Thirteenth Child

[calimac]

Our Mythopoeic group had a well-attended and meaty discussion today, but before anybody asks, my reactions here are too partial and personal to make a good formal discussion report. The topic was Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. In its setting and premise - a 19th-century US midwestern frontier in an alternate history in which magic is palpable and definable, and is based on the American folk tradition, and in which talented children are sought out and trained in that magic - it immediately brings to my mind Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card (please let's not mention the sequels).

Chris was otherwise reminded and got the best line of the meeting by calling it Little Hogwarts on the Prairie.

It seemed to me, though I didn't have time to read the whole book, that Thirteenth Child is a better-written book, with more interesting and attractive characters, than Seventh Son. But I had a harder time getting hold of it: for instance I found it tricky to get a handle on how old Eff, the child protagonist (short for Francine, we learn eventually, and now I'm being distracted by memories of Mr. F from The 21 Balloons), is at any given moment, and even more by exactly what's going on in the alternate history. Real and fictional events are thrown together in an off-balancing way.

One thing that became clear when Eff's family get to the frontier and all the talk is about the impassable magic barrier to the west, and the danger of magic animals marauding out of the wilderness, is that these things stand in the place of what, this being the 19th century, I might as well call the Indians, who are absent. Utterly. Here's her map of her alternate North America. Notice the complete absence of any names of Indian origin - Canada, Lakes Huron and Michigan, Chicago, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Gulf of Mexico - and the substitution mostly of English names.

What I'd forgotten was that there was some controversy over this when the book was published. Readers of Native ancestry found it creepily genocidal to be disappeared like this, especially given the sorry experiences of real history; and others agreed with them. Sentiment at the meeting, mostly favorable to the book on other grounds, tended to give Wrede a pass for this. From an internal viewpoint, it's an alternate history, "Europe" is spelled differently (though other things like Thomas Jefferson seem to remain intact), who's to say that in this world there was no Bering land bridge? From an exterior viewpoint, Wrede is trying to tell a particular story, and the presence of the Indians would just complicate things too much.

The more these excuses were offered, the less satisfactory they sounded to me. Card managed to get the Indians in without losing focus. Wrede is not so clumsy an author that she couldn't do likewise. And while Indians might be extraneous for Wrede's choice of story, she wasn't forced to write a story with an American frontier setting. She chose it, and certain assumed obligations come with that choice. If she wanted to change that much, she could have created an invented world without borrowing so much existing geography and existing history. I don't think you can get away with requiring readerly handwaving speculation about the Bering land bridge as an explanation, not without specifying what hands you want them to wave and why.

When Ursula K. Le Guin set Always Coming Home in an underpopulated future post-holocaust California, she devoted a section of the book to step out and break the fictional construct, to point out that most of the people the land has today are gone, to ask the question, "Was it I who killed the babies?", and to state what she has tried to provide in compensation. If, like Le Guin, Wrede is going to use a real-life template, I think she owes her readers a similar consideration, at the very least. Not as a legal matter, but as part of the moral contract between author and reader.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the same questions in relation to Harry Turtledove's very early series of stories in which the Americas were inhabited by hominids of species other than Homo sapiens. If you're familiar with them, that is, but you seem to be familiar with a lot of fantastic fiction. Turtledove make similar choices of nomenclature in his stories; for example, the big river in the middle of the continent is the New Nile.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I think the book you're referring to is called A Different Flesh. I haven't read it, but from what I know of it, the alternate history is an explicit substitution of the other hominids for the Amerinds. They weren't just made to quietly disappear in the incidental course of writing a story about something else. That makes the situation different. It could still be awful, but judging from the other books of his I've read, Turtledove has the skill to depict undesirable alternative states with understanding but without giving the impression that he'd prefer them.

Of course in both A Different Flesh and Thirteenth Child, if there are no Amerinds there'll be no Amerind-language names. Wrede's nomenclature isn't the problem, it's the symptom providing evidence of the problem. It shows that the natives aren't hiding just offstage. One of our members at the meeting suggested that maybe they were living on the other side of the magic barrier that runs down the continent. The problems with that are 1) that, according to those who've read it, the sequel shows that they're not; 2) in our history, the reason that they were only living in the West by the mid-19th century is that the whites had spent the previous 200 years pushing them there. They can't be limited to the West naturally without falling into the same problem of conscious disappearance; otherwise, either they're pushed, as in real history, or they don't exist.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I read Turtledove's "sims" stories when they came out. I thought they were not problematic, rather they were thoughtful and even inspiring. If people can learn that the exploitation of homo erectus is wrong, maybe we can do the same for homo sapiens.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As I remember, fuel was added to the fire during the original row, when someone linked to a rec.arts.sf.composition discussion in which Wrede described her plan as being to write a book that avoided the tropes of "Native Americans as savages" and "Native Americans as gentle ecologists", and that her solution was to do without them entirely. That seems to me a poor choice on every level. She also pointed out that in her book "there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation". Which, the more you look at it, the worse it is.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Are those exact quotes?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The last one is. The first two were my paraphrase of this:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Headdesk.

If that were my intent, I'd set the story on a fictional continent, a la Islandia, that had no aboriginal human inhabitants, have the characters remark on the unusualness of this (here and Antarctica, baby, that's it), and leave the implication that the magical barrier and megafauna are responsible for driving any previous attempts at settlement off. Given the natural hostility to human settlement shown by the magical forces in the book, that would make sense.

Or, if it's to be in America, have native artifacts indicating that the magic killed them off, or that the barrier was originally continent-wide and that the Europeans have driven it back by means of advanced technology. Or something to explain this. Just not a completely unspoken retroactive boojum.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Agreed. If you want to see the whole discussion in context, by the way, it's here.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I was disturbed by the lack of Native Americans in A Canticle for Leibowitz. One would think that they would survive, what with their living in remote locations, knowing the land, and having lots of subsistence skills. Especially in a place like New Mexico where the Native American cultures are so strong. Based on the text, there is one place where the monastery probably will be located and it is on a reservation.