I'm looking for alternative history timelines, either involving some element of fandom or just original alternate history. Guilty pleasures acceptable. I'd also be interested in high quality AARs.

Pros:

- Detailed

- Long

- At least semi-realistic

- British focus

Cons:

- Cursory coverage

- Transparent "fix it" approach

- Canon rehashes

An example:

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/an-empire-ascendant-a-stargate-timeline-mk-2.236595/

 

http://www.alternatehistory.com/

Enjoy.

 

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7170477/1/Renegade-Reinterpretations
Renegade Reinterpretations By: College Fool A species without Paragons is one with a sad and terrible history. Humanity enters a very different First Contact War, and Mass Effect as you know it will change. Warning: this fic may make you rage and wish genocidal retributions against aliens.
Rated: Fiction K+ - English - Chapters: 70 - Words: 95,544 - Reviews: 834 - Favs: 696 - Follows: 394 - Updated: Sep 25, 2011 - Published: Jul 12, 2011 - id: 7170477

Basically Batarians makes first contact with humans and tires to enslave them. Humans fights back but the end result is humanity becomes warlike renegede species.

 

Two of the better detailed and researched British-Focused timelines on ah.com include:

Look to the West by Thande, detailing how Britain maintained its colonies in America.
Bayonets Won't Cut Coal by Lord Brisbane, detailing a revolution in Britain during the interwar period and the ensuing fallout.

 

A World of Laughter, A World of Tears is probably the best AAR ever. Walt Disney is elected President of the United States of America, and at the start its the utopia he always wanted - the Happiest Place on Earth. But things go bad, and then they go worse.

 

Hey, regarding AlternateHistory.com:

TvTropes has a neat list of the most popular AH.com timelines, so you don't have to manually search through the forum:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Website/AlternateHistoryDotCom?from=Main.AlternateHistoryDotCom

 

Its not an AAR or anything but For All the Marbles on AH.com is fucking great.

 

Don't read The Raptor of Spain or The Revival of Rhomaion because they are complete shit.

 

Ez Geloybe Aretz on AH is amazing. I can't remember the exact point of divergence, but it involves an alternate WW1. Very well written.

As for AARs, there's the classic A Scotsman in Egypt for Medieval 2 Total War. The name describes it well. It follows the conquests and antics of 2 Scottish princes who drunkenly decide to invade Egypt.

I recall a fairly decent CK2/EU4 one, but I'll have to look around a bit.

 

Ez Geloybe Aretz the divergence is Wilhelm II dies before or just after he becomes Kaiser so his son ends up being raised by Princess Victoria and his brother. It's not bad but I got bored pretty quickly.

eisen-blut-und-fernhandel/
Is an earlier German unification time line with Japan joining the German customs union and a few other things. I've really enjoyed it so far.

I also enjoyed The Legacy of the Glorious which is a Hohenzollern Spanish timeline.

 

Anything with Russia or Israel?

 

One and Indivisible (Russian Kaiserreich AAR)

Kaiserreich (Heart of Iron mod) AAR about the return of the Tsar. Point of divergence is that the central powers win WW1 with a vastly different timeline.

Another fun Kaiserreich AAR is The Little Giant In which japan becomes a superpower.

 

I have an ASB Israel one but you'll have to sign up to view it.

 

Thanks.

Thanks. I've read it and liked it a lot. Hopefully it'll continue being updated.

 

I've spent the last few days reading fics on AlternateHistory.com.

There are quite a few good stories there (though reading them in forum format is irritating). The problem though is there is so much pure shit floating around, and everyone still blows the "you're amazing, keep up the good work" trumpet.

Most of the users seem to have no drive to improve their writing skills.

 

To be fair, quality writing isn't really the purpose, else they wouldn't be writing timelines in the first place. It's all about floating ideas, not about presenting them in a dramatic way.

My main criticism of AH timelines is that they focus so narrowly, often detailing events at the "unit level", that they move at a snail's pace.

 

There's an aspect to writing timelines that requires somewhat of an attention to detail, otherwise the events you're describing lose plausibility. But yes sometimes timelines get bogged down in the minutia - something I found myself falling into when I wrote a timeline detailing a different post-independence scenario of the Congo, Glory and Dignity, and struggled to advance the meat of the narrative onwards. I feel that AH.com ten-ish years ago hadn't adopted that style of writing and there were more free-flowing and rapid paced timelines but now the expectations of the forum have changed from not just simply writing about the events themselves but also writing about the circumstances of how those events came about and exploring the conditions surrounding those events in a much more academic manner. Your mileage may vary, essentially.

 

I'm not criticizing the timelines, I'm criticizing the people who try to write stories based on timelines only to fail miserably and then be praised for it.

 

I don't know if you tried the Green Antarctica - The Land of the Tsalal. It's the first alternate history I've read (still not done with it - it has 370 pages), so my opinion might be shit, but I really liked it a lot. A whole culture developing in such an inhospitable continent led to awesome traditions (White is associated with Death and Illness, so they culled the white skin people and dyed their teeth black).

It's on AH.com (there's a pdf version as well).

 

Green Antartica is good for the first 50 pages, until it starts getting more into culture and history of the place. Then it gets flat-out stupid.

The Tsalal are basically exaggerated combinations of every terrible thing one branch of humanity has ever done. Then add grimdark, exotic wildlife, and constant incest for flavoring.