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[ragnarok20]

Does anyone know of any fictionalized (obviously) accounts of what might have happened had the Americas not been discovered for, say, another millenia (or some significant time period of at least a few hundred years)? Even just a speculative kind of argument of what may have happened would be cool. How the technologies and cultures may have

Comments

[jkling]

Pastwatch by Orson Scott Card is a good read on this subject.

[ragnarok20]

The funny thing is, I actually have this on my shelf but never got around to reading it.

[ragnarok20]

Isn't there a theory that the Chinese actually reached the America before European colonization? I believe it was Zheng He that was supposed to have made it there, but I don't remember if he made it there before Lief Erickson as well...

[dorantherook]

The book is 1421 and it is laughable. Zheng He definitely made it to the east coast of Africa but they hardly made it north to Rhode Island like the book claims...I recommend reading it for the hilarity.

[randomstasis]

Well,there's a lot of disinformation about how primitive the Indians were. The evidence suggests that several native American groups were on the verge of some potentially revolutionary change during the contact period, and that even a couple hundred years later they might have had much better technology and socio-political organization to resist the European invasion

Amexica

[neo_teotihuacan]

Disease changed everything. The technology did not matter. One was no less than the other in most cases, as evident by the adoption of indigenous armor by Pizarro and Co. in Peru. I don't think Tenochtitlan would have fallen to Cortes and his Mexican allies if smallpox had not been in the process of wiping out vast amounts of human life during the contact period (highly controversial, but upwards of 90% in Mexico alone). I think its extremely fair to say that had disease not played its role, European colonialism in the Americas AT BEST would have worked like Hong Kong and India. What an interesting world that would have been. Better? Who knows

[randomstasis]

oh, duh- the fictionalized accounts- I've read several and can't remember the names of most of them, sorry! starting with RE Howard's Conan taking over in Mexico after he retired from Aquilonia, Card's Red Prophet series, one quite good one where the natives figured it out early, allied and managed to hold most of the western US, by a writer better known for spy thrillers, one based on events turning out diffferently in Mexico, with help from the north..there are several, most classed as SF

[mattphillips11]

Not what you're looking for, but a good non-fiction book to mention on this wavelength: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. Mann gets into the stuff mentioned a couple of replies above--just how sophisticated the goings-on were in the Americas right before European colonization.

[neo_teotihuacan]

Yes...this book is a great read. Really punches a hole in the Eurocentrism stuff. You'll find out the level of sophistication, both society-wise and technology-wise. In some cases its startling and destroys quite a few stereotypes.