What an amazingly thought provoking and interesting book. The story is of an alternate America where those who landed at Jamestown in 1607 did not find Native American humans, but homo erectus, otherwise known as Sims. These hairy "sub-humans" have no power of speech, no chins and no foreheads. They communicate with grunts and hoots and use only sharpened rocks as weapons. In the subsequent short stories from 1610 to 1988, we learn about how the absence of Native Americans as we know them, and the presence of Sims drastically alters the USA we know in this world.
The book was written in 1988 and has some problems that we in 2019 could possibly find offensive given our knowledge now of colonialism and the mistreatment of Native Americans. In this made up world, black slavery is outlawed a good 50 years earlier than it was in the real world. Steam engines also made an appearance about 50 years earlier. The USA is based on the Roman Republic with two censors instead of one president. In 1988, Sims are used as test subjects for AIDS cure experiments, being deliberately exposed to the virus first, something we would barely allow in animals now, certainly not human beings, but are Sims human beings? That's the question the book wrestles with throughout.
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