I'm generally willing to accept the parallel history despite fundamental early split in the universes with fantasy books because, well, it's fantasy. Magic can do whatever it wants, right? :) (BTW, see "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" for another example where magic has been around forever and had significant effects on history, and yet they're still fighting Napoleon.)
When it gets really annoying is when someone tries to do the same thing with a SF book, where there's no "logical" justification for it. Turtledove does this a lot in his "the South wins the Civil War" series. Despite a major divergence in the 1860s he's still got historical people showing up in the books into the 1940s (albeit with different career paths,) and he's not even the worst of the offenders (though he is one of the more prolific ones.)
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I'm generally willing to accept the parallel history despite fundamental early split in the universes with fantasy books because, well, it's fantasy. Magic can do whatever it wants, right? :) (BTW, see "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" for another example where magic has been around forever and had significant effects on history, and yet they're still fighting Napoleon.)
When it gets really annoying is when someone tries to do the same thing with a SF book, where there's no "logical" justification for it. Turtledove does this a lot in his "the South wins the Civil War" series. Despite a major divergence in the 1860s he's still got historical people showing up in the books into the 1940s (albeit with different career paths,) and he's not even the worst of the offenders (though he is one of the more prolific ones.)