pre-travel rec
Jun. 10th, 2024 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaznettiShould I be packing? Yes, I should be packing. Look, I'm mostly packed.
Last month's theme at![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fancake was black characters, and I thought about recommending this story, because it is such a remarkable work. I did not because it isn't actually fanfic, and indeed the degree of fictionality involved is complicated. It's alternate history, based as usual on a single point of divergence: the Malê Uprising of 1835, a revolt by Muslim slaves in Brazil, is more successful. After fighting a guerilla war in the hills for a few years, the survivors are put on a boat as a unit and sent to Africa, where they conquer one of the Sahel caliphates and set up a short-lived revolutionary state in 1840.
This is a story about a family, and about a place, and about three or four different shades of Islamic philosophy; it becomes a story about changing the world. It starts in West Africa, but the story spirals out to changes all over the world; I'm not sure if there's an update set on Antarctica but I wouldn't be shocked if there was. It isn't a utopia, but it's a world which is different in many ways, and better in some.
The story is called Malê Rising, by Jonathan Edelstein; it can be read over at alternatehistory.com. That's a link to the index of posts; this is a link to the first entry. The family of Paolo Abacar remains at the heart of it, but there are plenty of other characters along the way, some familiar from history, some less so -- and some very different from how we knew them (if you've ever wanted to read about Theodore Roosevelt as a gay pacifist, or Jules Verne as the visionary president of the French Republic, this is your chance).
The other reason I didn't link to this story over atfancake is that it isn't a story in a traditional sense; a lot of the development and worldbuilding occurs in the discussion between Edelstein and readers on the board, and it's difficult to skim through the 373 (or something like that!) pages of discussion to get at the story sections. At one point the story updates had embedded images, but those have mostly disappeared, at least for me. So it's in a practical sense a difficult story to read -- not all the discussion is useful, but some is. For example, as I read through the opening parts, I kept thinking to myself, wow, people on this board keep talking about the Franco-Prussian war, how predictably eurocentric! can't they see that this is a story about Africa! But it turns out that the Franco-Prussian War goes slightly differently and that ends up having some really interesting consequences, not just for Europe but also for West Africa. This may or may not have been the point where I realised that this is a story about how everything is connected, and about how much those connections matter.
Other warnings: There is certainly the kind of racist language you would expect to find people using in 1840, and later. It's history, so there is war and violence and disease (including an early outbreak of HIV) and starvation. There are no characters incapable of self-redemption. There is a reasonable amount of discussion of Islamic philosophy, for a story in which philosophy matters.
This is a story which has made me smile and made me cry. It's complicated and amazing and hopeful, and well worth the trouble.
Last month's theme at
fancake was black characters, and I thought about recommending this story, because it is such a remarkable work. I did not because it isn't actually fanfic, and indeed the degree of fictionality involved is complicated. It's alternate history, based as usual on a single point of divergence: the Malê Uprising of 1835, a revolt by Muslim slaves in Brazil, is more successful. After fighting a guerilla war in the hills for a few years, the survivors are put on a boat as a unit and sent to Africa, where they conquer one of the Sahel caliphates and set up a short-lived revolutionary state in 1840.This is a story about a family, and about a place, and about three or four different shades of Islamic philosophy; it becomes a story about changing the world. It starts in West Africa, but the story spirals out to changes all over the world; I'm not sure if there's an update set on Antarctica but I wouldn't be shocked if there was. It isn't a utopia, but it's a world which is different in many ways, and better in some.
The story is called Malê Rising, by Jonathan Edelstein; it can be read over at alternatehistory.com. That's a link to the index of posts; this is a link to the first entry. The family of Paolo Abacar remains at the heart of it, but there are plenty of other characters along the way, some familiar from history, some less so -- and some very different from how we knew them (if you've ever wanted to read about Theodore Roosevelt as a gay pacifist, or Jules Verne as the visionary president of the French Republic, this is your chance).
The other reason I didn't link to this story over at
fancake is that it isn't a story in a traditional sense; a lot of the development and worldbuilding occurs in the discussion between Edelstein and readers on the board, and it's difficult to skim through the 373 (or something like that!) pages of discussion to get at the story sections. At one point the story updates had embedded images, but those have mostly disappeared, at least for me. So it's in a practical sense a difficult story to read -- not all the discussion is useful, but some is. For example, as I read through the opening parts, I kept thinking to myself, wow, people on this board keep talking about the Franco-Prussian war, how predictably eurocentric! can't they see that this is a story about Africa! But it turns out that the Franco-Prussian War goes slightly differently and that ends up having some really interesting consequences, not just for Europe but also for West Africa. This may or may not have been the point where I realised that this is a story about how everything is connected, and about how much those connections matter.Other warnings: There is certainly the kind of racist language you would expect to find people using in 1840, and later. It's history, so there is war and violence and disease (including an early outbreak of HIV) and starvation. There are no characters incapable of self-redemption. There is a reasonable amount of discussion of Islamic philosophy, for a story in which philosophy matters.
This is a story which has made me smile and made me cry. It's complicated and amazing and hopeful, and well worth the trouble.
