talk 'people-talk' the way the Greeks did, but made uncouth incomprehensible sounds like 'bar-bar'), being natural slaves, were natural y enslaved. You do them a favor, obviously, by letting them be what they naturally are.
The very word 'slave' comes, I believe, from 'Slav' since to the Romans and the Germans, Slavs were slaves by nature.
It's not even just slavery. The German Nazis killed hosts of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and others. Did they do it because they were blood-thirsty, ravening beasts? Not to hear them tel it.
They were purifying the race and getting rid of disgusting sub-men for the benefit of true humanity. I'm sure they thoroughly expected the gratitude of al decent people for their noble deeds.
And we Americans as well, there is a story that the Turkish sultan, Abdul Hamid II, a bloody and villainous tyrant, visited the United States once and was tackled over the matter of the Armenian massacres.
In response, he looked about him calmly and said, 'Where are your Indians' Yes, indeed, we wiped them out. It was their land but we didn't enslave them; we killed them. We kil ed them in defiance of treaties, we kil ed them when they tried to assert their legal rights under those treaties, and we killed them when they submitted and did not defend themselves. And we had no qualms about it. They were 'savages'
and we were doing God's work by ridding the Earth of them.
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story that after Custer's Last Stand (the Massacre at Little Big Horn, it's only a massacre when white men get kil ed) a Comanche chief was introduced to General Sheridan (a Northern hero of the Civil War). The Comanche said, 'Me Tach-a-way. Me good Indian.
' To this General Sheridan is reported to have replied, 'The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.', A very nice genocidal remark.
The history of human cruelty is revolting enough, but the history of human justification thereof is infinitely more revolting.
Would it be any different in an alternate world, where Homo erectus still existed alongside of us Would we treat our evolutionary cousins any better than we've ever treated our own kind? Harry Turtledove takes a hard look at this question in A Different Flesh, and comes up with some answers we'd probably just as soon not hear.
Preface
WHERE DO:YOU get your ideas?
I've never known a science fiction writer who hasn't been asked that question a good many times. I'm no exception. And, as is true of most of my col eagues, the answers I give often leave guestioners unsatisfied. I've had ideas doing the dishes, taking a shower, driving the freeway. I don't know why they show up at times like those. They just seem to.
Sometimes ideas come because two things that by rights ought to be wildly separate somehow merge in a writer's mind. I had just finished watching the 1984 Winter Olympics when I happened to look at a Voyager picture of Saturn's moon Mimas, the one with the enormous crater that has a huge oentral peak. I wondered what skijumping down that enormous mountain, under that tiny gravity, would be like. A story followed shortly.
And sometimes ideas come because you look for them. Like most science-fiction writers, I read a lot. In late 1984, I was idly wondering how we would treat our primitive ancestor Australopithecus if he were alive today.
What I think of as my story-detector light went on. How would we treat our poor, not-quite-so-bright relations if we met them today. I soon dismissed the very primitive Australopithecus. As far as anyone knows, he lived only in Africa. But Homo crectus, modern man's immediate ancestor, was widespread in the Old World. What if, I thought, bands of Homo erectus had crossed the Siberian land bridges to America, and what if no modern humans made the same trip later? That what-if was the origin of the book you hold in your hands.
The world where sims (the European settlers' name for Homo erectus) rather than Indians inhabit the New World is differem from ours in several ways. For one thing, the grand fauna of the Pleistocene, mammoths, saber- tooth tigers, ground sloths, glyptodons, what have you, might well have survived to the present day. Sims would be less efficient hunters than Indians, and would not have helped hurry the great beasts into extinction.
Human history starts looking different too. North America would have been easier for Europeans to settle than it was in our history, where the Indians were strong enough to slow if not to stop the expansion.
Central and South America, on the other hand, would have been more difficult: Spanish colonial society was based on the ruins of the American Indian empires. And Spain, without the loot it plundered from the Indians, probably would not have dominated sixteenth-century Europe to the extent it did in our history.
Also, the presence of sims, intel igent beings, but different from and less than us, could not have failed to have a powerful effect on European thought. Where did they come from? What was their relationship to humans? Having these questions posed so forcefully might well have led thinkers toward the idea of evolution long before Darwin. Sims might also make us look rather more careful y at the differences between various groups of ourselves.
To return to Gould's question: how would we treat sims. I fear that the short answer is, not very well. They are enough like us to be very useful, different enough from us to be exploited with minimal guilt, and too weak to resist effectively for themselves. The urge to treat them better would have to come from the ranks of humanity, and to compete against the many reasons, some of them arguably valid, for continuing exploitation.
'The proper study of mankind is man.' true enough. Sims can, I hope, help us look at ourselves by reflecting our view at an angle different from any we can get in this world. Come to think of it, that's one of the things science fiction in general can do. That's why it's fun.
Viled Bead Simia quam similis, turpissama hestia, nobis!
[The ape, vilest beast, how like us!] , Ennius, quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum found the new World a very different land from the one they had left. No people came down to the seashore to greet their ships. Before the arrival of European settlers, there were no people in North or South America. The most nearly human creatures present in the Americas were sims.
In the Old World, sims have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Fossils of creatures very much like present-day sims have been found in East Africa, on the island of Java, and in caves not far from Pekin, China. Sims must have crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America during an early glacial period of the Ice Age, when the sea level was much lower than it is now.
At the time when humans discovered the New World, smal hunting and gathering bands of sims lived throughout North and South America.
