Either way, the Vikings beat them to it and I'm one who tends to lean towards the possibility of very early Europeans settling in North America as one of many migratory groups that ended up becoming Native Americans. The key would be some kind of permanent contact.

I think that's what the alternate history would be about - a China that didn't destroy her navy and turn inwards. That China would have dominated Asia all the way to Africa and would have been in close contact with European states (as well as the Ottoman Empire that buffered them). Or it could have collapsed the next day and been taken over by the Manchu, who knows (personally why I think alternate history is a waste of time beyond idle speculation).

 

[Captaindemotion]

Robert Harris' Fatherland, set in an alternate Germany of the early 1960s, where Germany won WWII (as I recall, the US stayed out of the conflict).

This theme has been explored in several novels - I think Len Deighton may have one but set in 1950s UK.

 

[Marc]

This theme has been explored in several novels - I think Len Deighton may have one but set in 1950s UK.

Yes - it was calls SS-GB.

Read if many years ago and was a bit disappointed - it's basically a dective story set against the back drop of Nazi occupied England.

 

[Trent Roman]

Thanks to everybody who was able to offer a suggestion and those who tried. A few titles to add to the short-list, anyway. Obviously not a very crowded area, and it seems we've defaulted back to Civil War/WWII already.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[Mistral]

The Gate Of Worlds by Robert Silverberg is told from a Western viewpoint(English) but takes place in a world where the Turks conquered Europe after the Black Plague killed 3/4 of Europeans instead of 1/4. The Aztecs have steamships, the Turks are in decline and the Amerindians are still going concerns. It's a bit different from the standard WWII/Civil War alt hist.

 

[captcalhoun]

i did a Trek fan-fic set in a parallel timeline where a different character to Worf winds up doing 'Parallels' and he winds up in some even more batshit universes than the MU, or 'evil Bajorans'; one is where the UFP is the British Empire and Commonwealth. basically, Britain won the American Revolution and wound up intervening in the French one and wound up taking over France and after a rebellious French general tried taking over Europe (N. Bonaparte), Britain winds up controlling all of western Europe as well as most of Africa and all of North America and a big-ass chunk of South America. They finally wind up fighting a Sino-Russian alliance in the early 20th before defeating the Japanese in the '40s. Sir Zephram Cochrane invents warp drive and the British Empire makes contact with Vulcan and winds up forming the Royal Starfleet...

the other one saw him briefly wind up on the People's Starship Enterprise, serving the Union of Soviet Socialist Planets...

 

[3D Master]

Uh, given the historical evidence, there is a slight, to very good chance they did find America first.

If true, they certainly didn't stay which is the important part

Native Americans are classified as a "Mongoloid" race, which in more modern-speak would make them ASIAN.

I'd suspect that one way or another, there may have been a Chinese influence on the North American continent. (Take a look at the Asian-looking Native people in Alaska and Canada.)

I'm not so sure about the "they certainly didn't stay" part.

That's the old from Asia theory. Modern genetics tells us Native Americans arrived from Europe some 20,000 years ago.

 

[Jono]

Without Warning by John Birmingham is an alt history novel (first of a series) set in 2003 just before the Iraqi invasion and has a mysterious accident that wipes out most of the continental US. It basically deals with how the characters and the world deals with the sudden disappearance of the only super power.

I haven't read it but I have read his Axis of Time trilogy, which is an alt history WWII series where the timeline diverges after a multinatioanl naval task force (mostly US with the flagship the USS Hilary Clinton) from the not too distant future is accidentally sent back and trapped in 1941.

Um, Battle of Midway-'42.

Without Warning seemed like a hokey idea but I loved AXIS so much I gave it a chance. Result? WOW. Just WOW. Can't wait for the sequel...

Sorry, 1942. I got it confused with the film The Final Countdown, which deals with the USS Nimitz getting transported back to the day before the attack on Pearl.

 

[Mistral]

Without Warning by John Birmingham is an alt history novel (first of a series) set in 2003 just before the Iraqi invasion and has a mysterious accident that wipes out most of the continental US. It basically deals with how the characters and the world deals with the sudden disappearance of the only super power.

I haven't read it but I have read his Axis of Time trilogy, which is an alt history WWII series where the timeline diverges after a multinatioanl naval task force (mostly US with the flagship the USS Hilary Clinton) from the not too distant future is accidentally sent back and trapped in 1941.

Um, Battle of Midway-'42.

Without Warning seemed like a hokey idea but I loved AXIS so much I gave it a chance. Result? WOW. Just WOW. Can't wait for the sequel...

Sorry, 1942. I got it confused with the film The Final Countdown, which deals with the USS Nimitz getting transported back to the day before the attack on Pearl.

I suspect Birmingham was influenced by that movie. He just did it right.

 

[Trent Roman]

That's the old from Asia theory. Modern genetics tells us Native Americans arrived from Europe some 20,000 years ago.

I don't know where you're getting your information, but as far as I know mtDNA investigations have supported the hypothesis of a single migratory wave crossing over from Berengia. Links?

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[3D Master]

That's the old from Asia theory. Modern genetics tells us Native Americans arrived from Europe some 20,000 years ago.

I don't know where you're getting your information, but as far as I know mtDNA investigations have supported the hypothesis of a single migratory wave crossing over from Berengia. Links?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2002/columbus.shtml

http://www.si.edu/encyclopedia_si/nmnh/origin.htm

http://www.atlantisquest.com/America.htmlhttp://www.atlantisquest.com/America.htmlhttp://www.atlantisquest.com/America.html

 

[Trent Roman]

Interesting if accurate (ignoring the bit about Atlantis), but I can't help but notice that most of those are not recent, or at least not as recent as the DNA work which appears to support the Berengian hypothesis, including accounting for the X haplogroup some of the other researchers were leaning on to support a European migratory model (cf. Fagundes et al.). Which isn't to say that there couldn't have also been a Solutrean migration across the Atlantic, but there's no evidence that such migrants spread throughout the Americas and were responsible for its peopling. Most likely, if such migrants did make an Atlantic crossing then they were displaced or absorbed into the mass of migrants coming from Berengia (like the hypothesized South Pacific migrants 30kya).

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[3D Master]

Interesting if accurate (ignoring the bit about Atlantis), but I can't help but notice that most of those are not recent, or at least not as recent as the DNA work which appears to support the Berengian hypothesis, including accounting for the X haplogroup some of the other researchers were leaning on to support a European migratory model (cf. Fagundes et al.). Which isn't to say that there couldn't have also been a Solutrean migration across the Atlantic, but there's no evidence that such migrants spread throughout the Americas and were responsible for its peopling. Most likely, if such migrants did make an Atlantic crossing then they were displaced or absorbed into the mass of migrants coming from Berengia (like the hypothesized South Pacific migrants 30kya).

There is plenty of evidence, most notably that the progression of tool culminating in the Clovis spear point does not correspond to Asian tools, it does however correspond to European tools.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

If true, they certainly didn't stay which is the important part

Native Americans are classified as a "Mongoloid" race, which in more modern-speak would make them ASIAN.

I'd suspect that one way or another, there may have been a Chinese influence on the North American continent. (Take a look at the Asian-looking Native people in Alaska and Canada.)

I'm not so sure about the "they certainly didn't stay" part.

That's the old from Asia theory. Modern genetics tells us Native Americans arrived from Europe some 20,000 years ago.

I'm pretty sure that's open to a bit of dispute. The best argument I've seen is that they arrived from many different directions. In other words, there were both European immigrants and asian immigrants. I thought it was through arrowhead analysis, not DNA analysis that the European theory originated (the genetic analysis opens up too many perils because no one knows if anyone has intermarried anymore). The timeline doesn't add up for the Bering strait, though, so that's no longer accepted as the sole origin for migration.

EDIT: I see this was addressed. This type of arrowhead appears to have spread east to west (and by east to west, from France to Arizona), but that doesn't mean that their culture survived. I do believe that they came from three methods - across the Bering straight, via boat from Asia and via boat from Europe.