When President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the West, he told them to look especially for mammoths. Jefferson had seen bones and tusks of the great beasts in Virginia, and he suspected—he hoped!—that they might still roam the Great Plains. In Eleanor Arnason’s imaginative alternate history, they do: shaggy herds thunder over the grasslands, living symbols of the oncoming struggle between the Native peoples and the European invaders. And in an unforgettable saga that soars from the badlands of the Dakotas to the icy wastes of Siberia, from the Russian Revolution to the AIM protests of the 1960s, Arnason tells of a modern woman’s struggle to use the weapons of DNA science to fulfill the ancient promises of her Lakota heritage.
PLUS: “Writing SF During World War III,” and an Outspoken Interview that takes you straight into the heart and mind of one of today’s edgiest and most uncompromising speculative authors.
What People Are Saying
"Eleanor Arnason nudges both human and natural history around so gently in this tale that you hardly know you're not in the world-as-we-know-it until you're quite at home in a North Dakota where you've never been before, listening to your grandmother tell you the world." —Ursula K. LeGuin
“Eleanor Arnason's wise and engaging stories make you question the things you take for granted. How we love, how we fight, how we live.” —Maureen McHugh, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Hugo Awards
“Arnason doesn’t write about peace, the unreachable stasis. She writes about reconciliation: and art, a process, an intricate and never-ending dance. A literature of reconciliation, a celebration of this other ancient preoccupation of humanity, is a truly exciting development in our genre. It takes feminist SF out of the ghetto, out of the realm of reaction and reproach, into the real world.” —Gwyenth Jones, Winner of the James Tiptree Jr. and Philip K. Dick Awards
“Arnason…refuses to write within the neat, confining boundaries of genre expectation, and in part because her fearless exploration of difficult political and social issues makes some editors and readers uneasy… Her work exploring gender, and particularly its intersection with politics, stands comparison with that of such better-known writers as Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and Sheri Tepper.” —Michael D. Levy, Professor of English Literature, University of Wisconsin-Stout
About the Author
Ever since her first story was published in the revolutionary New Worlds in 1972, Eleanor Arnason has been acknowledged as the heir to the feminist legacy of Russ and Le Guin. The first winner of the prestigious Tiptree Award, she has been short listed for both the Nebula and the Hugo.