I've been reading SF/F since I was a kid in the 1960s. I am a person of colour.
I'm also a social scientist with a certain amount of knowledge of the history of a small portion of the Americas, and a fan of alternative history (I hate the term "alternate history", and agree with Brian Aldiss's comment that it makes it sound as if they take turns). I see nothing wrong with stories or novels that ask "What if X had happened/had not happened?" And that includes unpeopled Americas. Or Americas where the humans aren't our kind of human (http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/different.html). Yes, I'm aware that manioc (I call it cassava, by the way; I find people who spell it "cassave" pretentious) is a staple in Africa. It wasn't before the sixteenth century. And people didn't eat tomatoes in Italy before then, either; they do now. And I've planted and reaped sweet cassava, and tomatoes as well. Not to mention sweet potatoes, white potatoes, yams, and taro (we called that "coco", not, mark you "coco-yam").
All that was the result of colonialism, moving plants as well as people around. In the process, the original people of the corn (actually, people of the cassava who lived on the land were forced out of existence, in part by the Africans who were forcibly brought over to supplement and replace them.
What's most interesting in your post, by the way, is the rather odd way that you make the modern European interest in the Americas entirely dependent on the gold and silver mines. That's not exactly the case. Columbus found little gold. And the settlers who followed him found very little, but they had nonetheless established permanent settlements, and continued exploration for years before encountering the silver mines of Mexico and Peru.
I find explorations of what might have been fascinating, in short.
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Date: 2009-05-13 09:59 pm (UTC)I'm also a social scientist with a certain amount of knowledge of the history of a small portion of the Americas, and a fan of alternative history (I hate the term "alternate history", and agree with Brian Aldiss's comment that it makes it sound as if they take turns). I see nothing wrong with stories or novels that ask "What if X had happened/had not happened?" And that includes unpeopled Americas. Or Americas where the humans aren't our kind of human (http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/different.html). Yes, I'm aware that manioc (I call it cassava, by the way; I find people who spell it "cassave" pretentious) is a staple in Africa. It wasn't before the sixteenth century. And people didn't eat tomatoes in Italy before then, either; they do now. And I've planted and reaped sweet cassava, and tomatoes as well. Not to mention sweet potatoes, white potatoes, yams, and taro (we called that "coco", not, mark you "coco-yam").
All that was the result of colonialism, moving plants as well as people around. In the process, the original people of the corn (actually, people of the cassava who lived on the land were forced out of existence, in part by the Africans who were forcibly brought over to supplement and replace them.
What's most interesting in your post, by the way, is the rather odd way that you make the modern European interest in the Americas entirely dependent on the gold and silver mines. That's not exactly the case. Columbus found little gold. And the settlers who followed him found very little, but they had nonetheless established permanent settlements, and continued exploration for years before encountering the silver mines of Mexico and Peru.
I find explorations of what might have been fascinating, in short.