A Different Flesh
1988 short story collection by Harry Turtledove
A Different Flesh is a collection of alternate history short stories by American writer Harry Turtledove. The stories are set in a world in which Homo erectus, along with various megafauna, survived to the modern times in the Americas as the Native Americans along with any other human cultures.
Turtledove was inspired to write the story by a Stephen Jay Gould article that speculated as to how humanity’s distant cousin, Australopithecus, would be treated if that species had survived.
Plot introduction
The stories give a brief glimpse in this altered American history ranging from 1610 to 1988. The Western Hemisphere is inhabited by Homo erectus rather than Homo sapiens, as well as megafauna long extinct in the known world. Consequently, the colonization of the New World by Europe has been a far more difficult process. As time goes by, various characters debate the nature of the "sims" (as erectus is known) and their role in human history.
Included with the short stories are quotations from The Story of the Federated Commonwealths. These snippets from an imaginary textbook providing the reader information about what happens during the time between the different stories.
Plot summary
Vilest Beast
1610: At the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, Edward Maria Wingfield must rescue his infant daughter from the tribe of wild sims who kidnapped her.
“A Different Flesh” enters the record as 1988 short story collection by Harry Turtledove. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Different, Flesh and short can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“A Different Flesh” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Different, Flesh and short provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16385487. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1610 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Different Flesh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.