The New Empire by Alison McBain

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The New Empire is a novel of alternate history, telling the story of a young man caught between worlds and struggling with the contradictions of his life.

In the prologue of The New Empire, we see what appears to be the final minutes of a young man named Jiangxi. He confronts an older man named Onas, with whom he clearly has a complicated relationship, but they share only a brief moment and have little to say to one another. Then Jiangxi goes out to meet the firing squad which is there to carry out his execution. The rest of the story is about who Jiangxi is, and how he got to be in such a fix.

When next we see Jiangxi, he is a young boy, a slave, being shipped across the ocean to a distant land. American readers may think they already recognize the narrative, but it turns out that Jiangxi is Chinese, and that the land to which he is being sent is somewhere in what we would call California.

This isn’t the world we know, but one in which the Ming Dynasty “treasure fleets” discovered the Americas in the early 15^th century. Three centuries later, contact between China and the peoples of North America has led to the formation of a “new empire,” a loose confederation of peoples that spans the continent. Influenced by Chinese culture and technology, the confederation is putting up strong resistance against the encroachment of European colonialists. The story later mentions armed conflict against the Europeans, especially the Spanish, led by a real-world historical figure (the missionary Junípero Serra). Yet we never see any of them, and the only part they play in the story is as distant barbarians who threaten the order of the confederation.

Jiangxi is purchased by Onas, an influential religious leader and statesman among the Ohlone peoples of the California coast. At first it seems that Jiangxi is going to be treated as a common slave, assigned menial tasks and brutally punished when he disobeys. Soon, however, Onas begins to educate him, teaching him skills he might need to be more than a simple slave. It becomes clear that Onas has something specific in mind for Jiangxi . . . but the Chinese boy develops ideas of his own, which may wreck all of Onas’s plans for him.

The alternate-historical setting of The New Empire is extremely well done. Chinese and Native American history are not my specialties, but what little research I was able to do while reading this novel seemed to support what we see in the story. It’s a very plausible setting. In particular, alternate-history authors often make the mistake of idealizing the cultures they write about, but there is none of that here. These are slave-holding cultures, backed by ruthless violence, and even sympathetic characters seem reluctant to condemn this.

Only Jiangxi is an eternal rebel against the injustices of his setting, and this is a key to understanding his character. He’s a mass of contradictions – originating from the very highest family in China, sold into slavery, forced to adapt to an alien civilization, eventually granted a position of privilege there. He lives in several different worlds and is at home in none of them, and the contradiction eventually drives his tragedy to its conclusion.

If there’s one aspect of The New Empire that didn’t quite work for me on first reading, it was the ending. Jiangxi’s story comes to a conclusion that feels very abrupt at first, and it’s not at all a happy one. On further reflection, I suspect that was intentional. It’s Jiangxi’s well-established character traits that lead him to his fate – this is a tragedy very much in the classical mode.

The prose style here is very clean, and the copy- and line-editing is quite good. One or two errors did catch my eye, but these never quite pulled me out of the story. Viewpoint discipline is good; the story is told very strictly from Jiangxi’s perspective. Exposition is done almost entirely through character action and dialogue, with no big clumsy blocks in authorial voice, and the reader is trusted to figure out the details of the setting on their own.

I very much enjoyed immersing myself in the world of The New Empire, and I would be interested in seeing what else Ms. McBain might attempt in this genre. Very highly recommended.