Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part six. Thomas Jefferson and the Origin of Democracy

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels (Nancy's War) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

One of the great white admirers of the Cherokees was Thomas Jefferson, long before he was president, long before he wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, back when he was a student at the College of William and Mary. He heard the Cherokee leader Ostenaco giving a speech to his tribe. He was a surveyor like his father Peter, and Ostenaco had been a frequent guest at his house. Jefferson was deeply impressed by the way Ostenaco commanded the assent of his tribe without the use of force, but just persuasion. If the Cherokee tribe can do this, why can’t European colonists create a democracy in North America?

Is it too much to say that the Cherokees inspired the concept of democracy in the mind of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson admitted as much in his writings, and Rice champions this viewpoint in his novel. Jefferson really said most of these things that Rice put into the novel. In particular, I found an almost word-for-word excerpt of an 1810 Jefferson letter to Governor Langston online. I am glad this quotation has been saved from historical obscurity. Apparently Rice just made up the part about Henry VIII, who was so fat that Dr. Newton should have taken his mass into account when calculating the orbit of the Earth; “but I digress,” Jefferson ends. Rice got into Jefferson’s mind.

To Nancy Ward, Thomas Jefferson was just Peter Jefferson’s little boy who had grown up and done something or other, she wasn’t sure what.

Nancy’s War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part four. Bryan Ward, Surprised by Love

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity: Nancy's War. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download (https://stanleyrice.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF_manuscripts/Trail-of-Tears-Nancys-War-2026.pdf). The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

Like all frontier traders, Bryan (or Bryant) Ward was a practical man. He knew that, to make deals with tribal villages, he had to not be seen as an outsider. Even the traders who, like Ward, were married to white women outside of the Cherokee Nation, took Native wives. By American law, the Cherokee women were not really wives. This practice continued until the Cherokee government outlawed it.

So Bryan Ward decided he had to have him a squaw. It was just part of business.

He was, in Rice’s novel, astonished when Nanyehi took an interest in him. He was expecting an ordinary, dumpy woman. But Nanyehi was beautiful as well as famous. He fell in love with her, which he was not expecting. He had to earn her trust, which he did by telling her he was an Irishman, not an Englishman, and his people were as much oppressed by the English as hers might soon be. This formed a bridge of empathy between them. This link, sealed by marriage, saved his life when strife became intense between the Cherokees and the whites; in her official capacity, she protected him. This is a love story that Rice presents with great tenderness.

We cannot know if maybe Nanyehi, in becoming Nancy Ward, was also acting in her own interests by marrying Ward. This marriage gave her a connection with the white world that eventually helped her and her tribe survive.

When it became clear that even Nancy could not protect him, Bryan left and returned to his white wife. Rice presents this as a sad resignation on his part. Rice got into Bryan Ward’s head, thinking and talking like an Irishman. As most novelists would do, Rice is probably using wishful thinking about this famous love story.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part three. Quality

You cannot just put your books on Amazon and expect people to find them, even if they would have enjoyed reading them. An author is not only competing with thousands of human authors but with computers that can generate AI garbage a hundred times a second.

An intelligent customer might want to verify that the author of a book is not an AI bot by searching the web for an author website. AI bots generally do not have author websites, though I could be wrong about this. But the author has to make it easy for the customer, who is usually busy and tired when looking for a book.

You have to promote your book. This means several things.

First, you need a platform. My platform consists of a brand new website designed by my son in law which, thus far, has only my non-fiction books on it; two blogs, which have collectively had over a million views; a YouTube channel, in which I pretend to be Charles Darwin; and Facebook. This does not mean I can just scatter announcements all over my platform. People read my blogs and watch my videos because they can learn something, usually about science, from them. If they suspect I am dumping cheap advertising on them, they will stop visiting. I have to make the announcements of my fiction books relevant to the platform. In my case this might be easy, since much of my fiction focuses on science (particularly, Darwin and evolution) which is exactly what my science blog is about, and faces a lot of religious questions, which is exactly what my religion blog is about. This is exactly the same situation as a tree faces out in nature: it has to have fruits and seeds that match the animals it is expecting to patronize them, rather than just random seeds.

Second, you need to catch their eyes in a pleasurable way. I will do this by having really attractive covers and short summaries.

The covers will be colorful and eye-catching and often create just enough cognitive dissonance that they will wonder what the book is about. I am fortunate that I have literally five decades of photographs from which to choose. I could never have guessed I would use them as book covers. It is also important to adjust the photos, not just with cropping, contrast, and coloration, but with special effects, which are now easily available on PowerPoint.

The short summaries must excite the reader and make them want to read the book. Here is an example of the first sentence of a summary, from a novel I wrote about Charles Darwin being a vampire: “You just thought you had seen the last of Charles Darwin.” The summary does not have to have everything in it. The summary of my novel The Confessions of Conseil take a swipe at the exalted image of Pierre Arronax, narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In Conseil’s voice, I call him Arronax the Arrogant who thinks his servant Conseil cannot possibly have a brain or a life of his own. Now this might create cognitive dissonance, therefore interest, among the thousands of readers who grew up (as I did) loving Jules Verne. I also portray Captain Nemo as a Marxist revolutionary.

Third, you have to deliver the goods. It has to be a good book—a good plot, good characters, good everything. I have to make readers feel good, even when unpleasant things are happening in the book. I have to remember I am writing for my readers, not for myself. I have to remove anything that is interesting only to myself, e.g., lists of plants. Only then will a reader—maybe, just maybe—remember my name and look for another book by me. I include a lot of humor, not gratuitous but as part of the plot and dialogue. I also frequently have sex, not pornographic but as part of genuine human encounters, and very rarely the full sex act. The sex is never degrading. And never gratuitous—it has to have a reason to be there. The Bible is my guide in this respect. There is a lot of sex in the Bible, but there is always a reason for it. Fiction should never have any gratuitous anything.

Will this fiction publishing venture work? I have made a conservative estimate that I will earn at least $75,000 for thirty books, which is $75,000 more than I would earn with my track record with commercial publishers. If it works, it will not be because of my business acumen but because I took my inspiration from the evolutionary success stories of the trees.

The Drama of Global Warming

Well, today I started teaching my general biology class about global warming, as I do every semester. Since I write science books (of which I have published four) and novels (thus far unpublished), I began thinking about why global warming is not a more prevalent theme in fiction. I thought about this as I walked to work. Walking is a good way to promote health but also to save energy and reduce carbon emissions. It is also a good time to think.

Global warming does figure prominently in most of the future scenarios of science fiction novels. However, the global warming that is occurring right now is largely absent from fiction. Why?

The main reason is that global warming is very real and is accelerating, but is still a largely gradual process. It is occurring over a time scale that does not lend itself to a plot line very easily. You can’t see it. You can see weather, but you can’t see climate change. You could write a novel about a big storm, but there have always been big storms; the novel would be about the storm, not about climate change. It is impossible to say that any particular storm (such as the one occurring right now in the Northeast) is or is not due to global warming. Any particular storm may or may not have occurred even without global warming. All we can say is that global warming is making storms stronger in general. How do you get a plot out of that?

There have been at least three movies or books based on global warming, and they illustrate three approaches to making fictional drama out of global warming.

First, in the 1990s, there was a TV movie called The Fire Next Time. The approach it took was to show how global warming shattered a family’s personal economy (the main character was a gulf shrimper) and how they came back together in the end. The plot was about the family, with global warming just being the background setting.

Second, a few years back, the movie Day After Tomorrow showed incredibly dramatic weather events. The movie started with a sudden fracture of an ice sheet and ended with a huge storm paralyzing New York City (even worse than the one that is descending upon them this week). This movie derived its plot line from exaggerating the trends of global warming. The ice is indeed melting (according to a study I read about today in the French media but have not seen in the American media yet), but it is usually hard to see. Antarctica still has a lot of ice.

Third, who could forget one of Michael Crichton’s last novels, State of Fear? In this novel, Crichton depicted all scientists, except a few brave outsiders, as filthy liars who have not merely invented global warming but who are actually causing the breakup of glaciers by setting off bombs! Scientists are part of a worldwide conspiracy, and they track down the true heroes (the ones who believe everything the Koch Brothers say) by following them in their evil blue Priuses. It was a poorly written novel that strained credulity so much that it was a third-rate piece of hack work. Every plot component was weak. This, from the man who wrote much better books such as Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park?

None of these works are actually about global warming. Is it possible to have a novel about global warming that is realistic yet also dramatic? Maybe one that is set in Bangladesh. Rising sea levels may inundate half of the country—including their incredibly productive agricultural land—this century. Could Bangladeshis flee over the border into India? India is already building a big fence to keep them out.

(Photo from Brisbane Times)

Maybe a young Indian man and young Bangladeshi woman could meet one another and kiss through the fence…I see plot potential here…Aside from something like this, global warming remains a major threat that is huge but slow, and which even those of us who study it have to measure its components rather than actually seeing it.