Science fiction from the outlook of the oppressed

“Fire on the Mountain,” by Terry Bisson; PM Press, 2d ed., 2009.

Too often science fiction visions of future worlds paint bleak pictures of earth and humankind devastated by catastrophic wars, which drive surviving humans to seek other planets to exploit. The message is a mix of “change things before it gets too late” and “be glad you aren’t living in the future.”

While Terry Bisson’s “Fire on the Mountain” is set in 1959, the book offers an historic transformation that looks back 100 years and explores what the future could have been had the raid on Harper’s Ferry ended with different victors.

Originally planned for July 1859, with strategic support from Harriet Tubman, the raid on the Harper’s Ferry arsenal was delayed until Oct. 16 when Brown and 21 men struck without the ailing Tubman. Brown’s forces were cut off and defeated by U.S. Marines led by West Point Colonel Robert E. Lee.

In Bisson’s vision, Tubman joins Brown. A small army of Africans, who have fled slavery, join them, as well as abolitionists. They are well equipped with modern weaponry. Lee commands federal troops sent to trap Brown and Tubman, confident that they can defeat Brown’s forces. Instead, Brown’s army decisively defeats Lee’s troops in a battle in Roanoke.

Imagining socialist Nova Africa

The raid opens the way for a victory by anti-slavery forces and leads to the overthrow of slavery and the creation of a socialist Nova Africa, forever changing the course of history. Frederick Douglass risks arrest to openly support the uprising at a Philadelphia abolitionist rally. Poet Walt Whitman goes south to join Brown. Support comes from Haiti, the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere; an English brigade raised by Karl Marx; Italian socialist Giuseppe Garibaldi; and the Mexican republic.

Since the raid took place as originally planned on July 4, that becomes Nova Africa’s Independence Day. Nova Africa’s socialist government is recognized by Latin American powers, a newly freed Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the Eloheh, the government-in-exile of the Cherokee. The heroic battle against slavery inspires Mexicans living in Texas, California and Arizona to overthrow their occupiers and rejoin revolutionary, republican Mexico.

In 1959, there is an independent Quebec and a Dineh nation. Africa is socialist. U.S. imperialism never materialized as a dominant world force. Moreover, the socialist South has just celebrated its centennial.

In that context, the book opens as Yasmin Abraham Martin Odinga crosses the Appalachian border between Nova Africa and recently socialized USSA. With her is an ancient doctor’s bag containing the papers of Dr. Abraham, her great-grandfather, which she planned to read at the Harper’s Ferry centennial celebration, however, she is three months late. A Black cosmonaut team, set to land on Mars, stirs memories of the death of her spouse, an astronaut who died during Nova Africa’s first Mars mission.

Her daughter is traveling with her to deliver the papers to the Harper’s Ferry museum director, Scott Grissom, a veteran of the “Second Revolutionary War” that brought socialism to the northern U.S. in 1948. Grissom shares letters from Thomas Hunter, the anti-slavery doctor who trained Dr. Abraham to become a doctor when they were members of Brown’s army.

Dr. Abraham’s memoirs tell of his youth, first when he was enslaved, and then joined Brown’s forces. His writings, and the letters by Hunter, the abolitionist son of a pro-slavery family, provide different perspectives on the Harper’s Ferry raid and the events that rocked the abolitionist movement in its aftermath.

Like the historic account of the Harper’s Ferry raid provided by Osborne P. Anderson, a Black revolutionary who took up arms to join Brown, Dr. Abraham’s letters reflect the turmoil resulting from this raid on both enslaved Africans and the white slave owners. Anderson’s account is in “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry: The Unfinished Revolution” published by World View Forum in 2000.

Mumia writes introduction

In this book’s introduction, Mumia Abu-Jamal, writing from Pennsylvania’s death row, observes, “All great fiction borrows from what might have been: But what world might we have 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.” Mumia concludes it is “guaranteed to make your spine tingle.”

First published in the U.S. in 1988, and then long unavailable here, the book was reissued in 2009 with Mumia’s introduction. It was published in France in 2001 as “Nova Africa.” The author has also written screenplays about Paul Robeson, John Brown and Mumia.

Bisson examines the obstacles that the oppressed in any given revolution must surely face in order to ultimately take the final step to revolt. Egypt’s unfolding revolutionary struggle today makes Bisson’s account seem less like fiction and more a missed historical opportunity.

The author explores the growing support by oppressed African people toward Brown, Tubman and their cadre as the struggle develops and the resistance forces are able to hold their ground against the opposing troops. Enslaved Africans provide secret material support to the resistance. Some abandon their captivity to join Brown's forces, as this book’s Dr. Abraham did when he was 12 years old, to become a revolutionary fighter. Fires set at plantations’ houses burn down these symbols of slavery’s oppression.

Here, Brown and Tubman’s army creates a literal beacon -- actual fires kept burning in the mountains -- that lets the oppressed know this resistance lives on, much like those who refused to yield ground in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Like the beacons in “Fire on the Mountain,” Egypt’s revolutionary struggle is offering hope to the world’s oppressed.

“Fire on the Mountain” and “A Voice from Harper’s Ferry” can be ordered online at www.Leftbooks.com.