Are there any stories with a powerful African or Native American or Aboriginal Australian empire?

For Native Americans, I'd greatly recommend the Eagles Trilogy by Alan Smale. I've read the first two books in the series and I'm currently on book three.
 

Deleted member 103950

I haven’t read it myself yet but there’s this young adult novel called Blonde Roots it’s about an African empire colonizing the world and taking white slaves from Europe.
 
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For native, of south american variety, the guns ot tashawu of the late robert perkins is always a good read
 
The Temeraire series has a good bit of this. The basic premise of the series is that dragons are real and generally have human level intelligence. The series is set in the Napoleanic wars where dragons are used by all sides to form air forces. It's kind of a combination of Military Fantasy and Alternate History. It's not shown much in the early couple books but gradually quite a bit of what you're talking about ends up getting revealed.

SPOILERS





A African kingdom which heavily uses dragons manages to unilaterally destroy the Atlantic slave trade by raiding and destroying the various slaving ports. The Chinese leave a bit of their isolationism behind and end up getting involved in the war. They also establish trading posts in Australia establishing sort of protectorates over various aboriginal tribes. The Inca's never get conquered by the Spanish and are still around (though still alive and quite powerful in terms of dragons European diseases have still wrecked hellish havoc on the human population.) The relative strength of some of the North American tribes leads to a less onesided relationship between the early US and the local tribes/nations. The US still expands a lot but in the Revolution the majority of American indian tribes/nations join with the Rebels and in return for getting their own states within the US, citizenship, and representation in congress. The European Colonists and the local Amerindians are shown kind of assimilating each other with a US that has a lot more American Indian cultural traits. We don't get to see a whole lot of what the situation is in the US but we do know that instead of James Madison Tecumseh is the president of the US.



All in all I can't reccomend the series enough. It's suprisingly hilarious and the emotional bond between Dragons and their riders is some of the best emotional writing I've ever seen. It's also a very well rounded out world. Once you accept the concept of intelligent dragons the rest of the world just makes sense. Dragons exist but so do countermeasures and their's a constant evolution of tactics and weaponry. The relative place of Dragons within society also see's a lot of focus as does the relative difference in terms of Human-Draco relations by country.

Agreed, Temeraire is an amazing series. I love how Novik plays off of the various myths of dragons in different cultures when designing the breeds and their relative roles in different societies, and the use of the dragons to explore different cultural relationships and how the exchange develops the characters throughout the series is great.
 
Agreed, Temeraire is an amazing series. I love how Novik plays off of the various myths of dragons in different cultures when designing the breeds and their relative roles in different societies, and the use of the dragons to explore different cultural relationships and how the exchange develops the characters throughout the series is great.

Agreed. I do think however that she kind of idealized non European cultures to an extent. She seems to buy into the myth that Europeans were sort of inherently culturally more aggressive, thieving, and monsterous instead of Europeans being about as culturally bad as most other cultures and just kind of lucking into the power mechanisms that allowed them to rule over the entire world.

For instance I'd say she idealizes the African kingdom to an extent (They're shown conquering and ethnically cleansing The Cape Colony and massacring all of the men but not killing the women and children). We see the flaws of Europe very heavily but don't really see a lot bad about other cultures. Admittedly averting European colonialism is a good thing as was ending the slave trade and freeing the slaves in Brazil. But we'd should see the more powerful non European powers as colonial powers in their own right. She didn't really avert colonialism. She just made the Colonial powers ruled by people who aren't Europeans.

Admittedly the Imperial Chinese version of colonialism was based more around tributary states then direct rule at least outside of Mainland China itself.

Still all in all a great series. I'm sad she stopped writing them and sadder that the TV series attempt never took off. Honestly after reading the entire series in a week I stopped about 75 percent through the last book. I just couldn't bear to finish it. It would just hurt too much to do so.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
There is an old online timeline - by Dale Cozart maybe) about a comet or asteroid impact 1400's think. The impact is somewhere in the old world which leads to an expanded Native American and presumably Aboriginal power. Anyone recall this timeline or where to find it ?
So at long last thanks to the efforts of jmberry I found this timeline although by a different author than I remembered.If you are interested in this topic its well worth reading http://web.archive.org/web/20010625144811/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4123/andrew.htm
 
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MaxGerke01

Banned
Wow I had forgotten how detailed the above timeline but despite all the detail it really cries out for more information about how this world develops outside of North America. I was also surprised about no mention of the buffalo which would have made a good pack animal and well as food source if domesticated.
 
Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan depicts a massive central African superpower, and a multiracial Gandhi-led social democracy in South Africa.
 

Deleted member 160141

Most of Human History is focused on Eurasia and Alternate History mostly follows suit. Africa, outside of the Northern region, only gets mentioned when it comes to slavery or colonization. The Indigenous Americans and Aboriginal Australians are generally seen as tribes to get conquered and little else.

Is there any story where Native Americans or Sub-Saharan Africans or Aboriginal Australians end up building a big civilization and industrializing?
Mask of the Sun, and its sequel anthology, Golden Reflections.
Basically the setting is an infinite multiverse of human histories in which two powers have arisen to contest the whole thing: the Aztecs and the Inca.
Somewhere, in one timeline of many, the Aztecs achieved world domination. In another, the Inca did. Now, they're each trying to flip as many timelines as possible to their side by fucking over each others' development there. This means they can go between timelines as well as back and forth inside them, which I've never seen before in any such fiction; usually it's either back-and-forth (Cross-Time by Poul Anderson, sorta) or side-to-side (Kalvan / Paratime Police, by H. Beam Piper).
There are multiple stories within each book, and they're all told from the perspective of a hapless local who falls into the schemes of one or another group.

Throughout the stories, the Inca are generally the good guys, but I personally think he makes them out to be just a bit too... nice? palatable? I don't know how to put it, but some versions of the Inca are a bit beyond the pale. (I mean, constitutional monarchy? Mate, you serious?) Either way, we get to see the Aztecs in full play, and they're not nice fellows.

If you want to see what happens when religious cannibalism is an accepted practice, try imagining what happens when you're a spy who gets caught and, uh, interrogated by them.
 

Deleted member 160141

Personally I think that one goes over the pale when it has the crown prince convince his father to allow Protestant missionaries into his realm around year 1600, himself convert around 1621, and then convert the entire empire around 70 years afterward.
I know that people can be soft in the head when out of their milieu and among strangers for a long time, but mate! Your entire basis of legitimacy rests on your descent from Wiraqucha! If not the prince, then the father should be deadset against this! You might be open-minded yourself, but you're the ruler of a large empire whose entire way of government is not going to just bend over to suit a foreign ideology! At the very least, the panakas would certainly have tried a coup against this flagrant blasphemy toward the royal mummies! But then they're not mentioned at all.
Suffice to say, I wasn't pleased with how it turned out.
 
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