Fire on the Mountain

Terry Bisson

Description

It’s 1959 in socialist Virginia. The Deep South is an independent Black nation called Nova Africa. The second Mars expedition is about to touch down on the red planet. And a pregnant scientist is climbing the Blue Ridge in search of her great-great grandfather, a teenage slave who fought with John Brown and Harriet Tubman’s guerrilla army.

Long unavailable in the U.S., published in France as Nova Africa, Fire on the Mountain is the story of what might have happened if John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry had succeeded—and the Civil War had been started not by the slave owners but the abolitionists.

Sujets

• Republic of New Afrika
• Shenandoah Valley
• Slave rebellion
• Political fiction
• Abolition

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604862584
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRAISE FOR
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
EXTRAORDINARY! Returning from Bisson s 20th century to our own is a shock, leaving us to regret that it was only a story after all. after all.
- Locus
A fascinating world with its Egyptian automobiles and Mars landings and whiffs of utopian superscience.
- Thrust SF Review
The writing is lyrical and seductive
- Los Angeles Daily News
A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points.
- Publishers Weekly
The South has risen again-this time as a brilliantly illuminated Black Utopia.
-Ed Bryant, Nebula Award winner.
Fire on the Mountain does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick s The Man in the High Castle did for World War Two.
-George Alec Effinger, Hugo Award winning author of Schrodinger s Kitten.
PRAISE FOR
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
EXTRAORDINARY! Returning from Bisson s 20th century to our own is a shock, leaving us to regret that it was only a story after all. after all.
- Locus
A fascinating world with its Egyptian automobiles and Mars landings and whiffs of utopian superscience.
- Thrust SF Review
The writing is lyrical and seductive
- Los Angeles Daily News
A talent for evoking the joyful, vertiginous experiences of a world at fundamental turning points.
- Publishers Weekly
The South has risen again-this time as a brilliantly illuminated Black Utopia.
-Ed Bryant, Nebula Award winner.
Fire on the Mountain does for the Civil War what Philip K. Dick s The Man in the High Castle did for World War Two.
-George Alec Effinger, Hugo Award winning author of Schrodinger s Kitten.
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
A LSO BY T ERRY B ISSON
Fiction: Wyrldmaker Talking Man Voyage to the Red Planet Bears Discover Fire (stories) Pirates of the Universe In the Upper Room (stories) The Pick-up Artist Greetings (stories) Dear Abbey Numbers Don t Lie Planet of Mystery Billy s Book (stories) The Left Left Behind (PM Outspoken Author)
Biography: Tradin Paint: Raceway Rookies and Royalty Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader Ona Move: The Story of Mumia Abu Jamal
Screenplays: Kansas Brown Live from Death Row Robeson
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
T ERRY B ISSON
PM PRESS 2009
Terry Bisson 1988, 2009, Introduction, Mumia Abu-Jamal 2009 This edition 2009 PM Press
ISBN: 978-1-60486-087-0 LCCN: 2009901384
PM Press P.O. Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 PMPress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.
Cover: John Yates/ Stealworks.com Inside design: Josh MacPhee/ Justseeds.org
For Kuwasi Balagoon and the Black Liberation Army past, present and future
Contents
Introduction
Introduction
I am, by any measure, a sci-fi head.
I have read almost all the works of the Master-Isaac Asimov, the works of Frank Herbert (and indeed, several of his sons), Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, et al .
I am a sci-fi head.
Yet few works have moved me as deeply, as thoroughly, as Terry Bisson s Fire On The Mountain .
Part of it is sheer fascination, the fruit of all well done sci-fi, for if all fiction is creative, sci-fi goes another step further into worlds known and unknown, into that undiscovered country of the future.
But Bisson s work breaks into a future that rarely raises its head in this genre.
Again, I say this as a true head, who has not only read classics, but viewed the film versions of such works with a critical eye. Have you noticed how much of sci-fi is not so much futuristic, as it is a projection of a future where whites are many and people of color are few? Have you ever watched a movie such as Logan s Run , and spent the first two-thirds of the movie wondering where all the black folks are?
Then along comes Bisson. His works ripple with Black life, with voices and opinions and ideas as real as the paper you re reading these words on (assuming, of course, that you re reading on paper!).
I admit to more than being a sci-fi head. I m hopelessly sentimental, so much so that to read Fire today wrings tears from me, not just at the sheer beauty of his prose, his fertile turn of phrase, but above all, for his vision, one born in a revolutionary, and profoundly humanistic, consciousness.
Over these long years in the gulag, I have heard some men deprecate fiction as literature not worthy of one s time and attention. I don t do fiction, man, some have said. But fiction has a power that we often ignore, for did not Lincoln remark, upon meeting the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom s Cabin ), So, you re the little lady who started this big war?
Of course, this was the rhetoric of an astute politician, but as with all rhetoric, there was a grain of truth in it, for Stowe s work forced millions to think about something they didn t want to ponder-American slavery. It is in this fecund spirit that Bisson s Fire rages in the dark night of Black American life.
All great fiction borrows from what might have been: but what world might have we been born into had John Brown succeeded?
With this single poignant story, Bisson molds a world as sweet as banana cream pies, and as briny as hot tears.
As these words are penned, the elections are in full swing, and a Black person may, or may not, be elected president. But, as time is our teacher, such a development means little when it comes to the freedom and independence of millions of Black people, even as the emergence of Black mayors has meant little more than their presiding over cities that mark our fall, rather than our ascendance.
Bisson s narrative, here and elsewhere, uses fiction to answer the What ifs of human nature with brilliance and insight.
According to classic multi-dimensional theory, there are thousands (millions?) of alternative universes where every probability has its potential fruition. If that is so, there is one where Fire On The Mountain is not sci-fi but a history book on what was.
This is a splendid work of imagination, guaranteed to make your spine tingle.
Mumia Abu-Jamal Death Row, U.S.A. (Summer 2008)
Most of the good things in this book are from Cheikh Anta Diop, W.E.B. DuBois, Leonard Ehrlich, R.A. Lafferty, Truman Nelson, Mark Twain and Malcolm X. The bad things are, without exception, the author s own.
The present, due to its staggering complexities, is almost as conjectural as the past.
-George Jackson
Dawn also has its terrors.
-Victor Hugo
America is our country, more than it is the whites . . . we have enriched it with our blood and tears.
-David Walker
My love to all who love their neighbors.
-John Brown
In 1859 the abolitionist John Brown, fresh from a successful guerrilla war that kept Kansas from entering the Union as a slave state, attacked the federal arsenal at Harper s Ferry, Virginia, with a small force of armed men. Brown came to Virginia to fulfill a lifelong dream: to carry the war against slavery into Africa (as he put it) by putting a small army of runaway slaves and abolitionists onto the Blue Ridge, and heading south. Brown s idea was that such a force, even if militarily weak, would terrorize the slave owners, embolden the slaves, and hasten the polarization which was already splitting the nation apart. Others obviously agreed: he had raised funds to buy the most modern weaponry, and recruited the experienced Black slavery-fighter, Harriet Tubman, to be his second-in-command.
The raid was symbolically timed for Independence Day, July 4, 1859; but Tubman fell sick and key supplies were delayed. After a three-month delay, Brown and twenty-one men struck Harper s Ferry on October 16, without Tubman. Through a combination of military errors and bad luck, they were cut off in the town and defeated by U.S. Marines led by a West Point graduate named Robert E. Lee. Brown and five others were hanged for treason and entered legend as martyrs instead of liberators. Even at the gallows they were dignified and unrepentant; even in failure, their raid terrorized the South, electrified the nation, and precipitated the Civil War, which broke out less than a year later.
Fire on the Mountain is a story of what might have happened if John Brown s raid had succeeded.
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN
Yasmin Abraham Martin Odinga drove across the border at noon. The man and woman at the station looked at her Nova Africa plates and Sea Islands University sticker and waved her on through without even asking for papers. Yasmin figured she was probably the first stranger they had seen all morning. Laurel Gap was not a busy crossing, and most of the traffic, from the looks of the road and the trucks and the area, was church picnickers and relatives home for Sunday visits-all known to them. Mostly white folks on either side of the border through here. Mostly older. Even socialist mountains give up their young to the cities.
An hour later Yasmin was in the Valley, heading north, with the high, straight, timbered wall of the Blue Ridge to her right, clothed in its October reds and golds. She scanned the radio back and forth between country on A.M. and sacred on A.X., ignoring the talk shows, enjoying the high silvery singing. There was no danger of running across the Mars news, not on Sunday morning here in what Leon had often impatiently but always affectionately called the Holy Land. She eased on up to 90, 100, 120, enjoying the smooth power of the big Egyptian car. She had a 200-klick run down the valley to Staunton and she couldn t shake the uncomfortable feeling that she was late.
She was looking forward to seeing her mother-in-law, Pearl. She was and she wasn t looking forward to seeing her dau