| Fire On The Mountain (1988 Book) |
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As a result, instead of the American Civil War , the United States faces a full-scale slave revolt throughout the South - helped by a handful of white sympathizers, by various European revolutionaries such as Garibaldi who take ship across the Alantic and by an invasion of Mexico seekeing to regain the territory it lost in 1848 . After a great deal of bloody fighting and an increasing dissatisfaction in the North which is required to send troops to fight the rebellious slaves, the Blacks succeed in emancipating themselves and create a republic in the Deep South , led by Tubman and Frederick Douglass . (Brown himself did not survive to see the victory of what he started). Abraham Lincoln tries to start a war to bring back the seccessionist Black states into the Union. He fails and is himself killed in that war, and Blacks remember him as their arch-enemy. Later, the Black state (named "Nova Africa") becomes Socialist , touching off a whole string of revolutions and civil wars in Europe. The Paris Commune wins out instead of being crushed, a United Ireland gets free of British rule already in the 1880's, and the Russian Revolution is just one of many similar revolutions in different countries. Finally Socialism wins out also in the rump US, following a revolutionary outbreak in Chicago . In the book, Socialism works out as predicted by Karl Marx , bringing happiness and prosperity to all of Humanity. (Marx himself is mentioned in the book as an enthusiastic supporter of the rebellious slaves, though he does not personally come to America to help them). The book has two levels. The overt plot takes place in 1959, in an Utopian Socialist world far in advance of ours in all ways. To mark the centenniel of Brown's raid, black astronauts lead a manned landing on Mars . However, the story of the protagonist, a young Black woman trying to bring the blessings of Socialism to the backward society in the rump US, is mainly the framewolk for excerpts from the vivid diaries of two people who lived through the stirring events of 1859 and its aftermath - her ancestor, who was then a young black slave, and a white Virginian doctor who symaphised with the rebellion. In this world, an Alternative History book is published called ''John Brown's Body'', which descibes a world in which Brown failed and was executed, the slaves were emancipated by Lincoln rather than by themselves after a war between two white factions, and Capitalism survived as a political and economic system. It is considered a Dystopia , describing a horrible world in all ways infeior to the one which the people in the book know. |
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