Australian Culture

>>I think that's the litmus test. If I, for example (as I said on bachsoprano's blog) can cheerfully write a story about Oliver Cromwell landing in a rather wet, boggy terra nullius west of Wales and cheerfully settling with his Puritans on all this land, to be only occasionally bothered by the odd Irish Elk, then I can write freely about other peoples who have been more habitually erased, both in narratives and in history!<<

I actually did beat Europe nearly to death in junior high and high school. I thought it would be fun to explore how the Americas would have developed into the future if not mostly obliterated by the American Invasion. I had some great scene sketches and stuff. Eventually I gave up because I just couldn't figure out how to beat down Europe far enough, long enough to keep the greedy pigs away, plausibly. (Dad being a history teacher poked a lot of holes in my plot web. "Okay, you accounted for that, but what about this and this?" "DAAAAD! I spent all weekend working on that!" "Well, they're still going to get through." *headdesk*) Not long ago, however, Doug pointed out that if it weren't for Islam, Europe would've had to start from scratch after the Dark Ages because the Muslims saved a lot of earlier material that the Christians were burning like mad. So if I took out Muhammad (which, alas, is potentially offensive to Muslims) that would be a nice crippling blow to Europe; in combination with some other stuff, possibly sufficient for my purposes. That timeline, thus, has come unstuck from the bottom of the great stewpot that is the back of my mind, and may eventually emerge into poetry and fiction. I like the idea of depopulating Europe, even though that will take out a favorite culture (the Celts) because it will make room to boost another favorite culture aggregate (Native Americans, of which favorite tribes include Lakota, Cherokee, and Navajo/Dine). But this one would take tremendously more work; it's probably beyond my reach and I'll need more time to grow into it.

Meanwhile, I've already written some stories with few or no white people in them. "Peacock Hour" (in Triangulations: Taking Flight) is set in a desert so the characters are assorted shades of brown. "Peaches from the Tree of Heaven" (in newWitch) was originally written with one white character, but the publisher changed that one to Chinese-American like all the rest. Thit should help establish that I'm perfectly willing to boot white people off the stage if they're irrelevant to the story at hand.