Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

18. “And So To Bed” by Harry Turtledove

What if Native Americans didn’t exist, but the Americas were populated by enduring megafauna and some other hominids (possibly australopithecus? [ed: homo erectus]), which white people enslaved? And what if Samuel Pepys were inspired by his interactions with them to propose a theory of common descent in 1661?

This is one of those story ideas that would leave me far less uneasy and more engaged if it did not entail the erasure of vast swathes of real and marginalised people.