Books Seeds of Story Apocalyptic Plagues and Anthropocene Forests: How Charles C. Mann’s 1491 Rewrote My Brain Exploring how history and other non-fiction works inspire speculative writing. By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on July 15, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, a new column where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. I’m starting with Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Twenty years ago, this book rewrote my brain. It changed how I think about the continent where I live and the range of possible societies. While numerous more recent books examine North American history from an Indigenous perspective, Mann’s provided many non-Indigenous folks’ introduction to the field, and its success opened the door to a stream of popular publications. What It’s About U.S. education notoriously treats Native American nations as part of the country’s origin story: a small group who helped the colonies survive and were then destroyed by them. Lucky students may learn more detail about the Aztec empire, the Haudenosaunee’s role as a model for democracy, or the occasional battle won on an inevitable road to loss. Things have improved marginally since I was a kid in the ’80s, but I’ve still had to explain to my own children that, for example, native nations still exist and have their own governments. Mann’s book uses demographic and anthropological research to show that native pre-contact populations were far larger than popularly supposed. This is the common thread binding the book together, but is merely a central spine for a history of wildly diverse cultures, governance structures, ecological management approaches, and technologies. Despite the title, Mann also spends plenty of time on how pre-contact dynamics affected contact itself and the years following. The increased estimates of pre-Columbian population force readers to confront the sheer scale and horror of post-contact plagues. Earlier estimates were based on settler reports of community sizes, failure to recognize non-European indicators of human activity, and the general conviction that it couldn’t have been that bad. Also, plain wishful thinking by people who don’t want to imagine that plagues can get worse than the Black Death. Studies now place the population collapse upwards of 90%, and place modern North Americans in a post-apocalyptic landscape where we wander among half-buried monuments and half-remembered names. And this collapse was prior to more deliberate genocidal projects like biological warfare, massacre, and residential schools. Despite that, this is primarily a book about survival and creativity. Another key thread covers the anthropocene project by which native peoples dramatically shaped their environment. Colonists wondered at forests full of food, with easy paths meandering through a veritable cornucopia. Obviously, they concluded, this is a gift from the divine: Manifest destiny, Q.E.D. It can’t possibly be a manmade landscape, because we know what that looks like: neat monocropped rows and orchards. These sections will make you want to slap the Pilgrims, even more than you presumably already do, but also make you think about how we recognize—or fail to recognize—technology when we find it. There’s terraforming hidden in Northeastern forests, the engineered soil of the Amazon, and corn. Did I mention the corn? The wild version of this now near-universal staple crop is teosinte, a slender grass with a few tiny kernels sprouting sporadically up its length. Breeding teosinte into all the diverse and delicious strains of cob corn is now understood as a multigenerational breeding project, one of humanity’s first and most successful genetic engineering efforts. In among these longer threads, Mann shares stories that illustrate the drama and variability of native experiences. Many, like Tisquantum’s intercontinental adventures and the Borgia-esque tale of 8-Deer Jaguar Claw, have inexplicably not been turned into blockbuster adventure series. (It’s explicable; the explanation is racism.) Tisquantum was kidnapped twice, wrangled incompetent European sailors, survived war and mutiny, and became a vital diplomatic go-between due to his familiarity with multiple cultures and languages. I want the web serial ASAP. * * * This book changed the way I see the world, and the way I write. It made me understand, at a gut level, the possibility of humans acting as functional parts of our ecosystems—a very different thing from stereotypes about native harmony with nature. When I worldbuild future or alien technologies now, I think about flexibility versus hardness, and the difference between working iron tools and creating extraordinarily thin metal plates. I was once napping at an all-night gathering, vaguely heard someone discussing their refusal to eat genetically-engineered crops, woke up to ask if they’d brought teosinte to the potluck, and promptly fell back asleep. 1491 is extraordinarily readable and extraordinarily memorable. It’s full of things you’ll want to talk about at parties (even when awake). It writes human agency back into the landscape of the Americas. And by doing this, it made it easier for more people, including Indigenous authors, to get published on all these topics. The failure mode for a non-Indigenous author can be to miss cultural context and shape stories to their own expectations—while I’m obviously not in a position to speak to this directly, I haven’t encountered the same sorts of native critiques of 1491 that I have, for example, of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel or Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent. Mann is careful about the limits of his evidence, avoids broad generalizations, and makes events accessible without turning them into neat or familiar narratives. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Alternate Plagues. Several years ago, an alternate history book posited Americas full of megafauna, but never populated by Pleistocene humans—thus making a conveniently guilt-free new frontier. It was unusual in the arguments that followed, but not in the ease with which it considered mammals more central to the continent than humans. I’m not sure anyone could read this book and not have the first branch point on their minds be, “Could we have avoided the worst plague in human history?” The number of options is vast. For example, there’s a relatively brief period between Eurasians evolving minimal resilience to smallpox et al. and developing vaccines. Earlier contact would’ve led to, at least, more symmetrical effects across continents; later contact would’ve involved less exposure. It could have also involved better treatments and cures—you can’t count on genocidal empires to share their medical acumen, but imagine someone like Tisquantum fitting a little medical tech espionage in amid all his hairbreadth escapes. Or what if native nations managed to domesticate more local megafauna, thus developing their own set of zoonotic diseases to share—and perhaps earlier protective options? The oddest method of mitigating the plagues, in a surprising number of books, has been dragons. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, for example, shows a North America in which plague decimated the human population, but less-affected draconic symbionts have managed to protect against invaders while humans slowly recover their numbers. And while the dragons in Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon’s Breath haven’t prevented invasion, they’re helping hold the line on the western side of the continent—and are perhaps helping change the dynamic in the east. A Different Sort of City. Most people—unless I’m having a Feldspar problem—know something about Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital on the current site of Mexico City. Mann lays out exactly how impressive it was, and even before it became commonplace to trip over ancient cities in the region, pointed out that it was far from unique. What’s surprising is that cities north of the Rio Grande were almost unheard of, with one exception. Cahokia Mounds was, at its peak in the 11th-12th centuries CE, bigger than any city in the eventual U.S. would be again until the late 1700s. It was a center for religion, leadership, and trade—and we know relatively little about it. The name comes from later locals who may not be related to its builders, and unlike Mayan cultures, they didn’t leave written records. Cahokia’s fall has been attributed to authoritarian overreach, ecological collapse, sanitation failures, and/or a gradual cultural rejection of city life. It’s full of untapped story ideas. Though not entirely untapped: W. Michael and Kathleen O’Neal Gear’s People of the Morning Star builds on the real history, while Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz plays with a version of the city that survives into the 1920s. Flexible Technologies. Split up a sapient species at the hunter-gatherer stage, and wildly different routes of technological development result. While Andean settled agriculture has recognizable similarities to Mesopotamian settled agriculture, the Americas by 1492 saw a wider spectrum of possible land management strategies than Eurasia and Africa. Food forests were human-shaped, but did not require intensive tending or harvesting. Controlled burns maintained ecosystems from grassland to salmon runs. In the Amazon, rich terra preta incorporated charcoal and broken pottery to increase fertility; we’re still trying to replicate its methods. Many native technologies also emphasized flexibility and tensile strength over the advances in hardness preferred by Europeans. European houses were brick and stone; northern American houses tended toward tight weaving and easy revision. The rule doesn’t generalize everywhere—a Mayan pyramid is plenty hard and the English did complicated things with wool—but is a good guide to central tendencies.  One vivid speculative depiction of this kind of technology is most certainly not influenced by Mann—but Mann’s book does change how I watch the work of noted non-deep cross-cultural thinker George Lucas. Take a look at that Ewok village, and tell me it’s actually low-tech, as opposed to tech-unrecognizable-to-spaceship-people. For that matter, take a look at how quickly Ewoks figure out hoverbikes, and how well arrows work against mass-produced helmets. Lucas was working with stereotypes, but accidentally got something right. Janet Kagan’s Hellspark is a first contact novel that, more deliberately, depicts the common failure to recognize technology that doesn’t look like ours. The book is built around the question of how we figure out that other people are people, and whether that might be something we can get better at. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star braids three timelines: ancient Mayan, modern-day, and a future culture. The latter draws on Mayan heritage and technology for a flexible and portable lifestyle, one that bears more resemblance to post-contact northern nomadism than settled cities. It does an impressive job of depicting how dramatic societal changes can be over time. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire draws on the same history, as well as on Martine’s scholarly background in Byzantine history, combining rigid and flexible aspects of technology with fascinating results. New Growth: What Else to Read 1491 opened the way for books such as Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations, Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books on native ecological management and philosophy, and numerous more tightly-focused histories and biographies. Mann’s own sequel, 1493, isn’t quite as groundbreaking as 1491; however, it remains a fascinating overview of the Columbian Exchange that altered foodways and ecologies around the world. Annalee Newitz’s Four Lost Cities goes in-depth on what we know about four ancient, abandoned cities, including Cahokia. And David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity dives into the diversity of governance options explored on all continents prior to written records and settled agriculture. It makes some dubious assumptions, but also points out assumptions that other researchers are making, and will probably show up in this column at some point—if “seasonally-variable government” sounds like a tempting plot bunny, you want to read it. Have you read 1491, and if so what did you think? Share your thoughts, and recommendations for both fiction and non-fiction playing with and expanding on these ideas, in the comments section.[end-mark] The post Apocalyptic Plagues and Anthropocene Forests: How Charles C. Mann’s <i>1491</i> Rewrote My Brain appeared first on Reactor.