Zulu Heart (Bilalistan, book 2) by Steven Barnes

[james_davis_nicoll]

Zulu Heart (Bilalistan, book 2) by Steven Barnes

Comments

a comment on the worldbuilding

[connactic.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's really unlikely Islam would arise in the world as described, since it does not seem that Christianity could have existed. (or was there a Jewish prophet/king Yeshua in Barnes' world.)

However, if you go with an infinite branching worlds theory, Barnes could just pick the one universe out of an infinite set that happened to have no Rome yet a mostly untouched Arabian peninsula where a really charismatic Prophet was born who was influenced by the dominant Monothesitc faith of his time- Judaism.

Also, you are kind of showing a cultural bias (as am I)- if we were practicing Muslims, the inevitable existence of Islam in any timeline would be taken as a given.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Like almost all ah and counterfactual history, these books totally suck on that level.

The second one even more so than the last.

The author didn't know enough about the history of the US and the history of the economics of cash cropping agriculture to make it make sense.