Well, as relates to the actual discussion in question, I think the problem is that Wrede isn't writing a thoughtful exploration of what the settlement of the American West would have looked like without slavery. It's that she erased Native Americans entirely (and replaced them with monsters), freed the culturally-homogeneous 'Aphrikans', and then just kind of glossed over how the settlers would still have been able to survive/the continent had somehow been 'set up' already in terms of crop cultivation/who built the railroads/etc. -- and all for the sake of telling a frontier story with only the fun bits.

I haven't read the books, so I don't know how relevant these thoughts are, but--from reviews, it sounds like the problem is that she writes out Native Americans and slaves not to explore the role of Native Americans and slaves in history but as a means to an end--a way to write about the past without having to deal with the complicated racial issues that were a crucial component of it. A way to get the "fun parts" of the frontier without that pesky genocide and slavery stuff. I can imagine writing a narrative in which slavery was ended sooner, or in a different way, or a narrative in which Europeans were less successful at starting the practice in the first place--but they confront the issues surrounding slavery rather than sidestepping it. Does that make sense?

Hopefully some other commenters can recommend alt history that deals with slavery in a more nuanced way--I haven't read much on the subject.

I would highly recommend KRS's The Years of Rice and Salt. Mostly highly. It's fabulous. And his treatment of slavery in certain cultural contexts is really quite good.

Mind you, it's basically the last several hundred years of world history assuming that white folks were more than usually susceptible to the black plague, and were essentially all killed. (Okay, so a very few are left, and survive more or less as freaks but don't play a major role.) But considering the superabundance of white folk in speculative fiction, I'm okay with that.

(I was dinking around with a kind of similar alternate history, but in mine white folks were still there, they were just economically out of the loop. Cheng Ho discovered the Americas, which were colonized primarily from West to East... okay, vast oversimplification, and I got *way* hung up on epidemiology. But it meant I'd been reading up on the time period, which really helped me appreciate KSR's piece.)

It trivializes it.

I think that captures an important aspect of it, thank you.

:: I can only look at it this way...if you are Native American in this country and you and your forefathers have faced decades of being excluded, your people's heritage and culture practically eradicated from the land that was taken away from you, where you are generally treated like a third class citizen, would you really want to see yourself and your people being completely removed from "history" entirely? As if they never existed? ::

I can't tell if you meant to capture this in "heritage and culture practically eradicated", but I wish to emphasize that Wrede's world incorporates as if it was true one of the major racist logics used against Native people. We are continually written out of society and existence, as if we only existed long, long ago. Just this morning, Debbie Reese posted about this public art which promises to never forget the Seneca. Despite the fact that the Seneca STILL EXIST. I can't tell you how many times I've had to remind people that Indians existed -- history did not happen like that -- and that Indians continue to exist.

Additionally, one of the major colonialist narratives to justify the Conquest was that this was "an empty land," which was "unused" and "waiting for settlement." Not only was that narrative used to justify racist acts against Native people then, it's used now. And not "merely" used now to justify acts that took place then (although you still see plenty of that!), but to justify contemporary racist acts. U.S. nuclear bomb tests are conducted on Shoshone land "because" it is "empty" and there is "no one" there. Energy development projects, nuclear waste storage, mining: white Americans perceive Native land to be "empty" and "unused" and available for white exploitation even though there are Native people living there.

Against such a backdrop, an allegedly shiny squeeful fantasy about an American frontier in which Indians really did never exist? It goes down very badly.

Oh, also, the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" sentiment feels familiar from RaceFail discussions and seems problematic to me. Just because there's a problem with the standard narrative and with some people's deviation from the standard narrative doesn't mean there are no workable options, assuming you write with respect and do good research... Also it's not like there's some particular mold in which the things a person writes are guaranteed to be "safe" and free from having to worry about being problematic. I am pretty sure this has been addressed and will see if I can find a more comprehensive take on it.

(deleted/reposted for typo cleanup)

Thanks for this; I agree.

well, I'll give it a go, but it really is a complex issue and I don't know if I can do it justice in a way that makes it easier to understand. history itself is a complex process, as is myth-making, and when you get down to it, history and myth-making turn out not to be so far apart. thing is, there isn't just one alternative to the history of the US as "we" know it--and already, different we's are going to know different versions of US history because how it is taught in most public schools already ignores the historical experiences of POC in America.

now, I haven't read Wrede's book. I have read some of the discussions of Wrede's book and I'd sort of like to read it if I could find a copy I didn't have to pay for first, because I find it very problematic that it may be a myth-making attempt that ends with the US being as powerful and wealthy as it is now, without bothering with the stories of how that power and wealth actually came to be.

I guess the short version might be something like this: without slavery, without Native genocide, without the exploitation of Asian labor, and without other, less notorious forms of racial oppression, the US would not be what it is today, and to write a tale where the US comes out "on top" without attending to the suffering that has actually gone into its coming out "on top" is problematic because it makes a logical leap that is not warranted based on experience. Without slavery, the US might not be an economic superpower. Without Native genocide, the US might not stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific--and as some have pointed out, without Native assistance, the first Europeans to set foot here probably wouldn't have survived.

So it's not that alternatives cannot be written, but that they have to take some complexities into account. Especially telling to me is that Wrede's story takes the "empty continent" myth upon which the US actually did predicate its "right" to take over territory that was not in any way empty; anytime a white writer takes up that trope and runs with it--well, I have a hard time imagining one doing so without playing right into the mythos that only the Europeans treated the land as "property owners" should, and therefore indigenous peoples had no inherent right to their territories.

So I've gone off the subject of your original question, which had more to do with slavery, but the same sort of reservations apply, I think. The idea that the US somehow immaculately "tamed" the land as "pioneers" when in fact we did it with chattel/coerced labor is not a new trope, not a fresh alternative to history as it actually occurred--it's an old mythos that has been used to cover up the fact that American wealth was created in large part by slave labor--and that the descendants of that labor are still largely cut off from that wealth.

I don't know if any of this makes sense, but I think the problem lies in that, as perceived by commentators so far, Wrede's narrative doesn't break new imaginative ground. Whether or not that is actually the case, I can't say, not having read it; however, I think the reservations people have about this story are still important and necessary, because any story that changes history this drastically is going to need a very new, very imaginative approach to avoid falling into the same old traps.

So that's how I'm thinking about it.

as some have pointed out, without Native assistance, the first Europeans to set foot here probably wouldn't have survived.

well, in point of fact, there were European settlers here before the Pilgrims, and some of them survived without considerable native assistance, and left again (vikings), and some died or were assimilated (the Roanoke Colony), and some survived with varied levels of assistance (Spaniards, Dutch). I think the argument that at various points people (whom we now call Natives) clearly *did* immigrate to an empty continent here (and elsewhere) and manage to survive (though maybe not on the first attempt) does support quite well the notion that supposing it is *possible* is not out of line.

And I don't believe the Native people settled here in the first place with coerced labor, and I also know that quite a few immigrants to the "New World" pretty much headed straight out into the (by then sometimes hostile) frontier lands and did pretty well by themselves. I'm descended from those people. My people have never owned slaves, and though they probably benefited from cheap textiles, they mostly built their own towns and grew their own food (my ancestors were English, French, German, and Oneida, and ended up in Michigan by way of what is now Canada, Pennsylvania, and New York).

I do appreciate the points that if you eliminate Native people on this continent, you also have to start from scratch as far as cultivated food crops that were native to here, but to say that would have stopped people dead is to ignore the vast number of agricultural products we brought here from europe and africa and the islands AND to assert, as some have, that No One but the natives could Possibly have thought to, say, tap trees. That's not how technological development works in history. There has always been parallel development, though not always on the same timeline, and with substantial gaps like the lack of the Wheel in the Americas.

My problem with a lot of discussions like these is that half the comments start with, "Now, I haven't actually read the book, but..."
Yes, it sounds horrible, but I always reserve my judgments until I've actually read the book in question.

I don't know, I think that the tropes a book employs can be discussed without having read the whole thing, or even any of it, as long as a reasonable summary is provided... the fine details of a book, the connotations and shadings, obviously can't be--but if a book's ten-word *premise*, its "elevator pitch", is problematic, and the summary does not indicate that dealing with the problematic-ness is something the book does... I don't see why a non-reader wouldn't be well-equipped to address what's wrong with the premise. Maybe the book does grapple with its premise in a clever and subtle way, and the summaries we have don't indicate that--but I'd be surprised if that was the case here. And on some level, even if there's clever and subtle grappling going on, a problematic premise is a problematic premise no matter what.

Like, if a book's premise was "The Crusades, casting the crusaders as 100% Good Guys, but in space, which is awesome!", I would find that icky and wouldn't mind saying so before I read the book, you know?

Am I missing something here with this line of reasoning?

This particular discussion isn't really about the book though. It's about the question "Is there some particular key way of exploring how things would have looked without slavery that would not trip these 'ignoring the victims' emotional buttons?".

The answer, afaict, being "Yes, there are lots of ways, though the idea is problematic so you'd have to be careful. But from all accounts this book chooses one of the bad ways, and here is why the way it seems to have chosen is bad."

And I think a lot of the conversations around this book have only been tangentially about the book itself. From what I've seen they've more been about the responses of fans of the book to the idea that it might be racist, or explaining the American Indian view of history, or looking at the way history gets portrayed in historical AUs in general etc. You don't need to have read the book to participate in those.

(nb I'm australian, so the nuances of american history and race go over my head a bit. This is just my POV)

EDIT: And for those parts of the conversation which are about the book I agree with rivenwanderer above. Gee, you guys type fast :)

Edited at 2009-05-09 12:02 am (UTC)

And that's really wonderful. But the fact is that we just don't have to read everything and study everything in depth. And so we end up commenting on literary themes and what have you without reading all the works in question ourselves.

And for that matter, I don't owe it to a writer to read everything all the way through to see if in fact the racist premise of the book isn't racist after all. I have shit to do. I can't spend all my time reading stuff by an author who can't be bothered to explain his or her work in a way that presents itself as something other than horribly offensive.

*tilts head*

You know, some people have argued that slavery was actually the progenitor of Southern American racism, not the other way around. Given an economic structure that the whites were dependent upon, they constructed a racial mythos that made it more acceptable to themselves. Back when the plantations were yet to be set up, there were black settlers who lived here on a fairly equitable basis (read Myne Owne Ground for reference).

Similarly, the economic competition of the reconstruction period seemed the progenitor of Northern American racism, which is different to the Southern variety, though still tremendously damaging.

I agree with you about the Damned If you do Damned if you don't line. I'm going to change it.

I have a hard time buying that reasoning. There is ample evidence that medieval and renaissance Europeans, who did not hold African slaves, still had derogatory opinions about people of other races.

There isn't a whole lot of colonial history that can be considered "pre-slavery."

...so went to the site, and looked at the comments.

Comment #3 contains this at the start:

Removing Native America makes the settlement of the Americas wildly different. I can only think of two works of science fiction which come close to the strangeness that would result: Howard Waldrop's African pamphlet short story, and Harry Turtledove's mammoth train short story.[...](You'd also have to eliminate at minimum three waves of human colonization[...]

And goes on to answer many of the questions you have, about how to critique and address these issues.
Comment #7 does much the same, id'ing the Alvin Maker series as one at at least points one way to address some of the criticisms. And one commentator, after expressing her revulsision at the idea in her LJ, linked in a comment, goes on to say:

That's not to say that the idea "What if America had been empty when the Europeans got there?" isn't a legitimate one to write on--it is. Apparently, you can even write some damn good fiction on it. But then, you're not writing of America any more, are you? It's not the Matter of America any longer. You're writing something else. So, for the sake of common decency, have the respect to make it be some place else, too, would you?

So I say if you re-read some of these comments, you might gain the concepts you're looking for, first off. To my lights, people critical of this work are making a sincere effort, at least in these early comments, to not just critique, but to examine their critiques and give examples of how the core idea can be worked better.

Does that help break down the comments? Reading on to comment 30 or so, I see a healthy discussion about how, exactly to work these themes with real-world examples, so even if the comments take a dive-bomb from there, it seems to me there's sufficent fodder for working such issues in one's own fiction from those points alone.

Unless there's another issue I'm missing in your question?

Well, and I appreciated in particular the comment about "then you're not writing of America any more" but then I think of Harry Harrison's "A transatlantic tunnel, hurrah!" which had similar dramatic changes, and yet was very much a book about America.

Which I suppose just raises things I need to think about in terms of my own definition of 'what is America'.

I feel like just saying +1 to Asim's comment, but I will add a bit.

You are damned if you do write from your place of unexamined privilege and you are damned if you don't consider the whole of your audience.

Presumably Ms. Wrede wants to sell her book to an American audience. If she is writing an alternate history of America, then presumably she wishes to say something about America. America has people in it whose ancestors were in that continent long before it was named after some Italian guy, and people whose ancestors were brought there in chains.

Those people, those Americans, pay a price everydayfor the real historical and current behaviour of white Americans. They also have families and careers and lives, and they create, and they have joys and sorrows, and they do the dishes and walk the dog.

To erase them, they and all that they are, for some intellectual what-if exercise (now with extra mammals!) is sickening.

Just for the record, and not to exonerate anyone: I know from hearing (well, reading) Pat Wrede talk about the book while she was writing it that her primary goal was to get megafauna; the lack of Native Americans was... collateral damage, not an aim.

Again, this is not to exonerate or trivialise. Collateral damage is still damage. For that matter, I know that for myself, it hurts *more* if someone dismisses me through carelessness or ignorance than if they're actually trying to hurt me. And people on the Tor thread are pointing out that it wasn't in fact *necessary* collateral damage.

(At the time she was talking about writing the book, I didn't think anything about that aspect of it; I seem to have learnt more in the meantime because just a couple of weeks ago I was thinking about the book again and suddenly thought, "Oh, wait a minute.")

Also I don't know anything about how the lack of slavery came about; I don't recall her discussing that. But it does sound every bit as problematic in effect, whatever her intentions were.


About the original question: Pat Wrede points out often that you can do anything you want as long as you do it right. I paraphrase mightily, but that's the idea. You want to write in the second person future tense? If you can do it well, you'll get away with it. This generalises: if you can write about the lack of slavery *well* -- which includes thinking about what the consequences would really have been in the book, and includes thinking about the effect your book will have on your readers in reality -- then you can get away with it.

In theory... It is possible that there could have been no Native populations for white settlers to 'discover' and interact with. Early humans could have either not crossed the land bridges or never found them; both options I find highly unlikely. I mean, people found and settled Hawaii. Hawaii! It's in the middle of freaking nowhere, surrounded by endless water! For early explorers to hop into their boats and strike out in a vague East-ish direction and stumble upon a volcanic island chain makes them both insane and incredibly brave to me.

Even if the Native Americans somehow never made it to the Americas, I believe that the area would still have been settled by 1492. The Vikings made it there and, if my history lessons were correct, did quite well and would have survived if they hadn't been driven out by the surrounding tribes. Then there is the evidence of Africans making it to America pre-Columbus. They obviously were either adsorbed into the local population or left like the Vikings, but there is a good chance they would have stayed and spread if the land had truly been empty.

Honestly, from reading all the comments and the writer's interview, the major issue with this book seems to stem from sloppy writing and the author not doing enough research. That, and not thinking about human nature at all. It's in human nature to explore and spread out. If we didn't we'd all be living in Africa's Rift Valley still (forgive me if I'm wrong. It's been a long time since I've read up on the newest theories on the origins of humanity). Sadly, it also seems to be human nature to oppress others as slavery has been a world wide issue since before the Egyptians.

As for the original question on whether there's a way to do an alt history without slavery... Well, obviously it can be written, but I'd always question if it could be written well. Removing the Native Americans completely from the picture is, frankly, the wrong way to do it. Not only does it go against my belief that it goes against humanity's core principle to spread out and explore, it also promotes the ugly myth that America was 'empty' and no one was 'using the land.' ((Fun Fact! Scholars believe that the Americas actually *were* a lot more empty then they could have been when white settlers began to invade. The reason? Disease! Even in areas where whites hadn't arrived yet, their diseases had spread and weakened or killed off tribes that would have otherwise tried to keep settlers off their land. /end sortofsnarkyness))

To be honest, I'd only accept a new 'settling the frontier' story at face value if several main characters were PoC (and had real personalities instead of being token characters) AND if it was obvious that this new frontier was not America. Basically, the story would have to be a fantasy rather then an Alt-History. It can not be an all white 'look at the things we did all by ourselves' congratulation fest.

A good book has to be honest to itself as well as to it's audience and ignoring something so major, emotional, and lingering just reveals that the author is not as good a writer as she thinks she is. If she was, her alt-history would still have all these issues, but be able to deal with them in a respective manner. Ignoring them, just trivializes them which is probably why she's receiving so much criticism.

Agreed on the issue of ignoring Native Americans. On the issue of characters of color, two of the most influential characters in the book are black. Both have personalities; neither are token.