What got YOU into Alternate History?

Rex Britanniae

Straightforward Question: What got you into alternate history as a genre?

For me, I liked fantasy, and found Turtledove's Darkness Series.

After I finished that, I wanted to see if I could find anything else by him, and that got me reading Worldwar, and the rest *DUMB JOKE WARNING* is history.
 

boredatwork

Banned
An old harry turtledove story about byzantium was an early instigator.

Didn't become actively interested until I started playing the various Civ games later on.
 

Johnestauffer

I have always enjoyed science fiction and techno thrillers. I first started reading some of the techno-thrillers that dealt with 'what if' wars.
Then I stumbled on some of the books by Peter Tsouras (not sure of the spelling).
I was looking up new books on the internet and stumbled on the Urchonia site.
From there to here was a short trip.
Oh the butterflies that made this possible....
 

Ofaloaf

NationStates, believe it or not. Started RPing on the forums there, and so finally had to place my fictional country down somewhere. After I started going into RPs set in the past, I figured it was due to construct an actual history for 'Whutehfeckia,' as my little made-up land was called.

That's when I started to think about What-Ifs. I had placed my country over what is most of Patagonia and Arucania and decided it was originally a mixed Dutch-German settlement. Obviously neither Spain or Argentina ever was able to grab those lands, so Argentina had to be smaller because of my country, right? Without any of the resources and people of the south, would they have fared as well as well in the War of the Triple Alliance?

The modern-day map I eventually made for this ATL was kind of wonky- I think it's actually up here on the boards somewhere.
 

Nicole

The What If? 2 anthology... went on the internet to find more of this "counterfactual history", and found myself here.
 

Theodoric

A newspaper article on alternative history mainly about Turtledove. I looked it up on wikipedia, than tried googling but mistyped, and ended up here.
 

Dave Howery

wargaming back in the 80s... one of the first board wargames I ever bought was actually an AH concept, a cheap little paper and posterboard game called "Raid on Iran", about what might have happened if the aborted attempt to rescue the embassy hostages had gone on. This was back in '81, when Iran/US hatred for each other was at it's maximum. So, when solo-gaming it, I'd spend more time sending my US special forces soldiers to chuck grenades into Iranian mobs than actually rescuing the hostages. From that point on, I bought and played several more board wargames, and somewhere along the way, I realized that a lot of the fun of the games was massively changing history. Thus, my slow descent into AH fandom, and the madness that is this website...
 

catboy637

Long story alert...anyway:
I was interseted in specualitive bology, like WI the dinosaurs surrvivved, and read some books on it.
I found a page on AH on Wikipedia one day, and I got HFR.
Got bored with it, and read Great War:American Front. I then read T-191.
 

cabbit

I think it was Eric Flint 1632 book around 1999. I was always into science fiction, had a friend tell me about the book, picked it up and read it so many times the cover fell off and bought a new one. Now I've read all of his 1632-verse books, even the slow and not so exciting ones. Then the IOST books, I didn't even know the was a second book by Sterling till about a year after I read it. So that's what got me it to Alt Hist and now I read all kinds not just Space Bats. I do love a good what if!!
 

Jaydoh

It was a combination of a love of maps (which began in fourth grade at the latest) and a love of alternate zoology (my local library had a copy of Dougal Dixon's After Man that I just loved as a kid). Google searches revealed very few websites about alternate zoology, but a few of the ones I found had links to alternate history websites.
 

Monkeyflung

I think it all started for me with star trek's mirror universe.That, the tv show sliders, and 'what if's and 'elseworlds' in comics.
It was a short leap from alternate fiction to alternate history.
 
Diogenes

Diogenes

I had an unhealthy addiction to history and fantasy. I could (and can) stare at a map for hours on end, and I had read a book called Stars and Stripes at War (or sommat like that...), the second alt. hist. book of a seires (of 2...) where GB pre-emptivly struck in the American Civil War, causing the South to re-join the Union. In the second, the Union liberates both Mexico and Ireland (GB took it over and tried to make a shitty canal.), makes a super-gatling gun, a mega-Moniter, and are begining to make a steam-tank.

Then, I thought 'Hey! Is there a alt. hist. website?' and the Force was with me that day, for it brought me here. Oh, speaking of the force, Star Wars was (and is) also a HUGE influence. So was Rome: Total War and Civ 3.
 
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