Mammothfail

Author Jo Walton posted a review of Patricia C. Wrede's young adult novel, The Thirteenth Child, describing the premise as:

The elevator pitch for Thirteenth Child would be “Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic.” This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

Several commenters expressed discomfort with the premise as reifying the racist erasure of American Indians, First Nations, and Polynesian Islanders from colonialist histories of the Americas. Kate Nepveu commented,

And now my immediate reaction was "ack, it's a frontier story where American Indians have been literally and completely erased?!"

Glass_icarus added:

My problem with "OK, let's look at it in a world without the genocide and the slavery" isn't, in fact, the genocide and slavery-free aspect; it's the fact that in order to achieve that, the victims of the genocide and slavery have been erased.

There has been considerable further commentary particularly in response to defenses of Wrede's work raised by Lois McMaster Bujold, which did not address the critiques made and followed many of the patterns observed in RaceFail 09.