With the goal of making the world a better place, prevent one person from having been born.

How about JC ? If he wasn't born, would he have been "invented" ?

Synthesized, really, from a large group of prophets circulating in that era.

Constantine turned Christianity from a faith system into a socio-political empire, a term that would become literal with the emergence of the Byzantine Empire, which was simply a Christianized, Greek-speaking Roman Empire.

A book I finished reading last week, about Alaric the Goth, points out that as much as Roman persecution of Christians is depicted in popular media, it was actually confined to a few shorts periods in the history of the Western Roman Empire. But when Christianity became the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire, religious persecution by Christians of nearly every religion that wasn't became non-stop for roughly a thousand years. And still exists in many forms today, including the xenophobic, wealth-obsessed American evangelical churches of today.

Without Constantine's imprimatur, so many of the evils visited upon Western civilization might never have happened; black chattel slavery, imperialism, witch hunts, child labor, vulture capitalism, etc.

While a de-Christianized Europe would be different than the real thing, I'm not sure that it would be more enlightened by our standards.

There's a novel about how the world devolops without European domination: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. The point of divergence is around a thousand years later than Constantine (A plaugue kills 99% of Europeans), but you might want to check it out.

I think you're right that a Europe never influenced for good or ill by Constantine-style Christianity wouldn't necessarily be more enlightened. It would probably just be very different in many interesting ways.

But it's interesting speculating on it.

Humans suck.

(adding my choice to the mix)

There are thousands more to choose from.

It is easy to pick Hitler or Trump but neither could have done the damage without hypnotising the crowds.

The Turtle alone changed our judiciary system for the next generation.

(OK I suppose Ivan the Terrible and other historical figures who acted on their own would qualify.)

That POS slaughtered even more people than Hitler...

If there is a bigger single killer in history than King Leopold II, then I would choose to prevent that POS's birth!

Leopold II: around 10 million
Mao Zedong: 40 to 80 million
Genghis Khan: as many as 40 million

N/T

eom

Because you have to look for someone who was more than just the tipping point leader, you have to look for someone who drove things to the brink themselves and that without them, things wouldn't have gotten to that point.

Someone mentioned Jesus, but some other religion would have been used to butcher just as many people without Christianity.

Trump is a good one because although the Reps were trending wingnut, they didn't have anyone in their ranks willing to go against America as much as Trump was.

Hitler was a force, I do not think Germany gets to that extreme point without him. Although there were many extreme and evil people around him, Hitler is the only one who could have taken Germany over the many many lines they crossed.

I think if Stalin hadn't been in charge, someone equally as or maybe even more brutal than he would have done the same types of things. Pol Pot too.

I remember walking around a German WWI cemetery in eastern France near Reims. It was surprising to see so many Star of David as the head stones. Not sure without Hitler the inherent but contained anti-semitism in Central Europe could have morphed into the Holocaust.

Plenty of leaders of early communist Russia would have gladly carried out the starvation massacre in Ukraine.

And in fact thanks to social media it's more popular than ever. We're truly heading for some very dark times ahead.

Stop the problem upstream

should read Making History by Stephen Fry, an alternate history novel in which Hitler doesn't get born. Things are vastly worse. Really, really good.

History doesn't substantially diverge until 1932. Only six years later, the Nazis are dropping nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. There's no way that Germany in the mid-1930's could develop nuclear weapons in that amount of time, regardless of who's in charge. What's more, Germany's economy in the mid-1930's was only a quarter the size of that of the USA in the early 1940's.

It's an excellent book. I do happen to have a great fondness for most alternate history.

subgenre myself. My focus on a small part of the plot wasn't meant to be a criticism of the book as a whole.

Just checked my bookshelf, I have a copy. I think I'll read it tonight. Has to be better the schlock Turtledove is pumping out lately....

I expressed myself poorly. I wanted to say something along the lines of it's okay to nitpick, not to imply you are being overly fussy.

Nice to know you have a copy, and I hope you enjoy it.

I gave up on Turtledove a while back. He used to be very good, and has simply gotten lazy, in my opinion. I got a couple of chapters into Joe Steele and had to give up. It is simply not at all credible that the man we know as Stalin could have been born and raised in this country and wind up EXACTLY as he was in Russia.

As for Joe Steele, I gave up on it myself. That, along with the Yellowstone series he did, pretty much made me write him off.

Still, he did good stuff in the past. Wonder what he's up to now?

(Looks up his new State of Jefferson series)

History is changed to the points that Sasquatch, Indonesian Hobbits, and Merfolk are real. Ok, I can run with that. History would be unrecognizable, so this could be interesting. They seem to be set in the late 1970's, and.....

Jimmy Carter is president, and losing in the polls due to the Iranian Hostage Crisis. He loses to Reagan, and his concession speech is word for word identical to the real one.

I read all of them, just to see how he'd finally end it. As you know, the California characters spend all three books pissing and moaning about the cold. Freeze to death already, was my take. Plus the idiocy of most of the characters.

Have you ever read Time on My Hands by Peter delaCorte? An American travel writer is in an obscure museum in Paris, is told by someone else that the machine he's looking at is a time machine, and can be gotten to him. Only the man who can procure the time machine wants our hero to go back and prevent Ronald Reagan from becoming President. It was published in 1997. Wonderful.

I have the good fortune to attend various s-f cons, mainly Bubonicon in Albuquerque and Mile Hi in Denver. I've had the privilege to meet a bunch of authors, all of whom are wonderful, of course. I have not crossed paths with Harry Turtledove, although if I did I'd be polite and tell him about the books of his I've liked. No point in being rude.

Oh, and in regards to alternate history, one s-f writer I've talked with feels strongly that once you change even one small thing, you change a lot. I'm inclined to think she's right, which is one reason Joe Steel does not work.

If you are not already attending s-f cons, I hope you will start to do so. You seem like a reader who truly appreciates the genre.

Oh, and that advice applies to all who read this post.

I live just outside of Denver!



Different writers certainly have different approaches to the subject. Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" is the source of the Butterfly Effect, of course, but other authors have written stories where "historical inertia" makes changes difficult. As Steve Stirling once said (quoting from memory), "There are no correct alternate histories, only plausible ones."

Edit: It was Will Shetterly who said that, no Stirling. Whoops....


I've attended a couple of them, but not for quite some time. I should start doing so again. Perhaps I'll see you at Mile Hi!

Oh, oh, oh!! Mile Hi will happen October 1-3. I am planning on attending. Please PM me if you decide to go.

One of my few regrets in life is that I did not start attending s-f cons many years ago. Once I finally started attending, about a decade ago,(aside of some random attending of ConQuest in Kansas City) I started making many friends, especially with writers. OMG! I will only say that I got to see the 2017 eclipse with one very well known writer, which made the eclipse even better than it already was.

Honestly, my friendship with various writers has come out of attending various cons.

Along with Mile Hi and Bubonicon (which isn't too much of a stretch for someone from Denver) I attend the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales (OMFG! An absolutely incredible and very small event) and COSine in Colorado Springs. COSine is in January, which means going to the Springs from Santa Fe in January is a bit problematical. I'd been aware of that con for several years, and once, at Bubonicon, talked with some representatives of that con about my hesitation. We wound up agreeing that there would be a special Raton Pass price, which was the same as the advance purchase price. I'd book the hotel, but not pay for the con until I got there, just in case the Raton Pass was impassible. In the several years I've gone to COSine, I was always able to get there. It's a relatively small con, which I personally like.

Another small con is the Jack Williamson Lectureship in Portales, NM. It really is a very out of the way place, which is an important reason why it is so small. I love it. Connie Willis always attends. She gives a talk at the lunch on Saturday, which is always a hoot. I do happen to be an enormous fan of Connie Willis, who is smart, funny, and always on point. And, like so many who attend cons of any kind, is always open to meeting with fans.

In 2019 I went to SoonerCon in Norman, OK. It was perhaps the best con I've ever been to. I am looking forward to attending again, hopefully in 2022. As you might already know or guess, s-f people are extremely friendly, and the cons are wonderful. As already noted, I've been to various ones over the years. SoonerCon had a level of friendliness above and beyond what I was used to. Wow. They also had some programming quite unlike what I'd known before, such as voice acting. I might sign up for some of that at my next SoonerCon. Not that I expect to become a voice actor, but for the very different experience.

I hope all this is inspirational to you. And even if you and I never meet, I sincerely hope you attend various cons.

Without the framework he put in place, I don't believe Stalin or Mao would have been able to become the monsters they were.

Eliminating one single person doesn't change the conditions that allowed that person to rise to a position where he could wreak havoc in the first place. Conditions created by others.

...the man who shot Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914, sparking World War One. Without this one action, that insane war might have been avoided, and Hitler might have drifted off into obscurity as a postcard painter, and Lenin died an embittered exile, and maybe the 20th century would have been infinitely better. Maybe. What-if games are fun, but there's no way we can be sure of anything...

Gumby. Those crazy eyes and green bell bottoms. He was obviously up to no good.