Ask HN: What are your favorite alternate history scenarios?
I’ve always been fascinated by alternate timelines.
I recently built a small tool that generates speculative timelines for “What if” questions.
Curious what scenarios people here would explore. What if Yeltsin was shot in 1991 and the only compromise candidate available was Zhirinovsky? What if the Malê Revolt in 1840s Bahia resulted into their transportation to Yorubaland, to form a version of Liberia on the upper Niger that was motivated by a utopian liberal hawkish religious interpretation that immediately quarreled with the monarchical strains of Maliki popular among the local monarchies? Ask the tool if it is familiar with any existing literature on these points of divergence and you'll be amazed. The reality that have the book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, not this one that had The Man in the High Castle and whatever was written in the side where the Axis won the WWII. What if European explorers landing in North America had encountered a society equally or more technologically advanced than their own. I love the theory that the church faked the calendar to skip over the dark ages even if astronomy makes it a complete non-starter. For all mankind.