OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
I recently came across Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain in the local anarchist bookstore, and I thought I'd recommend you all check it out if you haven't already. I've admitted before that most published alternate history doesn't interest me, but I really enjoyed this one.
The POD is a successful raid on Harper's Ferry, made possible by Harriet Tubman's involvement; this world's Civil War unfolds as a war of liberation rather than reunification and ends with an independent black state in the Deep South. The story is told through the memoirs of a boy who becomes one of John Brown's medics and through the perspective of his great-granddaughter in an Afrofuturist 1959. In her time, the rump USA is rebuilding after a successful socialist revolution, while Nova Africa is about to land the first mission on Mars.
I'm not going to do a whole SLP-blog review here, but I thought this would be a good starting point for discussing utopian AH in general and whether it can be done well. Bisson's focus on human relationships in the "present day" sections really sold the less plausible points of the narrative for me; alongside the explicitly revolutionary adventure of the 1859 storyline it worked well as a reminder that a better world is possible.
The POD is a successful raid on Harper's Ferry, made possible by Harriet Tubman's involvement; this world's Civil War unfolds as a war of liberation rather than reunification and ends with an independent black state in the Deep South. The story is told through the memoirs of a boy who becomes one of John Brown's medics and through the perspective of his great-granddaughter in an Afrofuturist 1959. In her time, the rump USA is rebuilding after a successful socialist revolution, while Nova Africa is about to land the first mission on Mars.
I'm not going to do a whole SLP-blog review here, but I thought this would be a good starting point for discussing utopian AH in general and whether it can be done well. Bisson's focus on human relationships in the "present day" sections really sold the less plausible points of the narrative for me; alongside the explicitly revolutionary adventure of the 1859 storyline it worked well as a reminder that a better world is possible.
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