About Doug Hoff's Empty America

[james_davis_nicoll]

I can't seem to find the first entry. What prevented anyone from migrating to the New World before the Vikings?

[Answered in comments: It's not specified in the initial post]

If you prevent anyone from coming over the top of the world it won't prevent the Polynesians from colonizing the Americas (Sweet potatoes got to Polynesia from the New World Somehow). Well, it won't unless you have extremely well aimed butterflies, able to use the secondary and tertiary effects of whatever the barrier to colonization is up north to prevent anyone from using the trans-Pacific route.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously people DID migrate to the New World before the Vikings.

And who's to say the odd hardy band of Polynesians didn't set up somewhere on the West Coast, only to assimilate to the local culture after a couple generations?

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Duh, understanding FAIL. This is an alternate history scenario, isn't it, of the "land bridge never happend" variety.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, except I don't know what caused the lack of migrations (except I do seem to recall the "Arctodus Simus proves to be an exceptionally effective barrier to human migration" WI didn't go anywhere).

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

I believe that the genetic evidence is that there *was* a transpacific migration. (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/bldgblog/2398034248/ for some maps.)

At the peak glacial ocean level low, the east coast of North American is much larger; the west coast is hardly larger at all because it's almost all subduction boundary, but it is larger. Given that moving inland is both difficult and undesirable -- there's less food there -- I do wonder if the good arrival date locations are now under the sea.

[kate_nepveu]

This appears to have links: http://emptyamerica.blogspot.com/

Thanks

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

no specific POD

Hrm.

Whatever it was, it had to prevent, what, at least four different migrations? And whatever it was had to be such that it didn't interfere with migrations in the other direction (No miocene migration of equines into the Old World is going to leave a mark on human history).

Re: Thanks

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Pat Wrede appears to have solved the problem with magic. And possibly dragons. (I know nothing about the book beyond the linked review & comment thread).

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

You'd need to depopulate Northeast Asia. The Inuit and related peoples came in long after Beringia had gone under and long before the Norse.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Someone had boat technology 40,000 years ago because the Wallace Gap didn't stop us from getting to Australia. If there are boats, it's hard to keep humans out of the New World indefinitely.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Are you sure it wasn't hot air balloons?

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Or possibly even earlier - stone tools found on Rottnest Island have been claimed to be 70000 years old. (I don't know if those dates have been confirmed).

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Didn't the Māori only arrive in New Zealand about 1000 CE? Possibly as late as 1300 CE? If I was trying to invent a virgin Americas for Europeans to find I might have Polynesians on the west coast, but just barely starting out since their first attempts fail for whatever reasons. And the Europeans would then conveniently ignore them. "It was a virgin New World free for our claims, ours by right of first discovery and settlement." "What about those people with the taro on the west coast?" "Oh hush you, they don't count."

Or I might do like Turtledove did and have some animal in the Americas that would make initial settlement very hard and thus a reason for the first small bands to get wiped out (including Vikings) and only get generalized European settlement with better guns and/or large groups with crossbows. He used Homo erectus in A Different Flesh, which I thought fairly clever.

Or it could only seem virgin with the population of the Americas having been decimated by a disease. Perhaps one that was not terribly virulent in of itself, but that would make a large percentage of the people who contract it sterile and thus making it where the generation after the disease will be so small and spread out that humanity in the Americas is reduced to next to nill. Given the slow population growth of people prior to germ theory this would mean an almost virgin Americas if it happened in the 500 years prior to first contact.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

IIRC, evidence of the sweet potato in Polynesia goes back to at AD 1000 and perhaps as early as AD 700.

Or I might do like Turtledove did and have some animal in the Americas that would make initial settlement very hard

Someone or other suggested that Arctodus Simus might have filled this role until relatively recently (it's been long enough since I came across this that I don't recall what changed in this model to let humans migrate into North America) but looking at the fossil record, the usual pattern is that humans armed with fire and pointy sticks are more than a match for annoying and/or tasty megafauna.

Home erectus was no match for us in the old world. Why would it be in the New World?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Homo erectus would not be any match for us, it would just have to slow us down. The goal isn't to keep humanity out of the Americas forever after all. If there is competition I assume it would slow down settlement of the Americas particularly in the choke point stage of first settlement. First settlements of whatever sort are vulnerable. Therefore it seems reasonable to assume that if they manage to hold back the first Americans until after the land bridge goes away then they'd have a chance to make it just a little too hard for Polynesians at the end of thousands of miles from whatever island. What they could not stop would be the Inuit so it would be a question of how early humans got really good at surviving in the high Arctic environment and started pushing down into the Americas from the north.

Oh poo. Looking at wikipedia I find that humans were living happily in the north of Greenland by 2500 BCE. Another idea ruined by horrible facts.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I would not have used Arctodus Simus as my plot device. I'd have invented some sort of 'terror bird' from South America and had it be a pack hunter that was just a bit to smart for humans with pointy sticks to get a good handle on.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

IIRC, evidence of the sweet potato in Polynesia goes back to at AD 1000 and perhaps as early as AD 700.

Indeed, a consequence of timing Polynesian settlement of NZ 'earlier' is that you also need an 'earlier' Polynesian sweet potato, or proto-Maori maintaining contact with Eastern Polynesia for long enough.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

Another consequence would be an absence of millenia of the domestication of food crops in the Americas, which would also impact the viability of early colonization attempts. World cuisine would also be quite different.

[kynn.livejournal.com]

Never heard of this before, but did some quick googling to read up on it.

I dunno, an elaborate fantasy designed to write the American Indians out of history seems fucking creepy to me, based on repeated real-world attempts to do the same thing to the same people.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's also an early WI from the same newsgroup where much the same was done to the entire Old World, so that New World history could develop without the catastrophe of the 15th century derailing the process.

I'll admit to have gamma-ray-burstered one hemisphere or another to see what develops afterwards (and to have nuked the Northern hemisphere into near-sterility merely to discuss how humans might encourage ecological recovery most rapidly: gigadeaths for gardening, pretty much).

[faeelin.livejournal.com]

Umm.

Knowing Doug, and having read the thing, this is pretty much ridiculous. And to be honest, it seems a bit weird to imply a setup to basically play Vikings v. Mammoths has a "Man, aren't we better off without those Natives?" intent behind it, even subconsciously.

[daev.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm.

Reminds me of the review of The Yiddish Policemen's Union in The Jerusalem Post, as discussed by Abigail Nussbaum.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I think Doug would agree with you that the premise is creepy. However, I think you're pushing an unwarranted value judgment about the character of the author.

I've written an alternate history where slavery in an independent Confederacy lasted until the 1930s. It's pretty damn elaborate. I know the history of the real world South extremely well, and I've used the best social and economic underpinnings I know to inform its alternate likely development. It's pretty horrible.

Does that make me a white supremacist? Um [checks self, loved ones], probably not. I've just taken a creepy premise and pushed it to its logical conclusion.

I think because so many science fiction premises are "fantasies of political agency", that it's problematic to write alternate history with unpleasant premises. The genre has been filled with promoters of extreme, bizarre, and hateful political ideas for so long that readers often mistake a satire or a thought experiment for advocacy.

But that's a sign of the immaturity of the genre community.

[bricklovinfreak.livejournal.com]

Arguments from ignorance are always hilarious. The show above (both sides of it) is truly popcorn-worthy.

I can imagine about a dozen ways for an 'Empty America' scenario to not be racist, and this is just idle meandering in the shower. For example, you could show how many (we're probably talking three or four times) more settlers die because they have no natives to enslave as guides. Or how much wealth that was plundered from native civilizations and sent back affected the Old World economies (is much later access to New World silver and gold better or worse for Europe?). Or you could examine what happens to population growth in the Old World with undomesticated potatoes, or none at all. In short, show the invisible footprints and call attention to just how much indigenous cultures (and their brutal destruction) shaped the Americas.

I haven't read EA in ages, though, so I can't really speak to it being one or the other in any useful way. Maybe we should all call a cease-fire over the weekend to do some reading.

[tevriel.livejournal.com]

Um... make the Ring of Fire not exist? Without tectonic instability where Polynesia formed, you get a large chunk of uninterrupted water. Which, without looking at a map of the globe, could give you no Polynesian route to the Americas, and also, probably, an uninhabited Australia.

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

I only noticed this recently, but if Beringia never existed, then Africa, Asia, and Europe would never have known wolves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canidae#Miocene_epoch

Instead, these continents would have likely experienced hyena-derived predators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena#Evolution