unspeakable horror
I've not read Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child, and I don't think I will.
According to Jo Walton writing over at Tor, it's "Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic," apparently. Which sounds awesome, and something I'd love to read. Only, one of its basic premises posits an alternate America ("Columbia") that's empty, where the Native Americans do not exist.
And my instant reaction to that is horror.
And disgust. And revulsion.
I find the very idea vile.
Nine out of every ten people in the Americas died due to the "discovery" and conquest, one-fifth of the human race was destroyed by disease, war, and deliberate eradication, and now here's a story by a gifted writer that eliminates the rest by making them never be?
By god, that's foul.
I acknowledge that Wrede could have just written her "best book yet," as Walton believes. But damn it--and her--if she had to erase an entire people to do it.
If you're writing about the European settling of America--even in fiction, and mayhap especially in fiction--you owe it to the story, to history, to the truth, and most certainly to the millions upon millions of dead Indians, to deal with the corpses. That many dead bodies do not fit under the rug.
Else, from where I'm standing, that story, that exercise in privilege, is in itself an act of harm. Might be the best story she's ever written, but if she disappears the Indians from a story of settling the American West--if she disappears the Indians from the Matter of America (and I believe the story of the settling is one of the key components of the Matter of America)--she's done something fundamentally wrong.
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? I mean, at least that way, your readers won't have to trip over the bones of all those erased Indians.
According to Jo Walton writing over at Tor, it's "Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic," apparently. Which sounds awesome, and something I'd love to read. Only, one of its basic premises posits an alternate America ("Columbia") that's empty, where the Native Americans do not exist.
And my instant reaction to that is horror.
And disgust. And revulsion.
I find the very idea vile.
Nine out of every ten people in the Americas died due to the "discovery" and conquest, one-fifth of the human race was destroyed by disease, war, and deliberate eradication, and now here's a story by a gifted writer that eliminates the rest by making them never be?
By god, that's foul.
I acknowledge that Wrede could have just written her "best book yet," as Walton believes. But damn it--and her--if she had to erase an entire people to do it.
If you're writing about the European settling of America--even in fiction, and mayhap especially in fiction--you owe it to the story, to history, to the truth, and most certainly to the millions upon millions of dead Indians, to deal with the corpses. That many dead bodies do not fit under the rug.
Else, from where I'm standing, that story, that exercise in privilege, is in itself an act of harm. Might be the best story she's ever written, but if she disappears the Indians from a story of settling the American West--if she disappears the Indians from the Matter of America (and I believe the story of the settling is one of the key components of the Matter of America)--she's done something fundamentally wrong.
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? I mean, at least that way, your readers won't have to trip over the bones of all those erased Indians.