Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-25626-20150324180019/@comment-21519-20150325032148

Oh yeah, the "evil idea." He's done Hitler winning, he's done Hitler losing but the winners are just as bad. He's done the Union winning the ACW but turning the South into one gigantic jail for decades and decades afterward. He's done numerous post-apocalyptic stories, with the survivors of a nuclear holocaust in one timeline, the survivors of a cataclysmic plague in another, and one or two others who've survived a society that broke down under unknown circumstances. He's even done a world where humans never evolved and the top evolutionary slot went to something much nastier, even if that was a shared-universe work.

So "evil" is probably something very puckish. The only other way I could see him topping what he's done before would be--and this could be a very interesting project indeed--to rewrite the broad swaths of world history in such a way that things remain recognizably similar, but with an inherently darker tone as though human nature itself were more brutal. Like in Star Trek's mirror universe, only with real-life events being altered instead of a fictional continuity. I'd like to see that.

One advantage to darkening human nature as opposed to specific events is that he wouldn't be bound by the need to keep his villains realistic. In a realistic AH the worst characters can't be any worse than the worst historical figures; we all know who Featherston is a stand-in for. But the less realistic stories show that HT's imagination is capable of conjuring up far more nightmarish figures than you'd ever see in the real world, like Rhavas or the Banished One.