mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
(Other Earths, Nick Gevers & Jay Lake, eds.)



The lead-off story in this anthology of alternate history stories deals with the Civil War, probably the most common period of history for meddling in this sub-genre.  But Wilson doesn't go the obvious route where the South wins the war, but instead takes the premise that the war was never fought, a compromise was reached and slavery gradually disappeared anyway due to industrialization and international pressure.  And while that may be good for all the soldiers who didn't have to become soldiers, it wasn't so good for the African-Americans, who still deal for years afterward with segregation, open hostility and, worst of all, government-sponsored internment camps.

It's to one of these former camps that an educated black man named Percy takes the narrator as his assistant and photographer.  They're warned that the area is no longer safe but no one has any specifics.  As it turns out an elderly former resident named Ephraim is still living there, trying to preserve one particular building where his son had written all over the walls the names of as many fellow detainees as he could.  These people are all now dead and forgotten, and Ephraim feels their memory can only be preserved at all as long as this one small building still stands.

Percy reveals he had received a letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in this timeline never became famous because she couldn't find a publisher for Uncle Tom's Cabin.  She reveals to him a vision of what would have happened if there really had been a Civil War, and while as horrible as that may have been it would have represented a definitive end to slavery and allowed everyone to move on to a new way of thinking more expediently.   In some respect this may be Wilson's response to some revisionist historians who see the Civil War as avoidable and ultimately unnecessary, those who try to cast it in the same light as our involvement in wars of the last ten years.  But he also comments through his narrator that undeclared wars can be just as bad, if not worse in the long run.  Wilson provides plenty to think about from this story, with a worthwhile use of the alternate history conceit, and he lends it enough originality within a focused, personal narrative that makes this a worthy contender from an author who can do no wrong lately.
posted by Mark at 9:37 PM