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  1. Margaret Beckett as PM

    How can we make this come about, and what happens as a result? The first hurdle is her being elected leader of the Labour Party. In OTL she's Labour Leader in 1994 after the death of John Smith, but loses the subsequent election to Tony Blair and John Prescott. The only way round this I can...

  2. China in the Sudan

    Just an experiment, really, but I was listening to a radio programme last night about China’s involvement in Africa. There is some concern that, where the UN and IMF offer aid and purchase resources in return for anti-corruption and human rights reforms, China is willing to make deals with any...

  3. Earth-changing inventions: low-tech

    I was reading about fish-hooks the other day, as you do; specifically about the enormous change they must have made to hunter-gatherer societies by providing a steady source of low-effort nutrition. I went on to wonder what other amazingly small and obvious artefacts/processes have had such...

  4. (Professor) Nebulous

    Does anybody else listen to this? It's not exactly AH (more slightly-surreal-comedic-future-history) but I'm hooked. Mark Gatiss is excellent as always, and the script-writing is a pleasing mix of sci-fi parody and just being weird. It's great! :D

  5. Worst possible scenario: Chernobyl

    Not exactly a cheery topic, but anyway ... I watched a docu-drama thing about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster the other week, with Adrian Edmundson surprisingly good as the tortured guilty scientist (although I did keep expecting him to launch into random acts of senseless violence). According...

  6. Carausius' Britain

    I remember coming across Carausius when I was about 10 in the Rosemary Sutcliff novel The Silver Branch (I was a huge Rosemary Sutcliff fan). In brief, he was commander of the Roman navy in the English Channel in the late 280's AD, who decided to set up his own breakaway Empire in 286 with the...

  7. An Indian War of Independence

    The thirty or so years leading up to Indian Independence were marked by civil unrest, and a 'second mutiny' was by all accounts widely anticipated. As far as my (embarrassingly limited) reading suggests, the avoidance of full-scale armed conflict was largely due to the popularity of the Mahatma...

  8. No/Fewer Cold War Spies

    WI the Great Powers hadn't developed the extensive and sophisticated spy networks that existed during the Cold War in OTL? We would, of course, be deprived of a whole genre of cool, but apart from that, what would change? Obviously, the side with the better spy network gets a boost in the...

  9. Emperors of Cologne and Constantinople

    I was reading Chrétien de Troyes the other day (as you do). In Cligés, one of his more interesting romances, he describes a marriage between the 'Emperor of Constantinople' and the daughter of the 'Emperor of Germany' in Cologne. The romance is set in the reign of King Arthur, and I think...

  10. WI Lennon not murdered

    Does he sink gently into drug addled obscurity? Or does he, on the brink of the Z-list, patch up relations with McCartney and re-launch the Beatles on a wave of exciting new music that makes 'The Bigger Bang' look like a group of pox-ridden old farts desperately trying to recapture their former...

  11. Islamic Renaissance

    Stolen this idea shamelessly from Max Sinister's "Muslims Conquer Italy" thread. My instant response to his question was, what would the Italian Renaissance be like under Islamic rule? That thread has now more sensibly turned to discussion of how the conquest might come about, but I wonder, if...

  12. Alternate art history?

    Putting this in Pre-1900, but it could go anywhere, really. I was wondering what people think about the influence of artists on history. For example, how would the world be different without Shakespeare? Would it actually be all that different? It's hard to think of any world-changing...

  13. Challenge: Chivalric society in 21st Century

    I've been trying to think of a scenario in which we could plausibly have a chivalric society - one ruled and policed by knights errant, who are bound by their own sense of honour to uphold justice and protect those who cannot protect themselves - somewhere in the world in the present day. On...

  14. John Smith doesn't die in 1994

    I've seen a lot of interesting ideas about British politics on the board recently, so ... What if John Smith (Neil Kinnock's successor as leader of the Labour opposition) doesn't die in 1994? Although he had a reputation as a reformer, he definitely wasn't (to my knowledge) into Blair's Third...

  15. Greece goes Communist at end of Second World War?

    At the end of the Second World War, there was a substantial Communist movement in Greece. Many of the partisans (effectively the Greek armed forces during the occupation) had distinctly Red politics and were widely expected to take over peacetime government of the country. In very brief, the...

  16. Japan not nuked in 1945

    Sorry if this is old hat, but what if the US decides not to drop nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945? Let's say Einstein's famous letter actually arrives, or that the threat of nuclear attack (backed up by the relatively harmless destruction of an atoll somewhere as demonstration) proves enough to...

  17. Islamic 'Pope'?

    **First off, am aware that this is a rather sensitive topic, especially today, so please, my sincere apologies to anybody who might be offended.** What if Islam had a 'Pope' figure - a supreme Ayatollah (?) who was the ultimate terrestrial authority to Moslems in the same way that the Pope is...
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