#[in the alternate history's 1950s? iirc]

[captainblazkowicz]

🚇A dingy old subway station, walls chipped to pieces, while waiting for a ride home / w/ grey!

Eerie Atmospheric Settings: Plot Starters / accepting / @coveitous

An announcement echoed off the crumbling walls, spoken in German and through a speaker that was too far away to make out the words. BJ looked like he could have been German... well, maybe. Tall, blond, blue-eyed, muscular. Probably like any old soldier around these parts. He stood over the bench— must've walked three miles from where he'd been staked out all day to this here subway station— and sighed quietly as it wasn't totally empty. That meant he had to speak. In German. And in the words of his compatriot, Wesley, 'your German? Frankly, it's atrocious. So no talking.' But how in the fuck was he supposed to get any better at it if he wasn't supposed to go usin' it? Didn't make any goddamn sense. If he busted out English, that'd blow his cover.

"Is this seat taken?" he asked the only other man around this whole damn station— the one on the bench, "Can I please sit here next to you?"

Felt and probably sounded pretty damn stupid to say. Even when speaking in German, the Texas twang snuck through.

[alliluyevas]

dream historical American Girl year/place/demographic etc???

Oh, great question! As I said earlier, I think the most glaring gap in the American Girl historical canon (both current and retired dolls) is the lack of an Asian-American doll. I've seen people say that Julie's Chinese-American Best Friend character, Ivy, should have been the central character of the 1970s arc, and I personally also think there's no reason why Courtney from the 1980s couldn't have been written as Asian and added elements of her cultural traditions in with her general 1980s storyline. (I believe she likes video games? I haven't read her books. A little Asian-American girl can also enjoy going to the game arcade and having Care Bear pajamas). That being said, since I think it's more interesting to come up with a new addition than to retroactively change an existing character, here are some ideas.

This is definitely not my area of historical expertise, so I'm probably going to be a bit vague here. I think AG could potentially do a Chinese-American doll set during the big blank period in between Addy and Samantha. The main issue here in terms of historical accuracy is that immigration even before the Chinese Exclusion Act was heavily weighted towards single Chinese men (or potentially married, I guess, but if they had wives already they often remained home in China and the husbands came over as lone men). So there was not as much of a family life and community culture involving children. However, our character could be either the product of a relatively rare but not unique family immigration unit, or potentially biracial with a Chinese father. (There were legal restrictions on interracial marriages between Chinese men and white women, but still some marriages happened, and actually a lot of Chinese laborers in the South married African-American women, apparently.)

Another alternative would be to have a Chinese-American character whose storyline is set during the 1950s or 1960s, after anti-Chinese immigration bans were lifted and more people started to come to America. Obviously, we already have 1950s Maryellen and 1960s Melody, but we have overlapping dolls from the 1940s as well (Molly and Nanea), and I think it could potentially be very interesting to be able to compare girls with very different cultural backgrounds living in the same time period. (I'm inspired a bit here by one of my favorite children's historical novels, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, about a little Chinese-American girl who comes to New York with her parents in 1947.) Depending on what works best time-frame wise, the character could be either an American-born child of immigrant parents or have immigrated along with her parents. (Kirsten herself is an immigrant, and Rebecca iirc is supposed to have been born after her parents came to America, but either "type" of immigrant story could be very interesting looking at a different time in American history and a different country of origin.)

I think a Japanese-American character could also have interesting potential. I do think that having a storyline that directly includes experience in an internment camp would be inappropriate. There's a lot of discussion about "struggle narratives" versus narratives that are a bit more...idk, affirming? when it comes to writing historical stories about children of color. I think you can have a story that acknowledges racism and oppression without centering it in a way that can be traumatic for readers who share the characters' identities. (Or go the route that Addy's books do. They don't shy away from the trauma of slavery on Addy's family, but the first book is mostly about her and her mother escaping and the rest of them are about her life in newfound freedom.) If they were to do a Japanese-American character, they could also do something in the 1950s or 1960s, which could work with acknowledging the impact of internment camps (perhaps through the remembered experience of the character's parents or older siblings) while not feeling like trauma-dumping. Or they could go for something older, like a character set in the 1920s.

I also have some more ideas about potential storylines for a historical Mormon character, but I think that might have to be another post. (And, as previously stated, I think the lack of an Asian AG historical doll is much more glaring.)

[random-thought-depository]

One of the things that’s interesting about Space Seed is the way it makes the Star Trek universe a de facto alternate history setting. Based on the bits dropped there and elsewhere in TOS, their later twentieth and early twenty-first century looked very different from our later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries!

The Eugenics Wars supposedly happened in the 1990s. The Star Trek original series ran from 1966-69, so this would have been about 25-30 years in the future at the time; the 1990s were for 1960s people what the 2050s are to us in 2020. So, not a bad time frame for events that were supposed to be near-future-ish but not immediate.

Or, another way of looking at it, from the viewpoint of 1960s people, the Eugenics Wars would have been about as far in the future as WWII was in the past. I get the impression history felt faster in the ‘60s, because of proximity of the great upheavals of the earlier twentieth century, and because the space race and the counterculture were ongoing big things, and because after 1970 or so technological progress slowed because a lot of the technological “low-hanging fruit” was picked. Think about how much the world changed from 1940 to 1967! People expected that pace of change to continue in the future. Thus all the middle twentieth century expectations that we’d have moon colonies and commercial fusion power and so on by the early 2000s; the sort of expectations you see in science fiction like 2001. The original Star Trek series was very much part of that trend, projecting manned space exploration of the other solar system planets and suspended animation technology and genetically engineered superhumans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. There’s a line in Space Seed when Kirk, Spock, etc. are first taking a look around Khan’s ship, that went approximately “Yeah, they used suspended animation in exploration ships back then cause back then it took years just to reach other planets of the solar system, interplanetary travel with faster ships that didn’t need suspended animation only started in 2018.” As somebody sitting in a timeline where it’s now 2021 and Luna is still the most distant world a human has walked on, hearing that sure made me feel something!

I remember somebody once commenting that Star Trek TOS’s vision of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reflected an idea, common during the ‘60s, that very soon we’d either get our act together or blow ourselves up. And I think what that comment was getting at was... There was an expectation that failure to do the former would quickly result in the latter so it was going to be one or the other. Something like our timeline, where we just sort of muddled through for the next fifty years, wasn’t expected; they’d have expected a scenario like that to have ended in the blow ourselves up outcome by now.

I think later Star Trek tried to kinda soft-retcon the timeline of the Eugenics Wars but never committed to explicitly changing it. According to First Contact, the “Third World War” happened around the 2050s (and this was building off stuff we saw in TNG). I think the implication is supposed to be that WWIII was the Eugenics Wars, but that requires ignoring some very explicit statements of dates in Space Seed and Wrath of Khan, and as I said, they never explicitly committed to a retcon. If we take what we see in the show at face value we’d conclude the Eugenics Wars and WWIII were two separate conflicts separated by about 50 years. Which makes it seem a bit weird that the Eugenics Wars apparently weren’t counted as a world war; based on the descriptions of them in Space Seed they were very destructive! Maybe the United States and the rest of the Americas and Australia and the Oceania nations stayed neutral, so they’re considered technically not a world war? Maybe they were less a single big war with two clearly defined sides and more a big mess of smaller interconnected conflicts like IIRC the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War?

Which... Star Trek has a reputation as the big optimistic science fiction, but this is making Star Trek Earth’s history from 1950 to 2070-ish look rather dystopian! We won’t be able to fully judge their history against ours until 2070 or so, but so far our post-WWII history looks more peaceful than their post-WWII history! One of the defining and good features of the post-WWII age is that it’s a long period of relative peace; it doesn’t sound like the people on Star Trek Earth would be saying the same thing from the vantage point of their 2021. I guess civilization blowing itself up every two generations would still be an improvement on the early twentieth century pattern of civilization blowing itself up every generation...

I think there have been some Star Trek novels written about the Eugenics Wars, and they squared it with real history by portraying it as a covert conflict that most people are the time were completely unaware of, kind of like the stuff that happens in Stargate and Men In Black? Eh, the descriptions of the Eugenics Wars in Space Seed really don’t fit with that idea. And I’ll just say that I don’t really like that “it’s all secret and the regular people have no idea any of this happening” trope; it’s OK in the right context but it’s got implications that limit storytelling and undertones of elitism I don’t like and I think a lot of the time it’s kind of lazy. If I were to just roll with the dates given for the Eugenics Wars, I’d take the approach of just leaning into the Star Trek universe being an honorary alternate history setting; I’d headcanon Star Trek Earth’s later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as being 2001-ish, with commercial fusion power and moon colonies and crewed expeditions to the other planets of the solar system and lots of “futuristic” stuff (like, y’know, the process that created Khan) by the ‘90s and ‘00s. Admittedly I’m not sure how to square this with Star Trek: the Voyage Home, which mostly takes place in a 1980s that seems real-world-ish; it’d take some creative interpretation to reconcile them.

And, y’know... In some ways, Star Trek Earth’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century look better and more interesting than ours. Their world is clearly much more technologically advanced! Their space program is far more advanced than ours! On the other, looking at the descriptions of the Eugenics Wars ... if we had to choose, I think it might be a good thing that we got our history and not their history. Khan Noonien Singh sounds like a guy who’s inflicted a lot more death and suffering than Donald Trump and COVID19 ever will. Compared to Star Trek Earth’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century, our late twentieth and early twenty-first century is kind of boring, and sometimes boring is good.

And all this makes me think of something Chris Wayan (the Planetocopia guy) said about the Randomia principle:

“Let's say you're contemplating Randomia, an alternate Earth no better or worse than ours, with roughly the same biomass, same amount of arable land, about the same population... just re-distributed. Now, what regions will you notice the most? First, your home, of course, and then, other well-known regions--and well-known means inhabited.

Randomia will always look inferior! For, by definition, most readers will be from our world's high-population zones. Random changes will, on average, degrade them. And the lands that improve, that become the heartlands of Randomia's civilizations, are likely to be barren obscure lands in our world, mere names (if that) to non-Randomian readers. The Turnovian version of Europe is cold (millions of European readers groan), while the green Sahara nurtures great civilizations (a handful of Saharan readers cheer). If you love civilization, Randomia will probably kill or cripple the ones you love, and plant its greatest civilizations in places you associate with backwardness.

So the grass always looks browner in a parallel world--because what you value most, what you KNOW to value, is generally lost. This principle makes it hard to see alternate worlds fairly.”

The long post-WWII peace is something that hadn’t happened yet in the 1960s, therefore when Star Trek writers wrote a future history that didn’t contain it, they didn’t know they were writing a history that didn’t contain something important and good about the real history that was actually going to unfold. From the vantage point of 1967, it was optimistic to assume there wouldn’t be a nuclear war in the 1970s or 1980s! We, in 2021, can look back on the post-WWII period of relative peace that stretches 70 years long behind us, and know that our timeline contains this important good thing.

On the other hand, my perspective is also influenced by this Randomia effect; the more advanced technology of Star Trek 2021 Earth likely implies less poverty and more advanced medicine, which over a few decades might have saved more lives than the Eugenic Wars ended, making their timeline net better than ours (though containing great tragedies we avoided). One could certainly choose to imagine their world as being that way!