This idea has been haunting me for literally years, so I decided to finally pull the trigger on it! Many years ago I read a vignette on this site with a really interesting structure: it was a fully conceptualized TL, conveyed entirely in one post in the form of a fictional academic syllabus. Absolutely fascinating. Read for yourself:
It occurred to me that this would be a really interesting concept for an AHC thread for the creation of concise one-and-done timelines and discussion of their implications, so I've thrown down the gauntlet! Since this is academic in tone, if you want to contribute a syllabus to the thread it should have the following format:
No current politics! Don't get me in trouble 😂 I put the thread here to give you all the maximum range to experiment, but post-1900 PODs are perfectly acceptable. Future history ones are iffy, they can easily get off the rails, so no PODs later than 1999 without asking first! If it gets into the 21st century find people who aren't currently involved in hot-button issues any more to attribute fake books to.
*As an aside, based the first comment I'm allowing theoretical finals/instructions for specific assignments and other collegiate-level academically structured materials, as long as they meet the basic challenge of alluding to a fully realized chain of alternate history events and are accomplished in one post.
It occurred to me that this would be a really interesting concept for an AHC thread for the creation of concise one-and-done timelines and discussion of their implications, so I've thrown down the gauntlet! Since this is academic in tone, if you want to contribute a syllabus to the thread it should have the following format:
- No need to include a student name, but it should open with the college it's being taught at, a realistic course name and ideally also number, and a professor. Making up colleges/professors is fine, but it should add some commentary to your scenario in some way if that's the case.
- It should have at least a paragraph-long "I: Course Outline".
- Most of the heavy lifting should be done in "II: Reading Materials", relying exclusively on titles and authors. If one of those works directly revolves around the POD you can include one (1) footnote, otherwise you can comment on it in a separate post.
- "III: Lecture Schedule" and "IV: Grading" must be included like any proper syllabus, though boilerplate is perfectly fine and depending on POD using ahistorical day names/time systems would be perfectly acceptable.
No current politics! Don't get me in trouble 😂 I put the thread here to give you all the maximum range to experiment, but post-1900 PODs are perfectly acceptable. Future history ones are iffy, they can easily get off the rails, so no PODs later than 1999 without asking first! If it gets into the 21st century find people who aren't currently involved in hot-button issues any more to attribute fake books to.
*As an aside, based the first comment I'm allowing theoretical finals/instructions for specific assignments and other collegiate-level academically structured materials, as long as they meet the basic challenge of alluding to a fully realized chain of alternate history events and are accomplished in one post.
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