: Re: Writing a coherent alt-history universe I have a problem writing my alt-history story. It's a story about basically World War I. Yet, I wish not to convey ideas of the time, like how which

@Kevin153

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With Alternative History everything is assumed to be the same unless the author specifically says otherwise, that being the case you need to be consistent when saying that you've made a particular change. If you change the name Switzerland to the "Helvetian League" then you can't turn around and talk about "the Swiss"; they don't exist anymore. Changing something as big as the name of a country changes a lot more than one initially realises it does though; you have to find and change the underlying reason(s) that a country has the name we're used to seeing and then create reasons to use the new name you want it to have. That fundamentally changes the nature of the nation, its policies and attitudes, and its people and their responses to internal and international politics. The Helvetian League is, in the end, only similar to Switzerland geographically rather than geopolitically.

Generally speaking if you want to do alternative history in which the world takes a path we are familiar with but point out that there are departures from our real history keep changes small and considered. Avoid changing history more than you have to, the people involved can be different but the broad strokes of world events shouldn't be disrupted if you can avoid it. For example maybe a certain Archduke was named Fritz and his assassin was a 30 year old Gustov but the killing still happened in Sarajevo and still resulted in a declaration of war and the whole mess that followed. This is clearly a different world but the events are the same.

As a note if you want to avoid expressing moral judgements one way or another about a particular nation involved it's worth noting and pointing out where each side was guilty of questionable behaviour. Everyone involved in both the world wars did things that were justified as necessities of the time but were immoral and/or even actively illegal.

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