Rach's Reading Club 2024-And Beyond!

A Different Flesh

A Different Flesh is a novel by Harry Turtledove, one of my favorite authors at the moment. Turtledove is best known for a genre called "alternate history". It means imagining that history turned out differently. My favorite book by him was a series of novels in which the South won the Civil War which carries the new history of both the United States and the Confederacy into the Twentieth Century. I enjoyed those books because of Turtledove's ability to write about the people in that time period in a way that was compelling but non-judgmental.

Anyway, with this book, Turtledove goes back much further in history and imagines that Homo Sapiens, modern humans, never crossed the land bridge from Asia to the Americas. Instead the Americas were inhabited by the Homo Erectus, a less developed relative of humans which were actua driven to extinction by the Homo Sapiens. Since this species is less intelligent than the human race, they would not have been able to drive the animals like the mammoth and the saber tooth tiger to extinction, so when the Europeans reach the Americas in the sixteenth century it is a very different place. The Europeans call the Homo Erectus, "Sims" for reasons which aren't completely explained.

Turtledove gives us a series of seven novelas set at different points in this history. It starts with a fairly exciting action story of the Jamestown colonists dealing with the Sims.

Another one is an alternate version of Samuel Pepys' diary when the ramifications of the Sims are being debated by philosophers in London. They essentially come up with the theory of Evolution much sooner.
Later chapters include a world where racism against black people ends much sooner because black people have the advantage of being better than Sims. This results in a courtroom drama about the merits and demerits of slavery several years before the Civil War.

There is also a chapter in which a human trapper during the nineteenth century falls in love with a Sim. This comes close to being GC rated by WDC standards.

The final chapter jumps forward to the 1980s with a story about Sims being used for AIDS research and the ethical questions that raises.

Some of these chapters are better than others. My least favorite was the Samuel Pepys one because of Turtledove's attempt to recreate the seventeenth century language of the diary.

But all in all it is an entertaining and thought-provoking read.