Who Goes There?

If any one author is to be associated with a subgenre, it wouldn’t be outrageous to associate Harry Turtledove with the alternate history subgenre. He didn’t invent it by any means (he explicitly pays respects to L. Sprague de Camp on that front), but Turtledove has, over the past four decades, worked more prolifically in alternate history than any other writer. If someone brings up what-if scenarios for the American Civil War wherein the Confederacy won it’s likely Turtledove will get mentioned at some point. He’s also a prolific Twitter user. Since Turtledove turned 75 this month I figured I should review something of his, and “Autubon in Atlantis” is a concise and decent (if not great) example of his specialty. As is to be expected, this is an alternate history story, really only nominally SF, in which the real-life 19th century naturalist John James Autubon returns to an Atlantis which is very much real, albeit lacking the magic in so many depictions. Seems like a random combination of subjects (I’m not even sure I’d heard of Autubon before this), but actually reading the novella, I got a whiff of autobiography, making it both personal and compelling.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 2005 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is not available online. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois) and the Turtledove collection Atlantis and Other Places.

Enhancing Image

The year is 1843, and John Autubon and his friend Ed Harris Edward Harris are about to leave a decidedly French-occupied New Orleans (it’s unclear if the United States were ever founded in this timeline) for an expedition. They board the steamer Maid of Orleans whereon Harris meets up with a woman with whom he seems to be in a friends-with-benefits relationship, although Autubon, being a good Catholic and loyally married, just rolls his eyes at his friend. (It’s worth mentioning that Harris was also a real person who really did accompany Autubon on his travels.) “Audubon admired a pretty lady as much as anyone—more than most, for with his painter’s eye he saw more than most—but was a thoroughly married man, and didn’t slide from admiration to pursuit.” This early stretch of the novella shows us the somewhat vitriolic friendship between the two middle-aged men, but also gives us a glimpse into this somewhat altered 1843, in which the Louisiana Purchase apparently never happened and Atlantis as a landmass not only exists but serves as a place for human settlement. Autubon and Harris complement each other such that the former is the brains while the latter is the brawn, Autubon being an artist while Harris fancies himself a hunter—an introvert and an extrovert respectively.

Autubon sails to Atlantis to draw some local birds there, but he also voyages out with the expectation that this might be his final trip to Atlantis; he’s deep in his fifties at this point, and is paranoid that he hasn’t much longer to live. “Audubon wondered if he had ten years left, or even five, let alone a hundred.” The real-life Autubon would die in 1851, aged 65, which in those days would’ve been a fine old age; but given that he’s traveling with Harris, who was about a decade younger, it’s easy to understand how Autubon would feel insecure about his own age. We’re shown in several ways how Autubon and Harris act as foils for each other, and how the latter unintentionally makes Autubon think of the man he could’ve been; but Autubon simply doesn’t have the temperament to be a big game hunter or mountain man, nor even to sleep around were he not already married. This resentment builds somewhat over the course of the story but never boils over, and I’m not sure if that’s for the best or not. If this story has an Achilles’s heel, aside from the occasional clunkiness of Turtledove’s style (this is already a short novella, but you could probably cut a whole page or two of just redundancies), it’s the lack of actual drama or even tangible stakes. Turtledove tries to inject stakes into the thing once we get to Atlantis, but the result ends up being a lot more melancholic than thrilling—which I’m willing to concede may be the point. This story clocks in at about maybe 20,000 words but could’ve definitely been shortened to a novelette.

Aside from our two leads there are only a few incidental characters, such as Harris’s lady friend on the steamboat and later Gordon Coates, “the man who published his work in Atlantis,” who appears for a bit of exposition but is otherwise not much of a character. For the most part this is a two-man show, which in itself is not exactly a problem. Butcher’s Crossing is just four dudes in the wilderness for at least half of its 260-page duration and that worked out fine. Obviously the other “characters” that are supposed to fill the void are the local wildlife of Atlantis, namely the red-crested eagle and Canada geese, the latter usually being called honkers (I struggle to get my mind out of the gutter when the characters call these birds “honkers”), with the red-crested eagle going after other birds for food. Atlantis used to be more abundant with native life, but a mix of human settlement and rat infestation has endangered the natural order of things. “Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.” The “upside” to this is that going gaming, or hunting for the sake of drawing the native life, is not that dangerous. Still, it’s a nasty situation which sends Autubon into a crisis of conscience, on top of his anxiety over the fact that he’s no longer a spring chicken. The way Autubon works is he doesn’t try drawing live birds, but rather has them killed first and uses wiring to pose the corpses, such that he can draw a still subject and try to give the impression of what the bird would’ve looked like in life. In the days before photography became both widespread and practical this would’ve been the best way (or at least Autubon’s preferred way) of capturing wildlife for research, not to mention artwork.

So there’s the dilemma: in order to draw his subjects accurately Autubon has to kill them first. This in itself is far from ideal, but you also has an ecosystem that’s being endangered, with the red-crested eagle possibly being on the verge of extinction. Autubon’s passion as an artist and scientist butts heads with the reality that his work requires him to toy with lives which may be on the brink of extinction. This is, at its heart, the problem of all would-be settlers: the destruction of the natural environment which comes from human industry. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the steamboat in the story’s opening stretch is framed in a rather unflattering light, as are the guns Autubon and Harris take for their expedition, including “newfangled” revolvers. This focusing on the environmental ramifications of colonialism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it’s rather convenient that there’s no indigenous human popular on Atlantis, such that Our Heroes™ don’t have to worry about the abuses settlers inflict on indigenous peoples; maybe Turtledove did this to keep his leads sympathetic, or maybe it just wasn’t considered. But then by focusing wholly on man’s relationship with nature (of the man vs. man/man vs. self/man vs. nature options the story goes with the second and third), Turtledove is able to zero in on the inherent tragedy of Autubon’s profession; that he chooses to not provide a clear answer to this dilemma is not a mistake but simply a choice. As such the story ends up being less about plot and more about… vibes. Autubon’s brooding. You may or may not have a soft spot for such a thing.

There Be Spoilers Here

Given the story’s rather episodic and amorphous structure it’s actually hard to spoil, so I’ll leave just it at that.

A Step Farther Out

If science fiction can be considered a marriage between art and the sciences then “Autubon in Atlantis” is quintessentially a science fiction story, even if it reads closer to historical fiction or even late 19th century adventure fiction than SF. Undoubtedly it’s a throwback to an extent, with Turtledove even using some outdated terminology to better fit the setting (the third-person narrator calls black people in New Orleans “Negroes,” which can be jarring from a modern perspective, but would’ve been perfectly innocuous in 1843), and so I can’t say I’m surprised that it was published in Analog. Taking its faults into account, it’s still an effective story in that it raises lay interest in a historical subject most people would not know anything about. I certainly knew nothing about John Autubon before reading Turtledove’s story, but now I have this absurd feeling (as I’m sure Turtledove felt when writing it) that Audubon was a kindred spirit. This is basically what I think historical fiction should do: make people of the past seem like we could’ve gotten to know them—not as footnotes but as people.

See you next time.