The Spanish American War

Today I had an idea for a short story, but I'm forcing myself not to think about it. I have a science-fiction short story in the works--technically the third in my sci-fi universe, but if I can get writing it and finish it, hopefully it will be the first finished that I'm satisfied with. The first was produced in high school and essentially created my universe. The second was written in college and based off a series of short segments (one to two sentences) that I randomly wrote and selected. I enjoy it, but I need to extensively polish it. Anyway, I'm trying to force myself to work on Tassia's Story to the exclusion of other projects, so I'm going to limit myself to blogging about this new idea instead of working on it right now.

I've always been fascinated by American history, but especially the various wars in our past. Like it or not wars are a natural part of the (fallen) human condition. Man always fights wars--there is no utopia where men are always peaceful (unless they're brain dead). My favourite genres are science-fiction and fantasy. I define science-fiction as taking place in a future extrapolated from the real world and usually involving superior technology (sometimes technological regression is involved, but usually starting from a tech base more advanced than today). Fantasy takes place in a completely fictional world, most often includes magic, and may contain races coequal with humanity (i.e. not aliens from another world). There are some universes that don't quite work. Terry Brooks technically wrote science-fiction with Shannara since it is in our future--but aside from that one fact it is pure fantasy.

In the course of writing fantasy I like to keep a low tech base--what was available in ancient and/or medieval times. However, I will borrow from around the world and occasionally from upstream in the timeline, if I can justify the development at an earlier time in this new timeline. The cooperative fantasy universe I've developed with Miah has Elves, which I control. One segment of the Elves resemble Europeans in some ways, and they have kingdoms next to a place of religious significanace, like the crusader kingdoms in medieval Palestine.

However, today I had another thought, primarily because the old books I've been reading lately (like America Across the Seas) were written in the aftermath of the Spanish American War. What if I had two medieval/fantasy kingdoms (others are around--I don't especially like worlds that are too simplistic--look at medieval Europe and the dozens upon dozens of principalities). One is a young kingdom (no republics or democracies hereabouts) with heavy reliance on trade--the other is a declining empire that depended on conquest to maintain its opulence. (Yes, America and Spain, different.) For whatever reason (a problem with a ship similar to the Maine incident in Havana?) the two nations go to war and the younger kingdom is victorious. As a result the kingdom takes control of various colonial possessions. This is all fairly straightforward--basically what actually happened in real history.

But here comes the twist. How would a medieval nation treat natives such as Native Americans or Caribbean Natives? Then after they had colonized the lands of these natives how would another kingdom act when it came in? We know that the Vikings were driven out of North America by the Indian tribes--and the Vikings weren't poor fighters. Obviously I'm proposing that the kingdoms in question have more resources than the Vikings did, and better access to their home countries. However, there would be much less of a technological advantage than even that which Cortes had over the Aztecs.

I'm not sure how to approach this topic, or what would happen in such a story. But I'm going to throw the idea out there in case anybody wants to drop me a reply. If not I'll still be happy though--just because this is here I might be inspired to revisit this idea in the future.

~Matt