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

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

There's a persistent vein of creepy utopianism in some political-agenda-driven SF.

If I were playing around with the idea I'd focus on the megafauna and how the lack of everything that Native Americans created changes the world.

That would be one of the main points of interest in the idea, I'd imagine -- the cascading effects of the changes, when you don't get corn, potatoes, tobacco, when the Spanish don't get that influx of gold from the New World because there's no one to get it from, when there's no one there to keep the Jamestown settlement from dying of starvation (if European settlement of America even stays the same long enough for Jamestown to happen in the same way, with Spain already on a divergeant historical path). But as someone pointed out down-thread, there's a difference between removing a group of people from the picture because you don't want to deal with them (which may or may not be what Hoff's project and Wrede's book do -- I haven't read either yet) and removing them specifically in order to examine what the consequences of their absence would be.

There would be more than one wave of human migration to the Western Hemisphere that would have to have somehow not happened, though, as other people have pointed out. It might actually be interesting to have one major source of human access to North America (like the landbridge and thus the Clovis culture in North America) cut off but leave the others - not a totally depopulated America, but an alternately populated America, where South and Central America and the Pacific coast are still inhabited but the terror-bird-infested plains of North America have been left unpopulated for later European or Asian arrivals to go and be eaten there.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Where the Terror Birds end up living is highly dependent upon their prey/herd animals. If they're herding horses, for example, then they are going to be limited to open range type areas. The great plains, California's central valley, parts of basin and range... That is an interesting geography. On the other hand if they're going after deer they could be almost anywhere. And it could have the interesting effect of giving the American Indians who do successfully compete against them an almost 'ready made' herd species. I cannot imagine people not taking advantage of that eventually. It could also have interesting knock on effects on the ecology of N. and S. America.

I will have to think about this question more. It is more interesting that I first thought.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

That's the creepy bit of the Thirteen Child thing, to me. Having no settlement of the Americas and then exploring how that changed your world, that's one thing. No natives, no culture, no one to teach settlers how to use the local land, no gold, no corn, no potatoes; having the natives present by their absence, that's one thing.

But from the description and quotes, it sounds like she's just swept the continent clean so she can plunk down standard Minnesota pioneer culture, with Magic and Big Animals. Erasing Native Americans not to explore what they made, but because it's convenient. And that's not only problematic, it's bad writing. You aren't *going* to have standard Minnesota pioneer culture. As one example, the potato massively influenced emigration to the Americas for far more than Ireland; Sweden had the exact same pattern of potatoes and other new crops helping to build an increase in population, and then crop failures driving heavy emigration for that excess population.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

standard Minnesota pioneer culture

Yeah, no. Not only would you not get that in a world where North America was empty until Europeans got there, the political and social forces that shaped the settlement of the West were heavily influenced by slavery and the controvercy over it. And from what I've heard, the 13th Child doesn't have slavery, either.

The sad thing is, an America with prehistoric megafauna and an America without slavery would both be fascinating things to explore if you were doing it in a less fail-y way. Someday, one of my longtime alternate history plotbunny dreams will come true, and someone will write a story where Eli Whitney never invents the cotton gin, and you don't get the deep South cash crop/cotton growing culture, the expansion of slavery westward into Alabama/Mississippi/Arkansas that it spawned, or the Civil War. Slavery becomes an artifact of the sugar-growing countries of Lousiana and the tidewater tobacco planters and the political will to end it isn't compromised by the fact that a third of the country's economy plus the Northern textile industry is utterly dependant on it. And, of course, without short-staple cotton, there wouldn't *be* a Northern textile industry, or anywhere near as large a British one. (so I guess it would kind of be the "slavery: the entire transatlantic world was complicit in it, and it was too the reason for the Civil War, nyah" AU)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the cotton gin could be delayed by very much. I understand there were a lot of people working on the problem at the time so rather like knocking off Alexander Bell it would just mean that another name would be on the patents and in the books.

It might just be conceivable that Virginia abolishes slavery in the 1830s though. I remember that it came within a very few votes of doing so and that would have made the whole world different. Or perhaps an earlier slave rebellion might have prompted the racist whites to view having a large slave population as dangerous and undesirable (one of the things feeding into the attempt to abolish slavery after Nat Turner's Rebellion).