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The Great Man
File:Placeholder If you know how history works, you're able to abstract it down to simple iterations of cycles, and say things like this: The early to mid-20th century is going to be -
Space-Filling Empire
File:Placeholder The problem with the world, from a writer's perspective at least, is that it doesn't go away just because it's not important to the plot. Sooner or later they'll -
Mexico Can't Into Space
OTL history says that Mexico was settled well before the thirteen mid-Atlantic colonies. It has the natural resources to industrialize, the population to provide that labor force, and the gold to finance it. Hollywood -
Sliding Scale of AH Plausibility
File:Placeholder A system for measuring plausibility. Of course, these ranks are all arbitrary, and as such should only be taken as a guide. -
Pulling a Meiji
So you want to mess up history, you say. So you want to not be racist or Orientalist or anything like that; to do something original. What do you do? Pull a Meiji. Here's -
In Name Only
"Naturally I was going to write'the famous Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,' but I thought of that other famous Austrian and immediately had a mental image of Hitler stroking his mustache and saying to -
Fame Equals Birth
File:Placeholder One of the ways to use Historical Characters born after the PoD, Fame Equals Birth is where post-PoD Historical Characters are born, grow up to have the same personalities, and more than -
The Reagan Range
When a timeline features Ronald Reagan elected President before or (very rarely) after 1980, the Reagan Range—the long interval of years during which Reagan could plausibly have won the Presidency—is at work. Ronald -
Screw
File:Placeholder The opposite of a Wank, a Screw is when the author sets about utterly breaking a nation out of all proportion to how it could be broken. -
Only OCs
It's basically completely random which sperm fertilizes any given egg. If you had to roll for it on dice, you'd need big dice and a very, very long time to reroll them. Why -
OTL Unknown
File:Placeholder The Great Men and Historical Characters are not, by any means, the only people in history. They just hog the limelight. The overwhelming majority of the world's population have names and faces -
US Balkanization
File:Placeholder This is a description of nations that frequently appear in Alternate History (or future history) when the US balkinizes. -
AH Tropes Wiki
AH Tropes is a sister site to TV Tropes. We proudly share information on any tropes that appear in Alternate History, and have close ties to AlternateHistory.com and TV Tropes. Any contributors are welcome -
Useful Notes: History
We all know what alternate history is, despite it (oddly) not being included in AH Tropes 101. Some of us are writing it; all of us are reading about it. But what exactly is history? -
Wank
In Alternate History, a "wank" is where one nation is extremely successful. Of course, the term has drifted quite a bit. The original idea was that the nation was being wanked beyond all plausibility; e -
Plausibility
File:Placeholder Plausibility isn't the only thing that alternate history gets graded on, but it's one of the most important categories. -
America AIDS
In any timeline where the USA loses some "homeland" territory to secession, it is inevitable that more balkanization will happen, resulting in (at best) more revolutions or (at worse) total balkanization, until only a rump -
Island in the Sea of Time
Named after S.M. Stirling's series, an Island in the Sea of Time (ISOT for short) is a specific type of Alien Space Bat: a community is teleported to a time and place in -
The Randomid Caliphate
"You're saying that... Caliphate is to Islamic civilization what SM Stirling's Draka Domination is to Western civilization?" -George Carty Not so long ago, the USSR filled a useful role for writers, especially -
Research Report
File:Placeholder One of the Primary Framing Devices of Alternate History, Research Reports give the author the most freedom. These stories have the explanation that somebody from OTL has visited (or observed) an ATL and -
In Personality Only
File:Placeholder One of the ways to use an HC born after the PoD, In Personality Only is basically Fame Equals Birth where names are changed. -
Chaos Timeline
In the beginning, Max Sinister wanted to create an antagonist for a GURPS game, because he wasn't fond of Centrum. This is what happened. "The Mount Everest of TLs," Chaos starts from a simple -
Bland United India
India is a subcontinent. The modern Republic of India recognizes 22 regional languages. It's wildly diverse. It's also foreign, far enough away from most popular Points of Divergence, and remote from pop culture -
Textbook
File:Placeholder One of the Primary Framing Devices of an Alternate History, Textbook is a compromise between Narrative and Timeline. In the Textbook style, the story is a "history book" (or series of newspapers, or -
Usage of Historical Characters
File:Placeholder Historical Characters born after the PoD pose a problem for authors, as the author must find a way to deal with them. There are many different methods of using these HCs, sometimes influenced
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