Top 5 Posts from June 2016

Most viewed map from June 2016.

So June was fourth highest month in terms of page views. Not bad. Lets take a look at the articles that got us to that point:

1) The Limits of Nazi Germany by Chris Nuttall.

2) Weekly Update #235! 1066 Turned Upside Down Coming Later This Summer and More by Matt Mitrovich.

3) The Inevitability of Tragedy or: How Alternate History tends towards Misery by Alex Wallace.

4) The Audio File: 5 Year Anniversary Special by Sam McDonald.

5) The Secret Alternate History of Earth 2 by Ben Ronning.

Fun fact: all these posts happened within the first 8 days of June.

* * *

Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger for Amazing Stories, a volunteer interviewer for SFFWorld and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not exploring alternate timelines he enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the day when travel between parallel universes becomes a reality. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

The Secret Alternate History of Earth 2

Guest post by Ben Ronning.

First and foremost, I would like to congratulate Alternate History Weekly Update and Matt Mitrovich on the website’s fifth anniversary. It has been my pleasure to contribute to it and I was flattered when Matt asked me if I wanted to write a guest post for the anniversary. For those that remember my previous posts to The Update, I wrote “Alternate History and Superheroes” three years ago, which explored the occasional intersection between the superhero and alternate history. I return to that well because we saw such an intersection in the second season CW’s The Flash. If you are familiar with the history of the Scarlet Speedster, you would know that the concepts of time travel and the multiverse are deeply entwined with the character. The first season of the show primarily dealt with time travel, the second season introduced parallel Earths with Earth-2, and the as-of-yet unnumbered Earth from the Supergirl series when the shows crossed for last March.

For those curious about the show, I will refrain from spoiling important plot points from both seasons wherever I can, and focus on the parts that relate to speculation of the alternate history of the Earth-2 seen in the television series. From what the episode, “Welcome to Earth-2” has show us despite being more technologically advanced than Earth-1 (based on the real world), Earth is aesthetically similar to the 1920s and 30s in terms of fashion and architecture. However, there is much to suggest that the history of Earth-2 is much more different than ours.  Most of this speculation comes from throwaway comments made by various characters in the show, I have my doubts that the producers and writers of the show made an extensive history for this world.

The most important comment was Jay Garrick’s (played by Teddy Sears) iconic helmet belonging to his father, who fought in the “War of the Americas.” From that I can extrapolate two possibilities. The most obvious one is that the United States of Earth-2 fought a war against the Mexico and/or Canada in their late 1970s or early 1980s.  Another possibility is that the North America from Earth-2 is a classic “Balkanized America” trope where several smaller states take the place of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. I find the latter possibility more like as a later episode mentioned a “Royal Bank” in Earth-2’s version of Central City. From that I extrapolate that perhaps Thirteen Colonies from Earth-2 avoided their break from mother Britain.

The United... Kingdoms of America?

In the interest of length, I will make broad strokes when it comes to constructing the alternate history of Earth-2, hence will refrain from referencing individuals unless necessary. This essay will largely focus on North America as my intent is elaborate on “War of the Americas” mentions in-show. Comments made by characters from that parallel world confirm that the fabled city of Atlantis not only existed, but never sank. Therefore it is still accessible to the outside world. Its presence alone would have a point of divergence going back thousands of years. For the sake of argument, I will assume that the nation-state trades with Europe prior to the 18th century, but does not involve itself in the continent’s affairs. Onward, to the Americas!

For the thirteen colonies to remain loyal to the crown, we will need to remove some of the causes of the American Revolution in our timeline, and presumably the timeline of CW’s Earth-1. To this end I would say that perhaps the Intolerable Acts and the Quebec Act of 1774, which extended Quebec’s border to the Ohio River and shut out the other colonies from westward expansion. Another factor would be the Great Britain’s reaction to the colonists’ demands. Suppose Parliament decided to give the colonies a degree of autonomy and an earlier version of “peace, order, and good government” similar to OTL’s British North America Act of 1867. Each colony gets its own legislature and British North America exists as a loose confederation of kingdoms until the early 19th century.

This would have effects in Europe as the expenses incurred by French assistance in the American Revolutionary War contributed to the fall of the House of Bourbon during the French Revolution. So it is more likely that the Bourbons remain in power without a costly war to drain the treasury, but the population still simmers with discontent. Without the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte remains an obscure figure and the Napoleonic wars never happen, thus the Holy Roman Empire stays intact (for the moment) and Spain holds on to her colonies.

However, the first rumblings of discontent come when United Kingdom passes the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. While the legislatures of the northern kingdoms, including Virginia, pass similar laws while the southern kingdoms refuse. Meanwhile, American encroachment on Spanish Louisiana also creates tension between the Spanish and British empires as well as right of navigation of the Mississippi River. The slaveholding class begins its rebellion against the British crown, aided by Spain and France, but erupts into open hostility when the southern legislatures declare their independence from the United Kingdom in 1835 as the Union of American Republics, thus begins the North American War. Britain and her allies (let’s say the Netherlands and Portugal) win, and gain more territory. Britain and her North American kingdoms gain all Spanish territory north of the 36th parallel along with Florida, Hispaniola, and much of the French Caribbean, the Netherlands gains French Guiana, and the Portugese colony, Brazil gains more territory from Spain.

The most direct consequence of the North American War, or The Planter’s Rebellion, is that the constituent kingdoms of British North America gain a collective sense of identity. As such, they reorganize into the United Kingdoms of America via act of Parliament in 1837 with a member of the House of Hanover as Viceroy of America.

Brave New Continent and the Nations That Inhabit It

With their loss in the North American War and the expenses incurred, many of the problems that plagued the French come to roost for the Bourbons and the kingdom’s nobles. Assuming that the ideas of the French Enlightenment evolve even without the revolution, France’s dire economic straits and a possible poor harvest are enough to ferment a revolt against the King, who refuses to abdicate citing the “divine right of kings.” The descendants of the enlightenment become more radical and despite the initial support from the third estate, its anti-religious views cause it to lose some support. The radicals attempt to create their own republic and France finds itself embroiled in unrest for several decades. People seeking to flee the unrest immigrate to the New World. Some move to the Kingdom of Quebec in the United Kingdoms of America while some nobles flee farther south.

While the North American War battered Spain, it managed to hold on into its New World possessions, but finds itself facing a new conundrum. Members of the defeated slaveholding class from the former Union of American Republics settle in what is today Texas with their slaves. New Spain also opens its doors to the French nobles fleeing and increasing radical France. The two groups (Anglo-Saxon Protestants and French Catholics) initially distrust each other, but generations of bitterness over what they lost and intermarriage create a white-supremacist society like S.M. Stirling’s Draka, but technologically arrested. The latter half of the 19th century is one of relative peace. The United Kingdoms of America expands and prominent cities like Central City, Keystone City, and Starling City dot the expansive nation with the construction of a transcontinental railroad as one of the nation’s great projects.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom of Quebec, fearful of Anglo domination and influenced by radical immigrants from the French Civil War petition both the American and British Parliaments for separate dominion status within the Empire. They narrowly achieve it, but the Empire is concerned with the Bleus, who are making noise about their irridentist claims on the kingdoms north of the Ohio. The butterfly effect also changes Russian designs for their empire in the New World. While Britain and the United Kingdoms of America claim the Pacific Northwest and northern California in our timeline, Russia successfully creates colonies at Fort Ross and what is OTL Victoria, British Columbia. Relations between the two powers remain tense, war does not break out until this timeline’s equivalent of the California Gold Rush. After a negotiated peace, Russia cedes its Ross colony to the British, who delegate administration of the territory of United Kingdoms of America with the Columbia River as the southern boundary of the Alaska Oblast.

After the discovery of oil in the New Spanish province of Tejas, the upper class begin their war for independence from an increasingly feeble Spain, resulting in the death knell of the centuries-old Spanish Empire. A grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte, who served as a senior officer in the French Army during North American War and whose Royalist son fled to New Spain during the French Civil War, inherited his grandfather’s military prowess and becomes the acknowledged “founding father” of the Empire of Tejas. Seeing himself as a latter-day Julius Caesar, the alt-Napoleon III, has his own ambitions for formerly-Spanish America and begins his own program of modernization, albeit with slavery intact.

The Road to the War of the Americas

The world itself might have avoided a war on the scale of OTL’s World War I, but it only delayed the inevitable. The French majority of the Kingdom of Quebec decides to break formal ties with the British Empire and declares itself a Republic. While the British Empire are slow to recognize the independence of the fledgling Quebecois Republic, they maintain trade and somewhat frosty diplomatic relations despite concerns towards their treatment of their anglophone minority. Meanwhile, in the wake of the collapse of Spanish rule in the New World, the British and United Kingdoms of America assumed joint-administration of Nicaragua with the intentions of building a canal, which brought them into conflict with Tejas. The Tejans, despite never having actually held the territory, claim all of former Spanish America as their version of Manifest Destiny and start rattling sabers until open hostilities break out after the canal’s completion. Tejas loses the Nicaraguan War, which strikes a blow to Tejan pride and blunts their territorial ambitions.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the lack of the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848 mean that OTL Germany and Italy did not become unitary states by 1914. Thus three states divided Germany amongst themselves. Prussia more or less occupies the most of the north and eastern territories of the region while southern kingdoms like Bavaria exist in a loose confederation with the increasingly multi-ethnic and liberal Danubian Confederation. Britain, with the House of Hanover producing male heirs due to the butterfly effect, consolidates their hold on the Kingdom of Hanover and bring it into closer union. Prussia, having adapted the radical ideals of this timeline’s French Revolution and subsequent civil war to their own reactionary ends, has designs for a greater Germany. As such, an intricate alliance system forms with OTL adversaries Prussia and France becoming allies. Desiring a chance at revenge Tejas allies itself with Prussia in hopes regaining lost pride and perhaps some territory. Quebec, having regained affection for their “French brothers” aligns with France. With Prussian and French investment, the two countries rapidly modernize their economies and militaries.

Alaska remains a quiet corner of the continent though American settlers trickle in faster than Russian settlers after several gold rushes and the populace of the colony agitates for greater autonomy as such. The Russian Empire itself modernizes much more quickly with British and American investment, though still lags compared to the rest of Europe and North America. This timeline’s version of Alexander II emancipated the serfs and avoids assassination. Though still an autocrat in Russia proper, he still makes Alaska an autonomous oblast with the empire along with representative government that becomes the template for the future Imperial Eurasian Federation.

The World War breaks out in 1942, between the Dual Alliance of France/Prussia and the Concord of Britain/Danubian Confederation with their respective junior allies, including the Ottoman Empire on the side of the Alliance. Tejas and Quebec honor their obligations and jointly attack the United Kingdoms of America for force the British Empire to fight on two fronts. Much like OTL World War I it results in a stalemate in Europe, but the war in the Americas is a different matter altogether. Though the Tejan/Quebecois invasion of the United Kingdoms caught the Americans by surprise and forces them into a two-front war, the United Kingdoms bring their superior industrial base and higher population to bear on their opponents. While the first years of the conflict result in a bloody stalemate and trench warfare on both fronts, the Americans make a breakthrough on the southern front and make their drive into the Tejan heartland.

With the war going poorly for Tejas and facing slave revolts, Emperor Louis Bonaparte grows increasingly erratic. An incident where a Tejan warship sinks a Alaskan merchant vessel in American waters results in the Tejan emperor insulting a Russian diplomat, and his refusal to apologize prompts the previously neutral Russia to declare war on the Alliance. With Allied help drying up, the Tejan and Quebecois war effort collapses, and both sue for peace.

The peace in North America is as harsh as the Treaty of Versailles with the United Kingdoms of America imposing demilitarized zones adjacent to the St. Lawrence and the Tejan border with territorial concessions, reparations, and limitations on their militaries.

The Flashpoint

Here is where I will inject some familiar DC characters into the mix; while the United Kingdoms of America emerged from the World War as the undisputed power in North America, Tejas and Quebec have not forgotten their humiliating defeat. Reparations have crippled both economies and chronic slave uprisings led to instability in the Tejan empire. However, market crashes in London, Metropolis, and Vienna lead to the Long Depression that lasts from the 1960s and into the 70s. Hyperinflation exacerbates the instability on the continent. The 1950s saw the rise of Gerard Shugel (known as the Ultra-Humanite in the comics) whose vast intellect and scientific prowess secured him a prominent role in Louis Napoleon II’s cabinet as his Minister of Science. However, his ambitions go beyond a mere cabinet position.

Through guile and intrigue, he sways many government officials and generals into executing a “secret coup” where Shugel implants his consciousness into the the body of the Tejan heir, the future Louis Napoleon III, and quietly assassinate Louis Napoleon II. Now with the resources of an entire nation behind him, the self-styled “Ultra-Humanite” begins his plans for world conquest. With the United Kingdoms of America distracted by labor unrest and a sluggish economy, the Ultra-Humanite begins a covert military buildup and several weapons programs, including mind-control techniques and rockets, for peaceful purposes like quelling slave riots,  of course. He also secures alliances with an ultranationalist and irridentist Quebec as well as quietly stoke discontent and rivalries across the New World, though he eyes them for later conquest. On July 28, 1974, Tejas and Quebec attack the United Kingdoms and begin the War of the Americas.

Rockets rain down on American cities while Tejan and Quebecois make their blitzkreg and advance quickly into in UKA territory. However, as the case was for the Confederate States of Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191, neither power is able to quickly knock the giant down. American Prime Minister Terrence Sloane refuses to give into their demands for surrender. With their industrial heartland still intact and the geniuses like Theodore Knight and Robert Crane, the Americans reverse engineer much of the Ultra-Humanite’s technology, including their own rockets and nuclear weapons. It takes years, but the United Kingdoms of America fire their own nuclear-armed rockets at Quebec City and Louisville (OTL Dallas, Texas.) Tactical use of these weapons on the battlefield also cause the enemy’s war efforts to collapse. When American forces march into the Tejan capital of Calhoun, they find the body of the Ultra-Humanite, but with his brain missing from his body. The government claims that he is dead, but fear that he transferred his consciousness to a new host and thus hide the truth from the populace.

The War of the Americas ends in 1980. However, the United Kingdoms of America permanently occupy a rump Quebec and dismember the former Tejas into smaller, much more manageable states. One of the most immediate effects is the rapid advance of technology in the wake of the war, despite the retro 1920s aesthetic, the United Kingdoms of Earth-2 are slightly more advanced than its Earth-1 counterpart. Notes left by Ultra-Humanite inspire new scientists, among them Harrison Wells, who establishes STAR Labs in 1991. The world is at peace once more until a particle accelerator experiment in 2012 goes awry and creates a phenomenon known as metahumans, including the murderous speedster known only as Zoom. It is Zoom who rallies (and in most cases coerces under pain of death) this world’s metahumans and begins his reign of terror. The world’s only hope is a mysterious helmeted vigilante who calls himself “The Flash,” but even he is not able to stop Zoom until the skies begin to open.

In Conclusion

As you can see, this scenario omits several details. Notably a more nuanced look at European events without the Napoleonic Wars and how it would shape the continent’s future. While I have made reference to a Danubian Confederation as a reorganized Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire’s evolution into the Imperial Eurasian Federation, they were mostly passing references while I focused on North America. Africa and Asia likewise get neglected, which brings up the question of which divergent colonial empires arise. For example, Japan avoided falling under foreign domination as India, China, and every place in between did in the 19th century. Were they that fortunate on Earth-2? None of this does not take the presence of Atlantis into account, which could have far-reaching impacts as to how the fabled landmass would interact with the rest of the world.

That only proves the rich potential of alternate history within the Arrowverse. The Flash’s Earth-2 provides a rare opportunity for alternate historians to speculate. I do not claim to speak for the producers of Arrow, Flash, Legends of Tomorrow and now Supergirl, so I cannot authoritatively say that this is the history of Earth-2. However, they made went the extra mile to make it a distinct world from Earth-1. As an alternate history aficionado, I can hope that perhaps we could see more of this particular Earth-2 in print form, but after the season 2 finale of Flash, I doubt that we that world in greater detail in the show’s third season.

But a fan can dream, can’t he?

* * *

Ben “Pyro” Ronning is the author as-of-yet unpublished superhero fiction with a deep affinity for alternate history. His current works in progress are Archetype Academy and Beyond Imagination. He is currently not maintaining a blog, but plans his triumphant return to the blogosphere.

Genesis Does What Nintendon’t. The Alternate Console Wars, Part Two

Guest post Ben Ronning.

I openly admit that I am more a child of the nineteen-nineties and my own nostalgia for the decade likely colors my judgment when I reflect upon the fourth generation of video game. Some call it the “16-Bit Wars” and for good reason. Despite its failure to gain a foothold during the previous generation, Sega finally managed to challenge the seemingly invincible Nintendo and almost brought the giant to its knees. Yet the company itself made some questionable decisions--notably creating peripherals like the Sega CD and 32X to extend the life cycle of the aging Genesis. However, intra-company rivalries between the Japanese and American branches also played a role in the company’s downfall, giving the narrative the air of a biblical parable or a Shakespearean tragedy.

As former Sega president Tom Kalinske said in an interview with Sega-16:

“In hindsight, I think there probably was. I don’t believe there was from 1991-1993. I think somewhere in the mid ’90s, ’94 or ’95, they built up a great deal of resentment, and I didn’t realize it at the time, until probably the latter part of 1995, when one of my colleagues in Japan, who I knew well and had a good relationship with, said to me something to the effect of “you don’t understand how browbeat and annoyed the Japanese executives here are because of your success. Every meeting we go into, Nakayama asks us why can’t you do things the way the Americans and Europeans did? Why aren’t you guys as successful as they are? We’ve been around longer.” I think the local executives didn’t appreciate that he’d take that tone with them. Apparently, he also beat them up over Sonic, which was never as successful in Japan as it was in the U.S. and Europe (to this day, that’s the case), and I think he was always throwing that in their faces too. So clearly, by late ’95 there was great resentment built up: jealously, resentment, and kind of a desire to get back at those Americans that Nakayama kept throwing in their faces.”

What few people realize is that Sega and Sony could have released what would have become the PlayStation as a joint venture, but Sega of Japan rejected the idea in the belief that, “Sony doesn't know how to make hardware.” Similarly, Silicon Graphics, the company that designed the CPU for the Nintendo 64, approached Sega first, but again, Sega of Japan vetoed the idea. Ultimately, it was the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 that felled the Sega Saturn during the fifth generation, which contributed to the fall of the Dreamcast in the sixth.

Nintendo was not without its hubris as well. Many gamers are aware of the origins of the Sony PlayStation; the company originally partnered with Nintendo to produce a CD peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The company also built a prototype PlayStation, which was effectively a SNES with a CD-ROM drive attached. However, problems arose over the issue of royalties. Sony wanted the royalties from any CD-based games produced for the system while Nintendo would take royalties from cartridge-based games. As such, Nintendo broke their deal with Sony to partner with their competitor, Phillips after Sony announced the SNES-CD as CES 1991. Ultimately, nothing came out of Nintendo’s partnership with Phillips, aside from games that received derision from the fans, and Sony became Nintendo’s chief competitor.

Cronus Invictus by Thande is one of the more popular video game alternate histories on AH.com despite its comparative shortness and over four years of inactivity. Every once in a blue moon when the cows practice their high jumps, a random poster will try to revive the thread no avail. Video game history in Invictus diverges when Hiroshi Yamauchi, President and Chairman of Nintendo at the time, reads the contract made with Sony and both party manage to renegotiate the terms and Nintendo and Sony release the SNES-CD, dubbed the “Super CD”, add-on in 1993. However, there are some interesting deviations that occur before the release.

If you are a Sonic fan, then chances are you are aware of the Simon Wai Prototype of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 where incomplete levels (notably the Hidden Palace Zone, and to a lesser extent, the Wood Zone) intrigued fans for well over a decade. Hidden Palace, as well as the never-completed Genocide City Zone, made it to the final product. Thande even references the time travel element that ultimately went to Sonic CD being reworked into a teleportation gimmick for the Hidden Palace boss. Additionally, Sega produced Sonic games based on the 1993 “SatAM” animated series and the UK-published Sonic the Comic. However, the timeline is not a complete Sega wank, despite what the title would suggest. Atari comes roaring back with the Cougar, marketed towards young adults and NEC still continues with its PC Engine/TurboGraphix line.

To my relief, the disastrous 32X never saw release and Sega instead released the Radical as the 32-bit enhanced Sega CD add-on as their response to the SNES CD. However, Thande stopped work on the timeline before he could elaborate on the next generation aside from vague rumblings of Sega’s Project Saturn and Nintendo’s Project Reality, which became the Nintendo 64 in our timeline, thought the timeline’s title implies whose system triumphs. Cronus Invictus, though inactive, serves as the template for other timelines to wax the nostalgic about what games could have been.

Player Two Start, a joint timeline by Nivek and RySenkari, is one such timeline that uses the same premise as Cronus Invictus. Nintendo and Sony produce the SNES-CD, but builds on the format by writing it in the form of fictional articles, quotes, and reviews. The pair also goes into greater detail into the content of the games, notably the sequel to Super Mario World where they list the themes of the various worlds and the nature of the boss battles. To give you an idea of how enhanced the SNES-CD is in Player Two Start, the author states that the fictional system is more powerful than the Neo Geo AES, the most powerful system at the time. The link provided should give you an idea of the graphical capabilities of the SNES-CD in this timeline, which is to say amazing considering the graphical power of a non-enhanced SNES and Genesis. Thus far, Player Two Start has only reached 1993 but the timeline is still ongoing, but considering how updates can be months apart, it may be a while before we see the next installment. However, with the cliffhanger the latest installment ends on, I am certain it will be worth the wait. 

And lastly, we come to Beyond the Genesis by Confortius, which I recommend because of my shameless partiality towards Sega. Like Player Two Start its format is partly reviews, but it is most mostly descriptions of games that could have been and bits of news. Sega avoids the damage caused by the intra-company rivalries by focusing its next-generation system uses the Silicon Graphics’ SGI MIPS4000i in lieu on its efforts with the Sega CD and 32X. While I do not find Beyond the Genesis as immersive as Player Two Start, there are enough surprises to raise a few eyebrows. For those who were addicted to Pokemon as children in the late nineties, expect a bigger grudge match between Pokemon and Digimon with Sega’s merger with Bandai, which collapsed in our timeline.

However, video game alternate histories are ultimately a niche subject. Despite the industry having its fair share of big personalities and corporate intrigue (as the Nintendo/Sony debacle had shown us), writing a novel-length story on an alternate console war would be a challenge to say least. It is definitely possible but highly improbable, so write them? As the aforementioned beta version of Sonic 2 has shown us, the incomplete levels made fans curious about what could have been. The inclusion of a revamped Hidden Palace Zone for the iOS/Android releases of the game finally gave us an answer. If Tim Pratt could win a Hugo Award for a short story featuring a video store from an alternate timeline, why now video games?

Get cracking, fellow gamers-cum-alternate historians.

* * *

Aspiring writer and platypus enthusiast Ben Ronning has lurked the AH.com boards since June 2006. When he is not roaming the multiverse, he can be found at his blog, Thoughts of a Platypus.

Game Over, Continue? The Alternate Console Wars, Part One

Guest post Ben Ronning.

No one can argue that video games have not made an impact on popular culture worldwide. What started as a primitive electronic version of table tennis has blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry whose releases rival Hollywood blockbusters in terms of hype and anticipation. The medium itself has been a childhood staple for Generation Xers, and Millennials like myself who made blowing dust from our cartridges a ritual (before I learned that the enzymes in my saliva slowly corroded the pin.) I recently purchased a Nintendo Wii U and I could not help but appreciate the fact that such an action would have appalled my younger self twenty years ago.

You see, dear reader, I was born in 1984 and the great 16-Bit Wars waged by Nintendo and then-rival Sega is a vivid memory to me. Back in Christmas of 1993, my parents bought me a Sega Game Gear and a Genesis (better known as the Mega Drive on the opposite sides of the Pacific and Atlantic) the year after. I was an avid fan of Sega and joined their camp in a war waged on the schoolyards across North America. My birth year is also an important touchstone for the industry, because that is year the industry collapsed, toppling the titan known as Atari and bringing the second generation of video games to a close. Atari’s fall brings up an interesting question: “what would have happened if the market did not collapse in 1983-4?” As does the final fall of Sega fifteen years later where the company bowed out of the hardware market to focus on becoming a third-party game developer. Could Sega have prevented it?

To answer the former question: Atari’s ability to prevent the crash depended on a number of factors. First and foremost, is that Atari’s corporate policy did not allow its employees to take credit for the games they programmed. Many programmers, such as David Crane, creator of Pitfall, left the company to form their own studios. Unfortunately, the rise of third-party developers led to a loss of quality control, which deluged the market with sub par games. Unfortunately, Atari also overhyped games that underperformed such as the infamous E.T. The Extraterrestrial and 2600 adaptation of Pac-Man. Atari produced 12 million cartridges despite having sold on 10 million 2600 consoles at the time, which resulted in the now-confirmed burial of the surplus carts. Several other companies like Mattel, Coleco, Bally, and Fairchild produced their own systems that varied in quality. Unfortunately, as noted by TV Tropes, the wide array of choices hindered their ability to succeed in the long term.

“Dirty Laundry: An Alternate 80s” by Andrew T manages to create such a scenario where the video game industry avoids the crash of 1983. While the timeline focuses on pop culture in general, Atari plays a significant part. How did Atari survive the crash? By building a better version of E.T. based on Steven Spielberg’s vision for the game, which he imagined as similar to Pac-Man. (So does that mean we swap Power Pellets for Reese’s Pieces?) Warner Communications, which then owned Atari, CEO, Steve Ross ordered Ray Kassar to replace Howard Scott Warshaw, the programmer of the game in our timeline, with Carla Meninsky over a matter of two hundred grand plus expenses. The game itself becomes the best-selling title for the 2600. Still, despite this aversion, Mattel and Coleco both bow out of the console wars as they did in ours.

However, one other interesting consequence is that Nintendo partnered with Atari to distribute the Famicom in territories outside of Japan. It was something that nearly happened in real life until Jack Trammel killed the deal in 1984. In terms of the games Nintendo produced, such as the iconic Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, very little would have changed. However, in terms of hardware, the mention of non-volatile random access memory in one post possibly means that players would possibly be able to save their game data on the cartridge itself. That means gamers in North America would not need to use lengthy passwords for games like Metroid and Kid Icarus. The long-term repercussions of a successful Atari/Nintendo partnership are still unknown.

One of the main reasons Nintendo dominated the industry in the late eighties and early nineties are its restrictive policies towards developers that prevented them from releasing games for competing systems. This “quality control” (though reviewers like an infamous nerd with anger issues would argue otherwise) allowed Nintendo to prevent another deluge of shovelware that plagued the previous generation with its lockout chip, though companies such as Tengen (Atari Games) and Wisdom Tree managed to bypass it. Nintendo also enacted strict censorship on the games it published. As noted by Douglas Crockford, Nintendo was quite selective in the language used in their games. Would the partnership be less restrictive in its policies towards third-party companies? Perhaps. Nintendo would have a captive Japanese market but Atari’s attempts to stem third party software were flimsy at best. If Nintendo still controlled the production of the cartridges, then I would not see a significant change in that respect.

The largest flaw I see with "Dirty Laundry" is that it only half complete and thus has not fully explored the implications of a video game market without the crash. While Andrew T confirms that Mattel bows out of the race and Coleco remains on its trajectory towards bankruptcy as it did in our timeline, there is little mention of any video game platforms to challenge Atari/Nintendo outside of the Intellivision III, now produced by Tandy. The platform itself boasts a Motorola 68000 processor (the same chip used by the Mega Drive/Genesis) with wireless controllers and boasts the ability to display 3D graphics for the low, low price of $599.99 plus tax. Andrew T leaves the system’s fate to the reader’s imagination, but it probably went the same route of another technically superior system with a similar price point in the nineties. Still, polygonal graphics still have the potential to be a game changer that could affect the next generation of consoles, particularly the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and the successor to the Atari Nintendo System, but will need to wait a while. Andrew T last updated last May so the next update may take weeks perhaps even months. I recommend giving the thread a look; if not for the video games, then do it for pop culture in general. You will not regret it.

Alas, there are only a few pop culture alternate histories with a point of divergence predating 1982. Brainbin’s "That Wacky Redhead" focuses on video games a handful of times but it is only a sideshow to the larger cultural and even political trends. However, there are a few elements I liked, notably that a licensed Star Trek arcade game was one of Syzygy’s (as Atari is known as in that timeline) earliest hits. It also appears that several genres that rose to prominence in the nineties, like fighting and adventure games, became popular earlier with a fighting game with Bruce Lee as its main character and an adaptation of Mission Impossible as the template for adventure games. As with "Dirty Laundry", it appears that with greater emphasis on creating a quality product will mean that the market will not crash in "That Wacky Redhead". While the eighties were formative for the fledgling industry, I believe that the console wars of the next decade set the tone for the industry and its players as well as provide fertile ground for alternate historians.

Next up, Genesis Does What Nintendon’t…

* * *

Aspiring writer and platypus enthusiast Ben Ronning has lurked the AH.com boards since June 2006. When he is not roaming the multiverse, he can be found at his blog, Thoughts of a Platypus.

DBWI Writing Contest Winners

So it took me a while to get to this point, but I am now ready to announce the winners of the Double-Blind What If Writing Contest! Just to remind you all, this contest had three categories: fiction, non-fiction and reviews. Sadly there were no entries in the review category, which disappoints me since I thought there was really some room for imaginative works. Nevertheless we had some great entries and its time we end the suspense and announce the winners.

First up is the fiction category. I defined fiction as two or more characters interacting with each other. The entries that came under this category are:

Chronicles of the Socialist Republic by Dimas Aditya Hanandito
Eckener Topic of Discussion at Yearly WTW Conference by Zach Anderson.
Midterm Exam, History 412: Modern North America, 1847-Present by Kyle Owenby
The President That Never Was: A DBWI Alternate History by Tyler “tbguy1992” Bugg
Travaillis Republique Democratique Never Existed by Sean Sherman.

And the winner is...Midterm Exam, History 412: Modern North America, 1847-Present by Kyle Owenby!

Finally, we get to the non-fiction category, or the essay category. While these works are fictional in the sense that they are set in the alternate history, I differentiated them from the entries above because there is no interaction between numerous characters. Instead you just have an author speaking to an imaginary audience in the form of an essay/article/etc. With that in mind, the entries in this category are:

Coronation Special: Looking back at the Anglo-Dutch Civil War by Matthew Tuck
Worlds Apart: What if Marvel Never Merged With DC? by Ben Ronning

And the winner is...Worlds Apart: What if Marvel Never Merged With DC? by Ben Ronning!

Congrats to both of our winners. I will be contacting you shortly about receiving your prize. Thank you to everyone who participated, they were all excellent submissions and I wish I could reward you all for your hard work. Meanwhile, I know there were few people who were working on submissions, but missed the deadline. If you are still looking for a place to publish your story, feel free to contact me at ahwupdate at gmail dot com.

I have some upcoming contests planned, but I want to give everyone a breather so I do not overload you guys with competition like I did earlier in the year. I do recommend, however, that cartographers out there consider what they might like to submit to The Update in the near future...

* * *

Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a blogger on Amazing Stories. His new story "The Enchanted Bean" can be found in Once Upon a Clockwork Tale from Echelon Press. When not writing he works as an attorney, enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

Worlds Apart: What if Marvel Never Merged With DC? by Ben Ronning

Entry for the DBWI Writing Contest.

It is almost impossible to imagine what the DC universe would look like if you did not see Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark attending the same cocktail parties or Spider-Man slinging with the Teen Titans yet such ideas would have been inconceivable thirty-five years ago. Marvel Comics seemingly brought DC, the giant that survived the moral panic that shut many of its competitors down in the fifties, to its knees in the sixties, struggled to stay afloat in the seventies, and vanished completely by the dawn of the eighties. Interestingly, Marvel’s demise did not come from the quality of its product but from deteriorating market and lack of editorial direction. The departure of Roy Thomas as editor-in-chief in 1973 left a gaping void within the company since there was no senior management to groom any replacement, which led to a revolving door of editor-in-chiefs and missed deadlines that came to a stop when Marvel’s parent company, Cadence Industries, suspended operations in 1981 and sold its assets to Warner Communications in 1983 in what many in the industry called a coup. However, the question of comic book aficionados and alternate historians is, “what if a more capable editor took the reins of Marvel Comics in the late seventies?” Would Marvel Comics still be in existence, and who could have been up to the task? One only needs to look to Jim Shooter for the answer.

Shooter was already something of a legend in the industry because he was the teenage prodigy who wrote the adventures of the Legion of Super-Heroes in Adventure Comics from 1966 to 1970. He had left the industry by time he reached maturity and despite a few brief forays throughout the seventies, he did not return to the fold until after Marvel had collapsed. By this time, several other professionals like Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, and Jim Starlin grew dissatisfied with DC’s policies towards freelancers who saw no benefits or royalties for the characters they had created. Shooter seized on this opportunity to attract these disaffected creators and exploit the burgeoning direct market by forming Epic Comics, which promised creators royalties should their title reach certain sales benchmark or if their if the character crossed over into licensed mediums like action figures and animated series. Had Shooter worked for Marvel in the late seventies it is likely that rising titles like Claremont’s X-Men would have possibly reached greater heights had the company not imploded. Many comic book historians and even Claremont himself admitted that The Outcasts was essentially a continuation of X-Men run but never regained its predecessor’s momentum. Even Frank Miller revealed that he meant for his hard-boiled revival of the Golden Age Daredevil to be a re-imagining of his Marvel namesake, which begs the question if Marvel missed out on a renaissance and what could have been if former Marvel staples like Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Thor remained with their mother company?

No doubt a revitalized Marvel would have had a ripple effects on its main competitor, DC Comics. While Epic’s titles enjoyed critical acclaim and robust sales, the company could not challenge the DC juggernaut, especially after the relaunch of several former Marvel titles (which all took place on Earth-4) reeled in old “Marvel Zombies.” However, sales became relatively stagnant in the mid to late eighties, as DC remained more or less complacent without any major competitors. Declining sales forced DC to completely reboot its entire line when Alan Moore, who ironically rose to prominence for his work on a character named Marvelman in the United Kingdom, destroyed the old DC Multiverse and folded all the characters in Twilight of the Superheroes in 1987. Would a viable Marvel forced a major change earlier? In my opinion, it would have. Many editors and writers complained that the concept of multiple universes was confusing with a Justice League on one earth, a Justice Society with older counterparts or copies on another earth, an evil “mirror universe” version of the Justice League on another, the Avengers on yet another, and so forth. A viable Marvel would have likely prompted such a drastic change perhaps two or three years before Twilight hit the shops and the newsstands of our world yet I will not complain as the event streamlined the DC line and renewed interest in its homegrown characters.

However, the liquidation of Cadence Industries in 1986 indicates that the company would have sold Marvel to a new owner but to who would be a good question. Take News Corporation’s acquisition of Epic Comics in 1992 as an example. Superheroes became big business in Hollywood in the wake of Batman’s blockbuster outing in 1989 and the buildup to James Cameron’s Spider-Man in the winter of 1993 after the massive success of Terminator 2 two years prior. Though Shooter had guided Epic with a steady hand for the better part of a decade, his dictatorial methods as an editor eventually alienated most of the industry’s talent. Alan Moore even sardonically compared Shooter to Hitler after his very public fallout with Epic in the late eighties. With sales declining in the early nineties, Shooter’s partners ousted him from the company and accepted News Corps’ buyout after a failed bid by Ron Perelman. Whereas Warner Bros. and DC touted Spider-man and the slightly darker Batman as family entertainment, 20^th Century Fox wanted to bring the genre to the 18-34 demographic and gave Frank Miller free reign over the line. Many comic book fans view Frank Miller as one of the godfathers of deconstruction alongside Alan Moore but where the body of Moore work was both intellectual and subtle, Miller had all the refinement of a sledgehammer. Sentinels (based off of the Charlton characters Epic acquired in 1988) was the “forbidden fruit” of my generation because of the gratuitous violence and overt sexuality ostensibly meant for adults also titillated teenage boys by the hundreds of thousands and spawned countless imitators. Fans recollect the Epic Comics of this period as poorly written, extremely lowbrow, and almost absurdly horrendous portrayal of the human anatomy, which makes it a popular source of Internet memes to this day. It is hard not to find someone wearing a shirt with the infamous “Answer the Motherf***in Question!!!” panel silk-screened on it at a comic convention today.

Epic’s content drew ire from the usual suspects; evangelists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson called it “pornography” peddled to corrupt the morals of “Today’s” youth and found unlikely allies in the feminist movement who decried Miller’s treatment of women in the books. (An allegation that is impossible to dispute considering how Nightshade’s costume was essentially duct tape placed over her breasts and genitals.) Miller was defiant in the face of his detractors when he publicly criticized parents for not paying enough attention to what their kids were buying and that he was not their “godd**n babysitter.” The growing public furor raised interest in Epic Comics with Sentinels continuing to sell in the neighborhood of one million copies each issue and raised the profile of the film adaptation in the short term. Video games also came under intense scrutiny over the intense violence in games such as Mortal Kombat, and this combine Epic’s continued defiance towards its created the perfect storm that led to the moral crusades by the alliance of the Moral Majority, women’s, and parents’ groups. The nationwide boycott of comic books, video games, and other media deemed “unfit” for minors devastated both Epic Comics and forced hundred of comics specialty shops to go out of business. To make matters worse, the critically maligned 1996 Sentinels film flopped at the box office when it returned less than a third of its 75 million dollar budget. Roger Ebert famously remarked that, “This film is nothing more than pornographic snuff with special effects, and not enough good snuff at that.” The failure of Sentinels resulted in mass cancellations at Epic Comics and left a barren landscape of defunct publishers in its wake throughout the late nineties.

While comic fans did not witness a repeat of the 1954 Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that saw the end of EC Comics forty years prior, the so-called “Epic Backlash” brought more rigorous control of content in the medium. The Comic Code Authority was no longer the “internal affairs” of the industry but a third party that enforced a rigorous ratings system where the Authority forced retailers to sell titles with “adult” content like Sentinels under the counter. While innocuous at first, the Comics Code Authority eventually earned a reputation as an industry censor when it rejected books deemed “subversive” after the terrorist attacks on Grand Central Station and Wall Street on September 9, 1999. For its part, DC Comics weathered the storm through its offering of “family entertainment” in contrast to Epic’s edgier offering. The Batman and Spider-Man sequels continued to turn a profit despite the mounting kitsch of the later films. It was only until recently the Edwards administration that the banality of the “vanilla” oughties is wearing off. DC Comics is finally experimenting again as new generation of writers ushered in an era of “reconstruction” in contrast to the postmodern deconstruction of eighties and nineties. Comics today borrow the imagination and weirdness from the innocent days of its Silver Age but with a subtle adult sensibility that would not have been possible fifteen years ago and it appears that the DC Juggernaut is invincible after the three-peat successes of Green Lantern, Flash, and Wonder Woman. A humbled Epic Comics is still in business today but relies more on licensed properties like Star Wars and nostalgia from its heyday to maintain its anemic twenty percent market share. Had Jim Shooter started at Marvel at that crucial period in the seventies I imagine we would see a completely different landscape in comics. While Spider-Man and Captain America retain their iconic status, some heroes like Thor and the X-Men fell by the wayside in the last thirty-five years. Perhaps The Avengers would have been the film to draw almost two billion dollars worldwide instead of Justice League.

But as Stan Lee famously said at a convention twenty years, “Just imagine.”

* * *

Aspiring writer and platypus enthusiast Ben Ronning has lurked the AH.com boards since June 2006. When he is not roaming the multiverse, he can be found at his blog, Thoughts of a Platypus.

Alternate History and Superheroes

Guest post by Ben Ronning.

Superheroes and alternate history are two subgenres of science fiction that have always appeared to compliment one another but very few writers ever dared to combine and exploit to its fullest. One reason for this is continuity, the holy grail of all comic book geeks. Ever since the debut of Superman in 1938 and the Fantastic Four in 1961, the Big Two of the comic book industry more or less rely on a floating timeline that prevents their characters from aging (though continuity is far murkier for DC after two major reboots and countless smaller retcons.) Superman could be BFFs with Joseph Kennedy in 1963 then be shaking hands with Ronald Reagan twenty years later without aging a single day. Another reason is because both companies, especially Marvel, pride themselves on verisimilitude by making their universe superficially similar to ours so neither company has fully addressed the social and geopolitical implications of the effective demigods in their midst until recent years with Marvel’s Civil War and DC’s 52.

However, one can consider Marvel’s What If? titles and DC’s Elseworlds line alternate history to some extent. These titles largely centered on the individual histories of their characters like “What if Spider-Man Joined the Fantastic Four?” or “What if Sgt. Nick Fury Fought World War II in Space?” rather than historical events from our world. Some scenarios such as “What if Captain America Were Revived Today?” from What If? (vol. 1) #44 possesses some trappings of alternate history. For example, Namor the Sub-Mariner took a different route when the Avengers pursued him in Avengers (vol. 1)  #4 so he never discovered the group of Inuit who worshiped a frozen Steve Rogers and thus never hurled Captain America into the ocean for the Avengers to find. The Avengers eventually disbanded without Captain America, but more disturbingly, a janitor working at a government facility awakened the mentally unstable 1950s Captain America and Bucky from suspended animation and convinced them that the United States was in danger from subversive elements. As such, the impostor Captain America and Bucky became involved with a political movement that transformed the United States into a police state until a crew of American sailors found the true Cap in the Arctic.

Marvel, aside from a dalliance with a robot Stalin, waited almost twenty years to dip their toe into the alternate history ocean with Neil Gaiman’s 1602. While not technically a What If? issue, the mini-series has a point of divergence (a Captain America from a potential future goes back in time to the failed Roanoke colony and aids in their survival) that causes various Marvel characters to appear nearly four hundred years before they should have. Instead of being the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury is Elizabeth I’s chief intelligence officer whose apprentice is Peter Parquagh, an ersatz version of a nameless friendly neighborhood webslinger. However, one of the more intriguing elements of Marvel 1602 is Gaiman weaved themes from X-Men into late Elizabethan history, particularly James I’s persecution of the “witchbreed” or mutants and how Magneto is ostensibly a grand inquisitor for the Spanish Inquisition but hides his illicit activities behind his position.

This fascination with alternate history continued with the fourth volume of What If? in late 2005. Unlike most issues of the title, which were largely self-contained worlds, this volume of the series took place within in a single timeline where Captain America’s genesis occurs in the American Civil War as opposed to World War II and the Fantastic Four were Russian cosmonauts. Being more of an aficionado of American history, I prefer the Captain America one and appreciate how Cap because more of a physical manifestation of the American spirit during one the nation’s most troubled periods rather than symbol. Because of this Cap’s presence shortens the Civil War, prevents Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and his origins in Native American mysticism sparked a cultural craze that prevented the Indian Wars of the 1870s. Out of the six What If? (Vol. 4) one-shots, only Captain America and Fantastic Four address the broader strokes of alternate history whereas the other four are more character-focused. Unfortunately, Marvel did not revisit this timeline as they did Marvel 1602, but they are well worth the effort of searching through the odd long box for.

Meanwhile, DC, like their marvelous competition, has only dabbled in the realm of alternate history with its Elseworlds line but there are a few notable examples such as Batman: Holy Terror written by Alan Brennert and illustrated by Norm Breyfogle. The point of divergence for this story is that Oliver Cromwell lived ten years longer and the United States became a totalitarian, theocratic state. While I have never read the issue on account that it has been out of print for over twenty years, a cursory glance of the synopsis on Wikipedia was enough to pique my interest and should do the same for other alternate history enthusiasts. DC’s Tangent imprint, introduced in 1997, operates under a similar premise where there are not only vastly different versions of Superman, the Flash, the Atom, and even obscure characters like the Sea Devils but the presence of superpowered beings radically altered history from what we know. The central premise behind the imprint is that an alternate version of the Atom intervened in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which resulted in the destruction of Florida and Cuba. As such, Atlanta became an underwater city populated by merpeople, their technology advanced further than the mainstream DC Universe, and the hippie movement was in its infancy when the nineties rolled around.

Dan Jurgens, the man who killed Superman and the brain behind Tangent, justified this divergence when he told Comic Book Resources:

“While the DCU Earth is essentially the same as our own, no more advanced in terms of technology or communications despite the existence of those qualities within the super-powered community, Earth Tangent is greatly influenced by all of that. Earth Tangent's economic, geographic and political landscapes are defined by the superhero community, whereas in the DCU those aspects exist unaffected by the superhero community.”

Jurgens brings up an excellent point about a medium that birthed the trope, “Reed Richards is Useless.” Take the Flash’s rogues gallery for example, Captain Cold and his cohorts possess technology that can generate temperatures near absolute zero, alter weather patterns, and even transmute the 118 elements. Why did the scientists and business leaders not reverse engineer the technology after the Central City Police Department confiscated it? The Tangent imprint gives something of a look at such a world and is perhaps a blueprint for how ambitious writers should combine the two genres.

Some could argue that Superman: Red Son is an alternate history and I suppose it is to some extent. The premise is simple enough: baby Kal-L lands in Ukraine in 1938 instead of Kansas. However, my impression of the mini-series is that if it is alternate history, it is about squishy as bag full of marshmallows (or a Type X on Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility.) Its writer, Mark Millar, makes reference to even greater civil unrest in the late 1960s under surviving JFK, a war against communists in the South Pacific in 1983, and a second American Civil War in 1986 without too much elaboration. Granted, there are constraints to the medium but it is clear that the focus is more on Superman as a seemingly benevolent leader of the Soviet Union and his rivalry with Lex Luthor than on the butterflies that a Soviet Man of Steel would create. That is not to say Red Son is not worth reading, it is more fantasy than alternate history.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, is the mirror image of Red Son in terms of realism and setting. In fact, the world of Watchmen could be a reflection ours until 1938 where the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1 inspired a wave of costumed vigilantes, and again in 1959 with the creation of Dr. Manhattan. Alternate history is one portion of Watchmen’s complexity that Moore executes extremely well. Dr. Manhattan essentially gave the United States the strategic advantage in the Cold War and practically won the Vietnam War single-handedly but that also becomes a disadvantage because he is also the lone reason why the Soviet Union stays in check. Hence, Moore makes the consequences of his departure realistic as evidenced by the Soviet invasion of Pakistan and bringing Earth closer to the brink of Nuclear War. However, there are also several other economic and cultural consequences as well. The good doctor’s ability to synthesize lithium allows for the mass production of electric cars, hence reducing the United States’ dependence of foreign petroleum, and the appearance “real” superheroes essentially led to the death of the medium in the late forties so pirate comics like “The Tales of the Black Freighter.” (Though I wonder how Indian fast food became so popular with the American public instead of McDonalds.) Watchmen is practically required reading for all comic book fans, but to read it again from the prism of an alternate historian demonstrates how well the two genres blend.

One of the things I admire about alternate history is that it posed a question Marvel asked when they released a new title in February 1977, “what if?” Personally, I am not as interested in the typical “What if the Axis won World War II?” or “What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War?” as I am interested in smaller events like “What if a more moderate candidate sought the democratic nomination in 1972” or “What if Lucille Ball decided not to sell Desilu Studios to Gulf+Western?” because even the smallest pebble can create many ripples. Marvel 1602, Tangent Comics, and Watchmen demonstrate that alternate history can blend with the fantastic as peanut butter tends to do with chocolate, and they are only the tip of the glacier. In a universe populated by gods, aliens, and immortal cavemen who could alter the flow of history well before the 20th century, the myriad of scenarios to use as story fodder is practically endless. Is there a writer ambitious enough to push this hybrid genre to its creative limits?

Only time will tell.

* * *

Aspiring writer and platypus enthusiast Ben Ronning has lurked the AH.com boards since June 2006. When he is not roaming the multiverse, he can be found at his blog, Thoughts of a Platypus.