A Different Flesh, Harry Turtledove
A Different Flesh, Harry Turtledove
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A Different Flesh

Author: Harry Turtledove

Narrator: Paul Woodson

Unabridged: 10 hr 24 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/17/2019


Synopsis

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.

About Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove (he/him) is an American fantasy and science fiction writer whom Publishers Weekly has called the "Master of Alternate History." He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Hugo Award for Best Novella, the HOMer Award for Short story, and the John Esthen Cook Award for Southern Fiction. Turtledove's works include the Crosstime Traffic, Worldwar, Darkness, and Opening of the World series; the stand-alone novels The House of Daniel, Fort Pillow, and Give Me Back My Legions!; and over a dozen short stories available on Tor.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Laura Frankos, and their four daughters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angie on July 04, 2017

Reread July 2017 for my SF Group. Just as good the second time around! A very thoughtful and well-thought-out book! A Different Flesh is actually a linked series of stories about an alternate history in which homo erectus survived and peopled North America. Although each story stands on its own and ca......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on April 17, 2019

What an amazingly thought provoking interesting book. The story of an alternate America where those who landed at Jamestown in 1607 did not find Native American humans, but homo erectus, otherwise known as Sims. These hairy "sub-humans" have no power of speech, no chins and no foreheads. They commun......more

Goodreads review by John on May 14, 2014

I enjoyed the book. The (individual) stories (chapters) were well put together, and showed a pattern of progress over time with regard to human rights and sim(homoerectus) rights. Slavery of blacks ended much earlier, and in a more peaceful way in the book, than in our history. The author implied th......more

Goodreads review by Jim on January 21, 2013

I started reading it. Very familiar...I had read this before. What hooked me again were the "cavemen" on the front cover. I've got a whole stack of about a dozen alternate history stories of Mr. Turtledove's under a table, waiting to be dove into. This one has Christopher Columbus and company findin......more

Goodreads review by Sam on April 02, 2020

I’ve read Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels for years, and I consider him to be one of the masters of the genre – he’s certainly among the genre’s most prolific authors. Alternate history is defined by Wikipedia as “speculative fiction consisting of stories in which one or more historical......more