Moments of Permanence - Back to Patricia Wrede and the Thirteenth Child: You Haven't Read This Post!

From: (Anonymous) Date: May 12th, 2009 07:46 pm (UTC) (Link)

Not looking for wildly divergent history? Well, I'm not going to say its automatically wrong to write a story where an entire race of people doesn't exist. I don't think it is, but if you are going to play that card you have to run with the consequences.

And for her story, history would have wildly diverged about 500 years before her story even leaves Europe.

The Vikings. Does she expect people to not think that the Viking expeditions would have had vastly different consequences to European history if they had unopposed access to North American resources centuries before anyone else even knew the place existed? Would they use those resources to support their aggressive actions in Europe? Would they have settled, and been more peaceful since they didn't have to steal resources anymore? How would this affect their conversion to Christianity, when their still Pagan leaders had lead them to such bounty? Or did someone note that this happened as many were beginning to accept Christianity? Would the Crusades have begun under Viking leadership as a result?

If she wants to play with writing out a race, fine. But her history becomes wildly divergent around 500 years before the voyage she depicts. She simply cannot write out the Native Americans and not have European history start to dramatically change starting around 1000AD.

If you want to go back further, there's a good chance that whatever blocked the migration to North America in prehistory could have rippled back and changed the foundations of civilization all the way back to the earliest cities in Mesopotamia. We don't know quite enough about these events to make any really educated guesses, more like wild speculation, but at the very least Northeastern Asia would probably have developed in a vastly different manner.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 12th, 2009 07:47 pm (UTC) (Link)

sorry, the above is me, found via LJ. I'm lordindra there.

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From: quiet1 Date: May 13th, 2009 10:59 pm (UTC) (Link)

The disappointing thing is that that could be a REALLY INTERESTING book, from someone who'd done the research to do it justice.

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From: sami Date: May 14th, 2009 12:47 am (UTC) (Link)

This whole debacle has given me a few ideas for books I could write that would be awesome and I spend a lot of time reminding myself that I DO NOT HAVE TIME SERIOUSLY I DON'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THE HISTORY ASPECTS SAMI STOP IT NOW STOP IT.

It's the end of semester. I have assignments. And AFTER that I still have about fifteen writing projects already started to finish! Gah.

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