Books

Jun. 23rd, 2009 06:23 am
dsrtao: dsr as a LEGO minifig (Default)
[personal profile] 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.
Page generated Jan. 24th, 2026 05:09 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios