Ideas?! Ideas? need ideas

[piChubby]

I'm looking for ideas of worlds that are around the time frame 1960s-1800. I already added one parallel world which is in the year 3000 and another that is an alternate future of a different out come for the civil war. I just need two ideas of parallel worlds in the time periods I said.

 

[Harpo]

Welcome to Chrons. We’re full of ideas, and sometimes a bit silly

 

[Wayne Mack]

I'm not sure what constitutes a world in this context, but there was a lot happening in southeast Asia in the 1940s-1960s, Japanese aggression, Chinese communism, Korean war, Vietnam war. In the US, the 1960s had the Cuban missile crisis. Before that there were regime changes in Cuba and South America, and the Red Scare in the US. In the 1800s US, there was the near extermination of the native American tribes. In the 1840s, there was nearly a war between the US and Canada over the northern border, see Fifty-Four Forty or Fight. Perhaps consider if electric vehicles had become popular instead of gasoline powered vehicles. I'm just scratching the surface, but I feel that there are a lot of possible events in 1800-1960 to spawn alternate history timelines.

 

[msstice]

Ideas? You are out of ideas? Now, if you had come here and announced that you had run out of words, or motivation, or, even, laser toner, I would have believed you. But IDEAS?

Ideas infest the air like a thick sickening miasma. Ideas run through the streets of our minds and coat the foundations of the houses with a dark, stagnating damp. Ideas collect on the roads in huge mountains of dry tumble weed. the fill up our pockets like matted lint, so we can not put our hands in them anymore on a cold day.

What I am in short supply of is discipline. The discipline to scoop the miasma from the air and form it into a sculpture, to divert the flood in the streets into powerful rivers, to harvest the tumble weed and ... well you get the picture:

Ideas cheap, execution hard, blah, blah, blah.

 

[sule]

Like you did for your first world: pick any event from your timeframe, then ask yourself: "What would have happened if...", then sit down and write down anything that comes to mind. "What would have happened if Nixon wins in '60?" "What would have happened if Germany wins at the Marne?" Write down every answer, even the stupid ones - tell yourself there are no stupid answers. Take anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Don't interrupt yourself with other things. Then, put the list away for a day or two. When you come back to it, pick through the most interesting ones and extrapolate on them.

 

[Ray Zdybrow]

Ideas? You are out of ideas? Now, if you had come here and announced that you had run out of words, or motivation, or, even, laser toner, I would have believed you. But IDEAS?

Ideas infest the air like a thick sickening miasma. Ideas run through the streets of our minds and coat the foundations of the houses with a dark, stagnating damp. Ideas collect on the roads in huge mountains of dry tumble weed. the fill up our pockets like matted lint, so we can not put our hands in them anymore on a cold day.

What I am in short supply of is discipline. The discipline to scoop the miasma from the air and form it into a sculpture, to divert the flood in the streets into powerful rivers, to harvest the tumble weed and ... well you get the picture:

Ideas cheap, execution hard, blah, blah, blah.

Agree, ideas are ten-a-penny

 

[Swank]

How about a world where the protagonist is the secret love child of Marilyn Monroe and JFK?

 

[paranoid marvin]

The problem with writing a believable alternative history is that you have to be pretty clued up with the actual historical period in which your story is set. I would consider writing about an alternative history for a period with which you are knowledgeable or least one in which you would enjoy studying.

If it's alternative American history, you have absolutely tons of subjects to choose from 1940s-60s: World War II, Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, Korea, Vietnam, Cuban missile crisis, Rosa Parks, space race, McCarthyism, Moon landing, cold war, assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King and Malcom X - even the birth of rock and roll. Many of these events were tied up with, or as a result of others of these events - so changing one could have a domino/butterfly effect on the others.