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'City of the Saints' review
- Thread starter Gary Oswald
- Start date
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
What's the story about?
- Location
- Arlington, Virginia
What's the story about?
I don't want to spoil too much but there's a lot of political intrigue in relation to how the United States is about to tear itself apart.
A practicing Mormon who writes about what a great place a Mormon theocracy would be just feels kind of... awkward to me. One wonders how much is sheer literary license and how much is first-degree author tract.
It's not utopian, I don't think - Deseret is portrayed as a rather politically volatile place. Butler has an afterword where he explains a lot of his thinking (at least one aspect of which I think is suspect) but he's candid about Mountain Meadows, for example. He does, though, portray Brigham Young overall positively.
Frankly I don't view this as being all that different from Yasser Bahjatt's Yaqteenya: the Old World which I've also reviewed for this site.
I Saw A Red Sky
He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but 🤓
I don't want to spoil too much but there's a lot of political intrigue in relation to how the United States is about to tear itself apart.
Are there characters?
- Location
- Arlington, Virginia
Among others, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe (as mentioned in the article) and Brigham Young. Also, other historical figures not as widely known.Are there characters?
Alexander Rooksmoor
Well-known member
A practicing Mormon who writes about what a great place a Mormon theocracy would be just feels kind of... awkward to me. One wonders how much is sheer literary license and how much is first-degree author tract.
I think they do tend to feel an obligation to do this. I am reminded of, 'Salvage', a SF rather than AH story, by Orson Scott Card, a Mormon himself, which suggests that somehow, even post-apocalypse, the Mormons would somehow be 'better' than other survivors.
Last edited:
Alexander Rooksmoor
Well-known member
I was immediately reminded of For the Strength of the Hills by Lee Allred (1997), a Sideways winner, in which the Mormons develop the Gatling gun and tie up almost the entire US Army in 1857 triggering an earlier southern US secession. It was published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future: Volume XIII (though edited by Dave Wolverton rather than Hubbard), also 1997. Seems ironic that one theocrat would support an alternative that favoured another theocracy, even if it was posthumously (Hubbard had died in 1986).
Riled by how Wikipedia pages on the Mormons are tightly 'policed' by the Church to downplay - almost dismiss - their aggression and empire building in the mid-19th Century, I wrote 'Branches' collected in Detour: What If? Stories of Americans (2015). I felt obliged to try to rebalance the easily accessible portrayal of the Mormons at that time. We tend to forget how hostile Americans were to polygamy. James Buchanan (1791-1868), US President 1857-61, saw slavery and polygamy equally as 'twin relics of barbarism'. Looking back now, perhaps using one AH story to attempt to counteract a contemporary political trend online, was an example of the worst kind of politicisation of the genre.
Riled by how Wikipedia pages on the Mormons are tightly 'policed' by the Church to downplay - almost dismiss - their aggression and empire building in the mid-19th Century, I wrote 'Branches' collected in Detour: What If? Stories of Americans (2015). I felt obliged to try to rebalance the easily accessible portrayal of the Mormons at that time. We tend to forget how hostile Americans were to polygamy. James Buchanan (1791-1868), US President 1857-61, saw slavery and polygamy equally as 'twin relics of barbarism'. Looking back now, perhaps using one AH story to attempt to counteract a contemporary political trend online, was an example of the worst kind of politicisation of the genre.