Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
[...] What do people think of alternate universe books in general? [...]
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I'm not a fan. I used to be more enthusiastic than I am now, but have hit too many disappointments to treat new offerings with much enthusiasm. My opinion extends to both time-travel stories and alternate universe stories as the two are so often intertwined.
I don't mind forward-time-travel so much, that's just a way of creating a new world for some fantasy/sci-fi story. But going backwards and forwards and finding out that in the end it was all supposed to happen just like it did, and/or that the alternative was worse than we have so we change back, has become too cliche for me to really enjoy. Even Stephen King couldn't resist this in his version of this story (he didn't try to kill Hitler, he tried to save JFK, but it's the same basic story - although in King's case he had me hopeful that he'd returned to form for the first half/two-thirds of the book, but lost me at the end).
I don't mind alternate universes so much when there is no time travel involved, and when there is no attempt to explain the difference as some single twist of fate. Much better to say, "this is some variation of the world where things are like this," without trying to explain how they got to be like that. The world is too complex for trite explanations to be convincing.
... Recently I was reading some old posts on MR about historical fiction that showed some people have quite high expectations of accuracy (eg:
Outlander got some things wrong). This, for me, is where alternative universes can work; they let the writer create something familiar enough that they don't have to spend lots of time explaining it to us, but they don't leave us with the expectation of detailed accuracy.
Terry Pratchett's
Nation is a good example of an alternative universe that works for me.