Alien Space Bats
4 o'clock, June 14, 2005
Okay, this weekend I’m writing an irrational history featuring Alien Space Bats.
Poor writing is often criticized for its lack of plausibility. These attacks are usually phrased in terms of the need for “Alien Space Bats” or ASBs as the motive force behind the change. For example, “Well, Alien Space Bats could land the German army in Wales.” The use of the term Alien Space Bats has been expanded to include handwaving difficulties in order to get to an interesting discussion.
(Wikipedia, soc.history.what-if.)
Figure 1. Alien space bat in captivity.
In fact, I might make ASBs a regular feature.
While I love the idea of Alien Space Bats, I'm now faced with a moral quandary:
That Wikipedia article could use some serious editing. Since it's Wikipedia, it would be technically easy for me to go in and do an editing pass. This would be satisfying in various ways. However, I'm way behind on all sorts of important things that I ought to be doing, and a thorough edit would require some research. (For example, I would feel obliged to find out whether the newsgroup misuses the phrase "plausible deniability" in the same way the article does, before correcting it in the article.)
Ah, well. Perhaps I'll just post an "ironic" note to the newsgroup mentioning the alternate history in which I went and cleaned up the writing in that Wikipedia article.