And, of course, it tells an excellent story, one well worth reading. Better yet, it drove home yet again the violence done to people through the institution of slavery, and (I think) might help to wake some up to the systematic oppression which slavery engenders in a society. And somehow that inversion was enough to shake me out of my “ah yes, this story again” complacency. Steven Barnes tells a familiar tale here, with a narrative that feels comfortably close to our expectations, but it’s one in which all the cultural and ethnic trappings have been inverted from our standard expectations.

A world in which the slaves working the fields of the New World are white, taken from their tribal villages to work the fields of rich Muslim landowners. Lion’s Blood posits a world in which Africa rose to prominence, rather than Europe. But the reason that I think it’s important and wish that it weren’t is that it confronts head on that feeling of complacent surety, the comfort of thinking that you know enough about historical (and modern) problems and don’t have to look deeper to examine your own place, your own implicit beliefs.

In Lion’s Blood, Steven Barnes takes a fundamentally simple concept and uses it to explore a number of things… it’s quite simply a good and fun (if painful at times) book. In many cases, you have to actively search out conflicting points of view and other narratives in order to prove otherwise, and why would you bother doing that when you don’t know about them in the first place? Why bother when you think that you’ve already got a good grasp on things? It is so easy, as a white man, to think that you understand troubles that others face, to think that you have read and spoken enough about a given issue to feel like you know more or less what’s going on, and why people feel and think the ways that they do. I think it’s incredibly important, and I wish that it weren’t.

Lion's Blood by Steven Barnes