What If the ‘Mayflower’ Hadn’t Made It?
The alternate history novel ‘To Climates Unknown’
The science fiction writer Arturo Serrano releases a new alternate history novel today, and he greets us with a long tweet thread this U.S. Thanksgiving morning.
For reference, here’s the book:
Serrano gives thanks for Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt as his original “model for how to write uchronia,” as well as for Edward Rutherfurd’s Sarum and Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, two chronologically structured tales he credits as having influenced “my entire writing life.” They are the literary predecessors of To Climates Unknown.
Why did Serrano begin his story with the failure of the Mayflower’s voyage? “If you remove the Mayflower,” he says, “you lose the rabid exceptionalism” that came to characterize the political philosophy of the United States.
The Mayflower, which departed Europe in September 1620, is not the only event in this alt-history that deviates from our reality. More happened that month…
