Current music:

Neko Case: This Tornado Loves You

Okay, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, naraht has been saving up links here. Go browse.

So in my own browsing, I have come across two assertions that I know to be factually incorrect. Certainly other claims that are Wrong On The Internet have been made, but here are the two that I want to argue about.

Wrong Idea #1: "Until recently, all readers of genre fiction/visible fans of SFF have been white." No. That is a lie.

I joined my hometown's SF fan group in 1977, when I was 14, because my best friend invited me, which she did because her mom ran it. And neither of them were white. Most of the people who attended regularly were white, but not all. We were all happily reading and discussing the then-new SF dealing with race and/or gender - Delaney! LeGuin! Tiptree! Russ! My friend's mom took her and her older sister to Boskone every year (she took me too, a couple of times; she was a great mom to a lot of people to whom she was not related) so it's not like they were invisible - at least in the non-metaphorical sense - to the white fen who now are claiming that my friend and her family didn't exist. This claim about the whiteness of SF's Good Old Days is a flat-out lie, and an excuse for present-day racist speech or behavior based on this claim is no excuse at all.

Wrong Idea #2: Alternate Timestream stories

I actually meant to say something like this about Elisabeth Bear's pseudo-Elizabethean fantasy series, with apologies to friends who I know really liked the books, so now I will say it about them and about the premise for P. Wrede's new book (which I haven't read, sorry) as well: Please leave the past alone. Just make up crap about the future! You will keep the historians from rending their garments and smacking their foreheads! Thank you!

More specifically, Wrede's new book is based on the premise that in some other universe, our planet's history was basically the same except that 1. there was such a thing as magic and 2. the big animals of the Americas did not die out when the glaciers receded and 3. the Americas were never populated until Columbus arrived. And yet the story is set in a recognizable version of 19th-century Minneapolis. Well ... okay, if there was enough magic to do all the work of clearing the land that was, in our universe, accomplished by swidden agriculture practiced by native people in some places or by herds of large animals managed by native people in others. Buffalo, sheep, cows, goats: whether or not the animals came with Columbus, it was local people whose uses of them changed the landscape. And there would have to be enough magic to come up with a suitable replacement for manioc, the food staple invented by Andean people that right now provides more calories than any other food eaten in Africa, because I guess Wrede's story does include African slavery, and all those enslaved people had to eat, right? Whereas here in North America, we are as we have been for millenia the People of Corn, and so I guess magic would have to replace corn as well (since it was bred up in the Valley of Mexico by native people there.) And if there weren't pre-existing gold and silver mines, what would have motivated the Europeans to bother with conquest at all? They had been following the cod stocks across the north Atlantic for centuries before 1492 and never troubled themselves with settlement or exploration, after all.

The general point is that the past is more tightly woven together than you think, and no amount of "world-building" can salvage a project that starts with such sweeping assumptions but ends up in such a familiar place anyway. I'm not usually all that much of a materialist, as historians go, but jeeze, you can't just ignore the interconnectedness of everyone's material existence, either.

The best description of how dependent Europe was on the Americas, in material terms, and of the relationship between demographic catastrophe in the post-conquest Americas and changing forms of labor is still to be found in Alfred Crosby's sadly outdated The Colombian Exchange. (Just say no to Jared Diamond and that silly-ass 1491 book, all right? Thank you.)

eta I realize that I should have pointed out that the most important thing about Wrede's three assumptions is that she (fictively) erased all the peoples of the Americas, which is to put it very gently an erasure with uncomfortable relationship to the needs and desires of writers and readers who sit at the top of the racial hierarchy in the anglophone world, and would prefer not to have to notice that the hierarchy exists at all - much less that non-white people exist. But, um, you know all that already, right? and you know I know that. So.