"Making Sense of Alternative History" Topic

Alternative history can be divided into three basic theories. In the first a single event changes and the world changes from that event, being increasingly dissimilar from OTL. In many ways this might seem the most logical path. Perturbation theory says that in a solar system changes in the original starting positions of orbital bodies can result in huge changes in the entire system. Chaos theory would also project that small changes will result in huge and unpredictable differences downstream of the change. Change can be down to the genetic level. A very different person could be born if a different sperm fertilizes the egg instead of the one that historically did. This basically means that after a single generation almost every person will different in some way, perhaps minor, perhaps major from any historical personage that might have had the same parents.

A second sort has events changing but some events being so highly favored, often by causes that may not be readily apparent on the surface that they occur even in an altered timeline in which many events have changed. This means that in such an altered time line Teddy Roosevelt, for example, may still be born, because the underlying reality highly favors this event, even though many other events have changed drastically

Finally there is the sort of altered timeline that looks very much like our timeline, even with many changes. In this case it might be easiest to think of the altered universe as being one of multiple, possibly infinite ones, and it just happens to be one in which although there are differences there are also many similarities with OTL. In this case the rational for similarity is in the underlying potentially infinite number of examples. No matter how unlikely an event is if the framework for that event occurs a huge, perhaps infinite number of times than that particular occurrence is not impossible and in fact is almost certain to happen.

Alternate history and alternate science creates a alternate culture.

They can, and that would certainly be covered by case one or two above. They might not, in the infinite alternate pathways, culture might remain the same, and that would be covered in the third case above.

Hard to tell, as with only one example to work with, it is hard to run the experiment and see what would happen as we have one reality we can access at a time.

I just use VSF the old fashioned Major General way, as an excuse to have steam tanks and Earl Grey tea.

Yeah, but the theoretical guys should soon be setting the experimentalists on the trail of other examples, and then you'll see! ;->=

If you follow the concept of infinite variable versions, one, two, and three will all have examples, and plenty where NOTHING is happening, because the divergence included a change in some fundamental-to-life, or even -to-stable-matter, physics.

For stories, or the basis of game universe, you tend to need the differences to be not TOO great, for fear of losing the audience.

Ah, dear old Tremorden. Let us all lift our G&T's.

Doug

"For stories, or the basis of game universe, you tend to need the differences to be not TOO great, for fear of losing the audience"

This might be true, or it might not be. I recall the ToS episode where the primitives on the planet were at war with each other and it turned out that the savages were Americans and the Civilized folks were Chinese.

You can certainly play the differences into the story as well and end with a surprise reveal