Books

[dsrtao]

_Preacher: Proud Americans_, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
_Thirteenth Child_, Patricia Wrede

I continue to try Preacher looking for the story, and finding just enough of it to continue.

Wrede's book is an enjoyable fantasy about growing up. It suffers from the first standard Alternate History mistake, which is unwarranted similarities to our own history after a major change. It also suffers from the standard clash between magic and alt-history: if magic is at all useful, why is this world anything at all like ours?

People have been criticizing Wrede for eliminating the Siberian land-bridge, stocking the Americas with the descendants of Pleistocene megafauna, and having the beasts be so nasty that they ate every pre-Columbian settlement attempt. This is being treated as racism, in that there are no aboriginal peoples in the Americas in the book. As far as I am concerned, this is a category error. The problem is that the cultures she does show us shouldn't be so close as they are to anything we are familiar with.

That said, it's fun and lightweight.

Comments

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your clear remarks about Wrede's book. I haven't read it, and was a little confused about the ruckus. I had the thought while reading all the reaction that by definition alternative would require big differences, which might logically include changing the origins of the population, but your thoughts actually make the racism charges seem more sensible to me. If, as you say, the resulting history is much like the original, then it might seem that she's just trying to get rid of the first folks due to some prejudice. If one is going for an alternative timeline, it should be *really* alternative.

[dsrtao]

The resulting history... doesn't make sense.

We get to see a small chunk of Columbia (the analogue to the USA) from around Cleveland to St. Louis, and a short expedition across the Mississippi. We see it through the eyes of a college professor's daughter, the unlucky 13th child of the title. The most advanced technology is the steam locomotive.

Nobody goes to church, except for a wedding. No comment on what kind of denomination it is -- I'm not entirely certain, but I don't think Christianity was mentioned.

There was a rebellion against England -- but England doesn't even have the same name. No mention of France as a power, and in our universe, the war between France and England was a major reason that the Revolutionary War succeeded.

Washington, Adams and Jefferson were Presidents. The only shared place-names, however, are Pennsylvania and Valley Forge.

There was a Lewis and Clark expedition... which is especially odd, since there's no reason for either of them to have been in a position to do such exploration without aborigines.

Basically, I'm saying that the people who are calling this racist are wrong, because it's alt-hist, but it's also not good alt-hist.

-

[seawasp]

It's not Alt-Hist. It's Fantasy with some Hist thrown in. I don't think Wrede went to any length to try to figure out the "branch points", etc., or anything of that nature. She wanted to say "What if a magic-using Europe ran into the New World, but filled with Megafauna and NOT bunches of natives". And wrote that. And said "and screw it if the history wouldn't really work that way", which is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, if you're not actually pretending to be extrapolating some alt-hist, which -- so far in my read of it -- I don't get the impression she is. More like using some familiar elements because they amuse her and will draw an audience.

[dsrtao]

... yeah, that's a better way of putting it.

[metageek.livejournal.com]

So it's A Different Flesh, but with magic instead of history?