In Spite of a Nail: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Fan Fiction]] ==

* Played with in the ''[[Star Wars]]'' fanfic [http://www.hawksong.com/~thammill/Wheel_stories/wheelMain.html Riding the Wheel of If], where in some alternate universes characters don't exist, and others even have them change gender. On the other hand, those versions of the characters that are the same gender are pretty much identical physically, and they're always the same age (per [[Word of God]]; when one author wrote a story where Obi-Wan was younger the original author said that didn't happen and it was considered AU to the series). And certain events take place in most or all universes, and if Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon both exist they're usually together, but that's all just [[Because Destiny Says So]].

* [[For Want of a Nail]] is extremely common in ''[[Naruto]]'' [[Fan Fiction]], but no matter what that nail might be, Team 7 or just Naruto himself has about a 90-95% chance of ending up in the Land of Waves and meeting Zabuza and Haku around when it chronologically happened in canon.

== [[Literature]] ==

* ''[[A Wrinkle in Time|A Swiftly Tilting Planet]]'' by Madeline L'Engle does this AND [[For Want of a Nail]] at the same time. Charles Wallace (and a unicorn, and Meg... sort-of) need to zig-zag though time, making a dozen changes scattered throughout history, to replace a dictator poised to start [[World War III]] with a nicer near-clone. But no matter what events they change, no other effects show up in the present. And they even screw with Meg's husband's family!

** The original comic-book version of ''[[The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]]'' is set in a similar world, although this is far more obvious in all the "supplementary" material than the main action. (The point of divergence in this case ''might'' have been a half-fairy queen coming to rule England instead of the first Elizabeth.)

*** The history wasn't the same as ours before that, either. Things like the Trojan War never really happened, or at least not the way happened in fiction (or in Moore's comic). The half-fairy queen is just another element of the [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink]], being a reference to [[The Faerie Queene]], by Edmund Spenser.

* In Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne's ''Back in the USSA,'' American government and capitalism collapse in 1917 and Eugene Debs leads a Socialist revolution. After that things go much as in the USSR in our timeline, but with American figures—e.g., Al Capone fills the role of Stalin, J. Edgar Hoover is the equivalent of Lavrentiy Beria, and Eliot Ness is an agent of the Federal Bureau of Ideology. Dissidents risk getting exiled to Alaska.

** Interestingly, the original TL-191 novel, ''How Few Remain'', largely averted this Trope. The following ''Great War'' trilogy at least made some effort at averting it as well, with notable butterflies and Expys of post-PoD historical figures... at least on the American side of the Atlantic (in Europe, however, he played it straight).

** Similarly, his collaboration with Richard Dreyfuss, ''The Two Georges'', concerning a giant British North American Dominion born of George Washington and King George III cutting a deal featured not only Governor General Sir Martin Luther King but a used Steam-Car tycoon named "Honest Dick" in Southern California.

*** That and the Nazis somehow are able to pull off stunts that resemble modern day terrorism's finest dreams despite having much lower levels of tech and having been completely and utterly raped and burned in ways that modern day extremists are lucky they haven't been.

**** Also, Heydrich's real-life assassination, the one whose failure is the PoD, wasn't just a random attack by partisans; it was planned in real life by [[MI 6]], who by that time really wanted Hedyrich dead for a number of reasons, not the least that he was threatening several high-placed German double agents. It's doubtful they would have just given up after one attempt.

** It gets worse. For the majority of the middle ages, the northern part of England was ruled by a Fairy-sponsored magician-king. This has almost no appreciable effect on the timeline.

* In a series of books by Vasiliy Golovachev, people with any psychic power are explicitly said to be resistant to past-altering powers. To be more exact, their personalities and memories are. Should their parents never meet, they will be born from other parents. This probably should cause a lot of confusion, as they might not know who their new parents are, and previous parents will forget them. The world once changed the sentient life in the past (sentient cockroaches to sentient apes), and there were people to witness it.

 

== Real Life ==

** And if World War One ends even remotely like how it ended in [[Real Life]] (strict economic sanctions on Germany, the Russian Revolution, a booming economy in the rest of the world followed by a huge depression), then [[World War Two]] is highly likely, even though people in our present want to prevent it so badly that [[Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act|writers need an entire trope just to make it unchangable]]. And if World War Two happened, then some kind of [[Cold War]] is likely. So it's entirely possible that the history of the 20th century ''really would'' have been remarkably similar In Spite of a Nail, even if that nail was the bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself.

 

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:Alternate History Tropes]]