…and the friend says “Who’s Hitler?”

Indeed.

Britain 1.0 suffers from overexertion and senility, Britain 2.0 emerges from the new US revolution all eager to cut the imperial cake, Stalin runs naked military build-up while on “existentially hostile” terms with Brits 1.0 and plays an agreeable fellow for Brits 2.0… Germany is sour due to Versailles, the rest of Europe is chafing, tired or sometimes (Italy) both…

But some people seem to still believe there was any way this mess could avoid going up in flames — if only that one failed artist with a bad case of brain syphilis did not sniff all the fairy dust.

A guy is complaining to his friend about how his time machine malfunctioned so instead of killing baby Hitler he killed Woodrow Wilson, and the friend says “Who’s Hitler?”

John W Campbell, the magisterial editor who shaped the Golden Age of science fiction, considered Rudyard Kipling the first modern science fiction writer. Kipling, he explained, was the first to go beyond simply providing the reader with the essential background information needed to read his story. He was thinking here of “With the Night Mail”. When this pseudo-journalistic account of transatlantic dirigible traffic first appeared in 1905, the text was accompanied by weather advisories, classified advertisements, shipping notices, and a wide range of other snippets intended to suggest that the tale was in fact appearing in a magazine published in 2000. All this stage business was extraneous to the story, strictly speaking; but it did help to establish the setting.

Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it gets the message across subliminally.

If Faulkner was right, Western alt-history goes back to 1492.

Heh. Genres start long before they become fashionable as often as not.

The oldest detective stories AFAIK were parts of the Arabian Nights and even Oedipus Rex.

Kipling’s “As Easy as ABC” (1912) was the sci-fi story in a style very distinct from early ones (whether Verne, Wells, or early pulp era) and closely resembling styles that dominated much later: exposition cut to bare necessity, more organic structure than Conundrum of The Week #14, neither focused on a single gimmick nor a “10 foot LASER pole” style conversion… oh, and it also introduced a gadget that later was dubbed Tractor Beam. For that matter, he had the impending wave of steampunk predicted (and preemptively mocked) back in 1894 in “The King”.

Socialisms…

There are many, many alternate history stories about the Nazis winning World War 2.

Unsurprisingly. Seeing how it’s the birth of (now dying) New World Order, and what passes for its history is mostly nonsense to begin with. Smoke and mirrors of fairy tales by the Soviet Communists, fairy tales by the American Communists, overcompensation by the “Allies who also won” and puffs from Wehraboo smoking crack already overlap and easily mix into surreal shapes.