However, you can really, really tell that this was written by a science fiction writer. (Sadly the racial shake-up doesn’t extend to the indigenous folk of the Aztec empire, who are wildly stereotypical.) Some readers who disliked the book have criticized it for the particular changes the author made to history in order to produce his world, but that doesn’t bother me since the point of the book isn’t “the world might have turned out this way with a few key changes!” but rather “what would a slave novel look like with the races reversed?” and the alternate history is merely a means to that end.

So I do appreciate the book for that, and the idea of what an African and largely Muslim New World might have been like in the 1860s and 70s is an interesting one. It’s a race-reversed slave novel, and reversing demographics in stories is an interesting exercise that brings readers face-to-face with our own prejudices. This book has a really interesting premise, which is that Africans colonized the Americas and captured Europeans for their slaves. Out with the old and lousy, in with the new and by-god-I-hope-it’s-better! I read through page 282 (almost halfway), but it seems fitting to throw out a bad book with the end of 2020. There is a sequel to this book called Zulu Heart Through his brilliant inversion of our history, author Steven Barnes examines the complex evils of slavery in a new light with Lion's Blood, an intelligent and exciting novel of freedom and bondage, battle and intrigue, sex and love, set in an America threatened by total war as Aztecs, Zulus, Moors, and whites clash.Ī Hugo Award and Cable Ace Award nominee, Steven Barnes has written 15 novels and 15 teleplays.

Yes, you read that right-in this alternate America, the South was colonized by black Africans, and the North by Vikings, who sell abducted Celts and Franks to the Southerners. The powerful master of a vast Southern plantation purchases the 11-year-old Irish lad Aidan O'Dere. The survivors find themselves chained in the dark, filthy hold of a ship crossing the ocean to the New World, where they are sold into slavery. In the year 1863, a primitive village is raided, the men killed, and the women and children captured.

Lion's Blood by Steven Barnes