So… here's something I have been obsessing over for way too long.
Thank you to: ModernMajorGeneral ModernMajorGeneral for looking over my shitty first draft and telling me how to make it better. NataKilar NataKilar , onetruegentleman does not match any existing user name, and magnadeus does not match any existing user name for shooting me some useful suggestions in chat. not_a_seagull does not match any existing user name for catching a ton of awkward phrasings and giving some very useful suggestions, Zyn Zyn for giving it another look over for things that didn't make sense, and last but absolutely not least sirpudding sirpudding for looking over my nearly-complete draft and telling me how to put on the final touches.
I really hope you guys like this. Any thoughts are appreciated.
e: Image made by me, using a picture taken from here. It was taken by photographer Ron Edmonds and is creative commons.
I enjoyed this, it offered a novel spin on the 'write something and it becomes true' trope, and I'm a sucker for detailed examples. I had a quiet chuckle to myself at 'the creation of Israel' as a side effect.
I like it, the idea that how shitty the world seems to be is a result of a Grimdark Alt-History contest. +1
Its funny, I've been recently fuming over how the Bernie Sanders anomalies and how the political events they reference feel too recent and in rather poor taste considering the corruption element of the Democratic Primaries that went on, and I though to myself, how it would be like if someone trivialized the systematic removal of African American voters names from voting rolls that occurred in Florida back in 2000 by making it an anomaly.
And here it is.
Hey, so, I understand your concerns here. Frankly, I didn't even think about this when drafting.
To clarify — the reason I picked the Gore/Bush election for that part was specifically the very large amount of small factors that could have changed things, most of which have very little to do with racism. Even now, different people will say different things about who won the electoral votes, the news cycle, etc etc. There are many places where things could have gone different. I'm not trying to attribute anyone's racism to an anomaly — these things would have happened in the original timeline, too. However, the exact amalgamation of factors is very, very variable.
the political events they reference feel too recent and in rather poor taste
The election I'm writing happened almost 20 years ago. At some point, I feel like speculative fiction should not be off-limits.
Still, I understand where you're coming from, and I'm going to think about possible rewrites that could help this issue.
The election rigging in Florida was really a major factor for the outcome of the Florida election. While there certainly were a multitude of small factors that could have changed how effective the purging system was, like IIRC how it only looked for a matching first 3 letters of certain name, or which other states felony lists it drew from, at the end of the day the only thing other then the rigging in Florida that could have changed the outcome in Florida, were the butterfly ballots and Gore's teams decision to only call for a recount in certain districts rather then the whole state.
I don't want to sound like an ass, but I can't think of a nicer way to put this, but how knowledgeable are you on the specifics of the 2000 Florida election? You mentioned there were a lot of small factors that could have influenced the outcome, but none of those were really that significant with what when down specifically in Florida, and as I mentioned before there are two obvious (at least for someone who knows about the whole thing) and specific ways that you could have easily been mentioned rather then the vague "news cycles".
If you really want to do something neat with the 2000 election, I would suggest rather then going for the obvious route of Florida, incorporate something else from that a characteristic of that cycle that most people don't know much about, like the attempted vote swapping crackdown for example. What if we could have been living in a world where vote swapping was more successfully cracked down on resulting in Nader pulling out and Gore getting the green votes that some say could have won him that election?
Florida is low hanging fruit anyway.
I don't want to sound like an ass, but I can't think of a nicer way to put this, but how knowledgeable are you on the specifics of the 2000 Florida election?
No, that's a fair question, and I'll admit it, the research I did was pretty basic (since the election wasn't supposed to be the overall focus on the piece).
Everything you're saying here is basically valid. For now, I removed the mention of Florida (since it was a throwaway line that's basically not worth it), and I'm going to do some research when I've got the time and see whether I can slip something a little more clever.
Thanks for bringing up all this up.
Slight issue: Hurricane Katrina happened in August 2005. Kind of outside the time bracket of "1970 to 2004."
Thanks for catching that! Fixed. I played around with the dates a lot in the drafting stage and missed that one.
And you've earned your upvote. GG. Looking forward to more from you.
I'm a bit confused. What was the flaw in the throwaway line that caused such massive changes?
It also seems like, if Israel didn't exist prior to the current iteration, then modern American politics would be so different that Reagan, Bush, Clinton, W., Gore, etc. wouldn't have been candidates.
I'm a bit confused. What was the flaw in the throwaway line that caused such massive changes?
"a different global wind." Major change in basically every weather pattern, what kind of travel is possible, how some countries form, etc.
Reagan, Bush, Clinton, W., Gore, etc. wouldn't have been candidates.
It changes all of the past. So the implication is that, perhaps, in the alt!past, different changes would have been made during those years.
I don't think the nonexistence of Isreal would've had an impact anywhere near as large as changing the environment around the most influential empire in European history. A rainforest near or possibly surrounding Rome could, for example, have been that little bit extra that Hannibal needed to win the Second Punic War.