The New Empire by Alison McBain
What if? That’s the question the alternate history genre of speculative fiction poses as it weaves together real events and gives them a different outcome. One of the best-known examples is Philip K. Dick’s classic, The Man in the High Castle, in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win WWII. In The New Empire (Woodhall Press) Alison McBain imagines enslaved people brought to the New World from China who become the human property of Native American masters.
AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF AMERICA
The New Empire is the story of Jiangxi, son of a Chinese emperor. When his father dies, Jiangxi’s evil older brother wants no competition for their father’s throne. He rips six-year-old Jiangxi from the arms of his nursemaid and sells him into slavery. Thrown into the hold of a slave ship, Jiangxi survives the journey eastward, thanks to the rich and plentiful food he’d enjoyed in the royal nursery all his young life. Baby fat has its purpose.
Arriving on North America’s West coast, Jiangxi stumbles from the ship and is purchased by Onas, an older Native American who needs a personal slave for household duties. Other enslaved Chinese people meet harsher fates as over-worked, under-fed laborers in fields of corn, beans, squash and tobacco.
Onas proves to be a strict but fair master. Jiangxi learns how to cook the new foods, work in the garden and keep the household fires burning. But soon, he learns there are aspects of Onas that are forbidden to him.
In addition to owning slaves that toil on his plantation, Onas is a spiritual leader and a respected elder. His father was of the Amah Mutsun coastal tribe, and his mother was Haudenosaunee, part of the powerful Iroquois confederacy, whose family came west to speak for the eastern tribes in trade negotiations. Onas’ mother died in childbirth; his father died soon afterward while hunting.
“The Haudenosaunee Elders dreamed a message from my parents, and so both tribes knew I would walk a different path,” Onas tells Jiangxi. “You are here to help, to bridge two tribes, like I do.”
WELL-RESEARCHED WORLD BUILDING
McBain builds a believable world by mixing factual ethnology such as Native American religion, wampum belts, Iroquois longhouses and the Iroquois tradition of matriarchy. She adds this into the story of how a vast, prosperous Native American confederacy based on slavery is threatened by the Dutch/English/French war in the east, and by the encroaching new Spanish settlements along trade routes to the south.
As years pass and Jiangxi matures into manhood, he learns more of the history of his master’s people but never forgets his own ties to the enslaved Chinese people who suffered to build the new civilization. When Jiangxi finds a young, formerly enslaved girl in the forest who has just escaped from Onas’s fields, he helps her run away and takes her to a place she’s not likely to be found. They meet again years later, under very different circumstances.
Even as Onas decides to give Jiangxi his freedom and make him his apprentice, Jiangxi is conflicted. “His hatred had fractured, though, and become more complicated,” writes McBain. “He closed his mind to the riotous mess of his emotions. His true purpose needed no confusion added to it.”
As the threat of war with the Spanish mounts, The New Empire becomes the old story of risky alliances, war versus peace, and how one person can change history. Jiangxi must ultimately choose his own path.
Alison McBain is a prolific short story and poetry author whose debut novel, The Rose Queen: Book 1 of the Rose Trilogy, was a fantasy finalist for the 2019 Independent Author Network Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Literary Classics Book Award. It’s a retelling of a classic fairy tale. Sometimes Beauty is the Beast.
The New Empire uses the question “What if?” to rewrite the past and expose readers’ minds to the wide-open future.
About Alison McBain:
Alison McBain is an award-winning author with more than two hundred publications in magazines, journals, and anthologies. Once in a while, she puts on her Associate Editor hat for the online publication Scribes*MICRO*Fiction or draws all over the walls of her house with the enthusiastic help of her kids.
