Title: Khan Victorious! - A Star Trek Timeline!
Author: CaekDaemon
Genre: Alternate History
Rating: T
Fandom: Star Trek
Words: About 187,474 on A03 at the time of this post (significantly longer and further along at alternatehistory.com)
Published: 2018 (Original Thread on Alternatehistory.com began in 2017)
Status: WIP
Short Summary: Part timeline and part story, Khan Victorious aims to explore what happens in a world where Khan Noonien Singh won the Eugenics Wars, leading to the science of genetic engineering not being abandoned by mankind, but elevated and embraced to its full potential, a world where Augmentation is given to the entire world, from the end of the Eugenics Wars to Star Trek Nemesis and beyond.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14160555

I went back and forth on whether to post a review of this, as it's a alternate history timeline set in the world of Star Trek rather than it is an actual fanfic. I eventually decided to hell with it and put it for review. However it's perhaps one of the most impressive and detailed pieces of fiction I've ever come across. Khan Victorious originally began on alternatehistory.com and in fact recently won the Harry Turtledove 2018 Award there.

CaekDaemon often goes to Tolkien levels of detail in his writing, and it leads to perhaps one of the most impressive fan works I've seen, and it's certainly a highly recommended treasure for anyone who likes Star Trek. My vote would be 5/5.

 

That isn't a fic. It's a timeline as the name implies.

So there really are no characters, no real conflict, no nothing. It's just a dry list of events, lacking even the typical "history textbook" format some authors use for these.

I understand if someone follows these from the beginning and than engages in the between update discussions, but trying to read this as a typical fic will bore you to death.

Edit: Since I hadn't actually read this in ages I went back and tried to read some of this TL. While it isn't exactly as bad as I remembered it's still unreadable.

Through the first two parts it's entirely exposition. The kind you would normally scan for a couple of keywords and go to the more interesting part. It never ever gets to the point.

Overall this is like reading someones world building notes arranged in pseudo fic form.

Overall it's 2/5 for me. Mostly because when I wrote my original comment I had confused this with "This sceptered Moon" and if nothing else this TL is a hell of a lot better than that abomination.

 

This makes me leery as hell.

This guy can’t write for shit, because he doesn’t understand basic grammar conventions. His “Tolkien level of detail” is closer to “Tolkien vomited his every stray thought onto a page with all the skill of a ten year old.” He can’t plot for shit and managed to write about 300k words of an ASOIAF au that didn’t even get beyond “the king is coming to Winterfell,” and had hairy cows as its “big thing.” IIRC, it spent a straight 50k words on Ned Starks finances.

I imagine this is just as retarded as everything else that pours out of his head. I’ll still give it a look, but given it’s a timeline, it doesn’t deserve to be here anyway.

Edit: I read it, and the very first part is actually a story, surprise surprise. To caekdaemon’s credit, he has learned some grammar, but he still doesn’t understand the value of a fucking period or the necessity of brevity. Run on sentences everywhere. More importantly, he still uses too much fucking detail. Sure it’s a lot of words, but most of it is pointless retarded shit or is wordy for the sake of being wordy.

Also, his plot for the opening of this “timeline” is hard to even get behind.

Spoiler

I mean really, suddenly, everyone has augment babies and won’t fight Khan because of that, so that makes Khan win. I mean, fuck, the guy is still an asshole. If everyone at the end of WW2 started having little hitlers would we have suddenly stopped bombing Berlin?

1/5 for being fucking a worthless waste of my own time.

 

So I used to be pretty into the whole "Alternate History" timeline thing, and then I realized my niggling problem with the whole thing. That kept me from really enjoying the whole thing even though I thought the potential was there. Issue that even the "good" examples of the genre suffered from, which was that there was a whole lot of buildup slash potential that sort of fizzles out far, far, far away from any sort of payoff.

And absolutely nowhere is that problem better exemplified than here.

I keep coming back to this timeline business out of nostalgia and lingering hope that this time, someone has written something that I could unequivocally call a good. What I got was something that reminded me why I stopped reading it and what'll hopefully remind me to never give it another chance.

As a timeline it's unbelievably bloated, endless writings on minutia development of technology, society, mentality and so on. Retreading the same decades for each field before jumping forward in time. Trying to show a realistic and coherent development of the world and politics, then twisting thing so that it could still be seen as part of the Star Trek universe. So it's 5/5 on that front.

As a story I'll give it 1/5, I would have been happier if it never existed.

So I'll average it out to 3/5.

 

I'm 99% sure you mean buildup/potential. My mind cannot help but interpret this as you being disappointed because there's no slash "payoff" scenes.

As for the work itself...

Eesh.

I'm not big on timelines, but this fails both as a timeline and a story. The word-vomit has no place in a timeline. The whole point of a timeline is to sharpen things up and describe events without getting bogged down in the prose.

This is neither wholly a one or a two star for me. But it's damn sure closer to the bottom than anything else. I wouldn't recommend this even to a fan.

1/5