Stephen's User page

Hi, my name is Stephen.

Some of the timelines I'll put here were previously online (from 1996-2005) at users.metro2000.net.

I appreciate any suggestions to make them better, so please use the discussion page for each to leave me a note or two.

I strive for realism in the way I present alternate histories and the subjects within them. The President Gary TL is an old one for me, and has been expanded here to include the president, as well as Vice Presidents under "President Gary," all in Wikipedia style and format. The newest TL, Confederation of British North America, is also quite old, and comes with quite an authentic Constitution.

Timelines I have created here:

• No Gettysburg - part one of a two-part series
• President Gary - What happens when a recent U.S. president resigns with a newly appointed VP?
• Confederation of British North America

• North America Constitution Act (Confederation of British North America)

Suggestions for Alternate Historians:

• Avoid Trite PODs - The temptation to portray someone like Richard Nixon in an alternate 1973 as the head White House janitor is trite, overused and rather lazy. Better to portray his political rise in a *slightly* different way. Say, winning the 1962 race for CA governor, then winning the presidency in 1964 - or losing to Johnson in 1964, but winning in 1968. Like William Jennings Bryan and Aldai Stevenson, winning the nomination and losing the general election twice is not unheard of.
• Use Obscure People - Using real people in a timeline is fun and easy - if, of course, they are portrayed doing plausible things. But using obscure people, and making them rise to prominence in ways they did not in OTL, is frankly more interesting. In my No Gettysburg TL, I show many lesser-known political leaders from OTL becoming President or Vice President of the USA or CSA after a Confederate political victory in the American Civil War. These people act as if they would had the CSA won, and that lends credibility to the TL. Of course, I had a little fun with these REAL people's names - like a President Reagan (a real person).
• PODs Often Change Everything - When divergences occur in your TL, bear in mind that after that POD, people will be in different places than they were in OTL, will be doing different things, and meeting different people. People who NEVER would have been urged to run for political office, or start a business, or become a clergyman meet people who convince them this is just what they should do - and of course, world and local events change, making certain decisions (like joining the military, or not) more likely.

What's also fun to pursue is the death by being in wrong-place-wrong-time phenomena. Someone who got hit by a car in OTL may be 3 seconds late after hearing the POD event announced on the radio and narrowly misses getting hit by a car and isn't killed. A train conductor friend of his who isn't upset over that person's death DOESN'T lose sleep the following night, and DOESN'T wreck the train, carrying a future wealthy businessman who would have died, but who will NOW go on to hire the man who will one day become the leader of his nation, rather than a lonely insurance salesman who killed his neighbor in a fit of anger and got a life prison sentence. Get the picture? ;-)

"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree." - From Timeline by Michael Crichton.

"You mean to say that that machine has travelled into the future?' said Filby. "Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which." - From The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, Chapter 1.

"A country without a memory is a country of madmen." - George Santayana