Look to the West: Difference between revisions

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[http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=157898 Read it here]. [http://alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=178247 And continued here.]

 

 

The timeline is written as a series of clippings from [[Unreliable Narrator|sometimes biased or incomplete]] [[Scrapbook Story|"local" histories written by the natives of the timeline]], with [[Alternate Character Interpretation|multiple viewpoints mixed together for balance]] and the whole sprinkled with [[Word of God|footnootes from the author]] [[Framing Device|(although technically from the team below)]], quotes real and fictional, and [[Framing Device|occasional helpful interludes]] in which a team of crosstime explorers from [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] (our future, it would seem) explain their findings.

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* [[Adolf Hitler]]: Michael Hiedler is the Alternate Timeline Brother of Adolf Hitler's real life great-grandfather Martin Hiedler.

* [[The House of Hanover]]

* [[The Duke of Wellington]]: Richard Wellesley, Lord Mornington, is roughly a mixture of the Duke and his real life brother Richard.

 

* [[Airstrip One]]: After a rebellion by French-speakers in Quebec, the Empire of North America either anglicises (Montréal -> Mount Royal) or outright renames (Quebec City -> Wolfeston) all its settlements with French-sounding names.

** Similarly, after adopting Russophile cultural policies to appease those alienated by the earlier Tsars' westward-looking stance, Russia Russifies some of its more German-sounding names.

* [[Generation Xerox]] - {{spoiler|Once more, we have another British king named Frederick driven from Britain, though this time he is not exiled by his father but rather flees to avoid dealing with Joshua Churchill.}}

* [[Golem]]: Golems are very popular in the fantasy fiction of this world, due to the fact that they can be a [[Recycled in Space]] version of Automata set in a mediaeval setting before technology would allow the real thing to be built.

* [[Head-in-The-Sand Management]] - Charles Fox.

* [[Heroic Sociopath]] - Michael Hiedler. A man whose burning hatred of just about everybody fuels his dark charisma ([[Adolf Hitler|just for fun, try saying his name out loud]]). May, or may not, [[I'm a Humanitarian|eat people]].

* [[Locked Room Mystery]] - {{spoiler|Jean de Lisieux's eventual, unexplained fate}}.

* [[Moral Guardians]] / [[Executive Meddling]]: In-universe, some of the "Automaton Craze" books of the 1820s-50s are subject to this, such as ''The Cogwheel Turns'', where the original ending ({{spoiler|that humans are themselves an automaton creation of [[Precursors|an earlier vanished race]], identified with legends of pagan gods}}) was censored.

* [[My Friends and Zoidberg]] - “I would like to thank all you gentlemen for your attendance...along with Mr. Churchill.” From Leo Bone at his father's funeral. (Leo [[You Killed My Father|had wanted to]] [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge|burn London down]] {{spoiler|again}}, blaming [[Well-Intentioned Extremist|Churchill]] for his father's heart attack, but was dissuaded.)

* [[One Nation Under Copyright]]: Most of India is owned by a consortium of European trade cooperations, called ''International Oversight Board for East Indian Trade'', while the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company dominates the northern Pacific, including North Japan.

* [[Peace Conference]]: The Congress of Copenhagen is the TTL analogue of the Congress of Vienna.

* [[The Republic|Republic, The]]: The Corsican Republic and the United Provinces of South America, the latter also counts as [[The Federation]]. The French Latin Republic is a villainous example.

* [[Rightful King Returns]] - Frederick the First of Great Britain returning from his American exile. The New Spanish repeat it during the Popular Wars, which in the future of the timeline will be written about, appropriately enough, by *Tolkien.

** {{spoiler|And the return of the New Spanish Bourbons to Spain itself.}}

* [[Riddle for the Ages]] - No-one ''really'' knows what happened to {{spoiler|Lisieux}}, though many theories are put forward. [[Shrug of God|Not even the author]].

** King Henry IX is close to Charles James Fox and other Radicals in Parliament. Naturally, his political enemies nickname him "[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja|King Radical]]".

* [[Show Within a Show]] - Fiction and art have also taken a different course in this world, and some works are periodically mentioned. Most notable is the "[[Steampunk|Automaton fiction]]" craze of the 1830s-50s period, which effectively replaces ''[[Frankenstein]]'' and the rise of vampire fiction in our timeline. (Vampires in this world are considered as obscure as, say, naga or drow are to the general public in our timeline; golems are much better known than our timeline due to authors using them as a mediaeval stand-in for automata in works set in the past).

* [[Steampunk]] - Steam technology has received a boost relative to out timeline, with highly awesome results.

* [[Stuff Blowing Up]] - Most recently, London.

* [[The Revolution Will Not Be Civilised]] - And how!

* [[Titled After the Song]] - Not intentional, according to [[Word of God]] (unless it was subconscious) but ''Stairway to Heaven'' does have the title in an apposite context (considering the number of [[Running Gag|heroes whose houses are burned down]]):

''And the voices of those who stand looking'' }}

* [[Tomato Surprise]]: [[Show Within a Show]] example--''The New Eden'', the book which started the Automaton Craze in the literature of this world, ends with the revelation that {{spoiler|the 'humans' living in the roboticised landscape are themselves automata}}. This twist is then played with by other books inspired by it, such as ''The Cogwheel Turns'', which suggests that {{spoiler|the world is trapped in a cycle in which the dominant race create automata to do their work, grow lazy and decadent, and then the automata rise up and take their place--and the original edition also suggests humans are themselves the creation of an earlier race...}}

* [[Unreliable Narrator]] - Footnotes will occasionally highlight how some of the quoted history books get it wrong, either through lack of knowledge or just plain bias. Most prominently, a common prejudice in the 'present day' of LTTW (excluding some revisionist historians) is that the Japanese are considered subject to [[Creative Sterility]] and are intrinsically inferior to neighbouring Asian races, which obviously puts a spin on historical accounts.

* [[Wham! Episode]] - The Popular Wars begin in {{spoiler|Portugal's colonial empire, of all places.}}

** The 100th chapter ends with {{spoiler|the "narrators", a research team from another timeline, being violently arrested by English (no, ''not'' British) security forces.}}

[[Category:Look to the West]]

[[Category:Literature]]