Thank you to canonized, English Patriot and all the other members of the Tempus Society! It’s certainly an honor to be a Fellow in such an organization as this. Alternate history is a great love of mine, and so it’s only natural for me to gravitate toward this fine group of AARlanders who celebrate, advance and promote the genre.
The breadth and quality of work generated by the Fellows is simply breathtaking, and those works that I have read have furthered my own appreciation for alternate history and shaped my vision for writing it. Atlantic Friend’s Crossfires and DerKaiser’s The Golden Nation are the first to come to mind, but there are many, many others.
My AAR, Weltkriegschaft, is (according to the introduction I typed on my very first day on the forums) an “in-depth speculative history”. Specifically, New Year’s Eve 1935 sees a dramatic event which creates ripples of consequences that alter the course of history as we know it.
“How will history be different?” This is the question that every sentence in Weltkriegschaft plays a part in answering.
I strive in my writing to achieve the greatest possible degree of plausibility. This can extend from researching when certain weapons were invented to studying the popular culture that the characters would have been exposed to. Even the little things -- like the changing of the seasons and the latest news from Wall Street -- all contribute to the feeling that the world of Weltkriegschaft is real, and not just a convenient literary backdrop for the story I happen to be telling.
Weltkriegschaft is presented in a narrative style. Readers experience the story through the eyes of characters -- with their own wants and fears, and a living, breathing world around them. Yet I do not see my writing as primarily literary in nature. This is because I do not have a luxury that most writers of fiction have -- crafting the events of the plot to form the most dramatic or satisfying story. Instead, I look at my role as more of a historian. Because Weltkriegschaft is based on a historical simulation (my game of HoI2), I am bound to the results it gives me.
From these results I created records -- by the taking of extensive game notes and obsessive-compulsive generation of new savegames (several gigabytes for Weltkriegschat’s game alone). I then wrote the specifics of the history -- in a format similar to a history book AAR. In writing the actual installments, I draw upon this history in much as one would draw upon real history writing a dramatized account of D-Day.
I always find excitement in this extra level of challenge. Several times, the game engine threw real curveballs at me -- and I found myself scrambling to justify in narrative terms the events played out in the game.
In closing, then, I’ll share an anecdote that serves to sum up my approach to alternate history AAR-writing.
Several months into my game, I noticed that a British carrier based in the Far East had sustained some inexplicable damage. I scoured my save files for some sign whatever fate befell the unfortunate vessel. The UK was not at war with anyone, no battles were recorded, and I managed to determine when the damage occurred to within two hours. Could I have just ignored this result? Yes. But that felt to me like somehow getting off easy. Something had happened and I needed to justify it. As my next update revealed, German agents had orchestrated an attack of sorts. Since such an action is out of the known scope of the game engine, I reasoned, such an event was within the acceptable leeway I had in telling the story. Some of my readers had a hard time grasping why I was trying to “cover up” for the game engine. “I do my best,” I explained to one, “to make an obviously limited representation look good, competent and comprehensive.”
Broadly, this is the calling of writers of alternate history in AARland. We make the game engine look good, competent and comprehensive, and in so doing create plausible and compelling histories to rival our own.
Thank you all again.
