This novel by the New York Times-bestselling "master of alternate
history" explores an America reshaped by a twist in prehistoric
evolution (Publishers Weekly).
What if mankind's "missing link," the apelike Homo erectus, had survived
to dominate a North American continent where woolly mammoths and
saber-toothed tigers still prowled, while the more advanced Homo sapiens
built their civilizations elsewhere? Now imagine that the Europeans
arriving in the New World had chanced on these primitive creatures and
seized the opportunity to establish a hierarchy in which the sapiens
were masters and the "sims" were their slaves.
This is the premise that drives the incomparable Harry Turtledove's A
Different Flesh. The acclaimed Hugo Award winner creates an alternate
America that spans three hundred years of invented history. From the
Jamestown colonists' desperate hunt for a human infant kidnapped by a
local sim tribe, to a late-eighteenth-century contest between a
newfangled steam-engine train and the popular hairy-elephant-pulled
model, to the sim-rights activists' daring 1988 rescue of an unfortunate
biped named Matt who's being used for animal experimentation, Turtledove
turns our world inside out in a remarkable science fiction masterwork
that explores what it truly means to be human.
