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Reading ‘To Climates Unknown’
Alternate history of humanity’s journey
It was a fictional version of April 4, 1581 when apprentice sailor William Adams met an alternate fate. So, too, then, the Mayflower. And thus the history of colonization changed. The history of science, too — the “eureka” of the evolution of species and the far slower realization that some rocks are radioactive. Everything changed.
The alternate history novel To Climates Unknown was released several months ago. In this fictional version of the industrial revolution, there are submarines, tanks, nukes, and a flying machine. Religion, as absorbed and interpreted by world leaders, is a corrupting influence. The story is about how people achieve self-determination. It’s about the effort of using reason, as well as subterfuge, to confront or evade powerful egos that only want war.
It was reviewed by Alexander Wallace in Never Was as “the best alternate-history novel I have ever read,” with characters whose “interactions, no matter their country of origin, feel plausible, and you will find yourself deeply invested in people you will only know briefly”; a work of “broadmindedness…that is fundamentally moral.” Dawn…
