Alternate History
Everybody copies each other. I read a series of books, about a Civil War regiment, that gets sent to another world to fight aliens. What happens? A guy writes a series about a World War 2 ship that practically has the same thing happen to it.
Another writer wrote a book about a guy who travels back in time to give the South blueprints to an automatic weapon to win the war. However another time traveller stops him. Years later another writer about a racist group who gives the South AK-47s to win the war, and they do, but the South frees the slaves anyway.
Yet another was a series of novels that had America fighting not just the South, but England during the Civil War, and of course that idea was expanded by another author who had America fighting England and France as well as the South during the Civil War.
The what if/alternate history genre is likely the one genre of writing that people copy or the ideas are so few that nobody really notices. Some of it also has to be because people don’t know history except for bits and pieces of World War 2, or the Civil War. A what if story about the Napoleon isn’t all that entertaining, because it has doesn’t really affect us, and we don’t care, and we don’t know much about him because history isn’t really taught either.
Finding an original thought for this genre is tough, but doable. It takes awhile, but I don’t understand the fascination with copying someone else’s work. Come up with an original idea or don’t bother. It took me years to finally come up with original ideas. I really mean that. Years. I’ve got a couple of things going, but it takes time to develop. And part of the problem is that I don’t just want to tell an original story, I want to do something that hasn’t been done before. Something cool. I’m literally working with story content I was thinking up when I was a teenage, and that was twenty years ago.
I hope we’re not out of ideas, because if we are, we’re out of imagination.
Another writer wrote a book about a guy who travels back in time to give the South blueprints to an automatic weapon to win the war. However another time traveller stops him. Years later another writer about a racist group who gives the South AK-47s to win the war, and they do, but the South frees the slaves anyway.
Yet another was a series of novels that had America fighting not just the South, but England during the Civil War, and of course that idea was expanded by another author who had America fighting England and France as well as the South during the Civil War.
The what if/alternate history genre is likely the one genre of writing that people copy or the ideas are so few that nobody really notices. Some of it also has to be because people don’t know history except for bits and pieces of World War 2, or the Civil War. A what if story about the Napoleon isn’t all that entertaining, because it has doesn’t really affect us, and we don’t care, and we don’t know much about him because history isn’t really taught either.
Finding an original thought for this genre is tough, but doable. It takes awhile, but I don’t understand the fascination with copying someone else’s work. Come up with an original idea or don’t bother. It took me years to finally come up with original ideas. I really mean that. Years. I’ve got a couple of things going, but it takes time to develop. And part of the problem is that I don’t just want to tell an original story, I want to do something that hasn’t been done before. Something cool. I’m literally working with story content I was thinking up when I was a teenage, and that was twenty years ago.
I hope we’re not out of ideas, because if we are, we’re out of imagination.
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