The Tales of Alvin Maker

The Tales of Alvin Maker is a series of seven alternate history fantasy novels written by American novelist Orson Scott Card, published from 1987 to 2026. They explore the experiences of a young man, Alvin Miller, who realizes he has incredible powers for creating and shaping things around him.

Overview

The stories take place on the American frontier in the early 19th century, a fantasy setting based on early American folklore and superstition in a world in which folk magic actually works and manifests differently by race. Many Caucasian characters have a limited supernatural ability, or “knack,” to do some task nearly perfectly, Native Americans manifest nature magic, and people of African ancestry use magic similar to voodoo.

The stories involve a number of historical events and figures but are as a creation of alternate history. One source of divergence is the survival of Oliver Cromwell from the illness that killed him in reality since a physician secretly has a magical healing knack (Cromwell considered such knacks evil witchcraft). The Colonial United States is divided in the books into a number of separate nations, including a smaller United States, whose capital is Philadelphia and largest city is a Dutch-settled but increasingly English-speaking New Amsterdam. The series displays much stronger Native American influence in its culture and society between New England and Virginia that extends westwards to Ohio. (New England is a colony of a Republican England in which the English Restoration never occurred thanks to Cromwell's survival.) A monarchy on the southern portion of the Eastern Seaboard (the real-world Carolinas, Georgia, etc.), known as the "Crown Colonies", was founded by the House of Stuart in exile. An autonomous region, known as "Apalachee", is centered on the Appalachian Mountains.