Writing something that purports to be an artifact of another culture is the most complicated, difficult kind of science fiction, because not only is it about strange things, it must also in itself be a strange thing. And when you have not one, but several different narrators with different rhetorical stances, it becomes even more difficult. There are different perspectives, different personalities, and the culture must change across time, so that writers from the culture early on must somehow have differences from writers in that culture later on.

So we're talking about a very tough project, one which is rarely attempted and which is almost never attempted under circumstances where you actually try to pass it off as a genuine document. Even those of us who write science fiction publish it with the word "fiction" somewhere on the cover. Our name is on it as author, and we expect to get credit for our inventiveness. We don't try to say we found it.

There is a historical precedent, however. An ancient Scottish poet named Ossian was "discovered" by a man named James McPherson, who supposedly translated this work of ancient Celtic poetry which he found. In his own time, his work was taken very seriously as an ancient text. It was an era when people loved the idea of finding ancient manuscripts, especially manuscripts native to the British isles. When they praised the poems, they praised Ossian, not McPherson. It was in an era when new work was not respected as much as old work, so if you could find a way to put out new work as old work, you'd get much more favorable attention for it. McPherson was not a particularly good poet—but Ossian supposedly came from a more primitive time, and therefore his poetry was remarkably sophisticated for the time it was supposedly written.

McPherson produced exactly what people of his time expected or desired ancient Celtic poetry to be. But it also happened to be deeply, hopelessly wrong. It took only a little while before the fraud was exposed. Though most critics accepted Ossian, Samuel Johnson accused McPherson of forgery during his lifetime; McPherson never did refute that charge or provide the originals. Yet he remained a Member of Parliament until his death in 1796. Today, of course, the press would have seized upon Johnson's charges and hounded him to an early grave. It was a more courteous age.

Today, though, when you look at the works of Ossian you can clearly see that this is the work of an 18th-century British writer. It has nothing to do with what you'd expect to find from an ancient Scottish writer. It's an obvious hoax, good enough only to fool people in a fundamentally ignorant time.

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Cultural Confession

Joseph Smith's project, if it was a fraud, was far more ambitious than McPherson's; a much longer, more extensive work, with multiple authors. We're talking about somebody jumping off a cliff here, folks. His work should proclaim itself to be a phony on every page today. This is because every storyteller, no matter how careful he is, will inadvertently confess his own character and the society he lives in. He can make every conscious effort, he can be the best educated scholar you could possibly find, but if he tries to write something that is not of his own culture he will give himself away with every unconscious choice he makes. Yet he'll never know he's doing it because it won't occur to him that it could be any other way.

Even the best science fiction writers make this mistake all the time, but we forgive it because we don't expect any better. They're not really pretending to be translating a genuine document of another culture. They're looking for readers, not believers.

You can spot, immediately, the decade in which almost any science fiction story was written. Any one of you here could do it. The conventions of language alone, will give it away. The style of writing that was prevalent in the 1950s is completely different from what you expect in the post-60s world of science fiction. Anybody who is writing after William Gibson will have been bent by Neuromancer. We'll see the influences of each era, because the accepted mode of storytelling has changed.

Furthermore, we find preoccupations with contemporary issues. Science fiction of the 1950s invariably has some element that refers to the fear of Communism or Nazism. In the 1960s and 70s we find lots of references to rebellious counter-culture groups, libertarianism starts popping up seriously, and we find a lot of drug culture stories, reflecting concerns and values that were virtually unknown earlier.

The level of knowledge of science will also change across time in science fiction. Nobody's writing stories about breathing the atmosphere of Venus anymore.

Most important are the cultural assumptions. Let's step outside science fiction for a moment. How many of you have seen old episodes of I Love Lucy? The relationship between a husband and wife in that show, between males and females in general, is deeply offensive, to me at least. Actually, it was deeply offensive to me even in the fifties. I never liked Lucy as a child because I thought she was an idiot, and I really never liked her husband because I thought he treated her like a jerk—but I had a different standard of what a husband and wife should be than the rest of American culture, apparently, because I never saw the series criticized on those grounds at the time.

Nevertheless, even as recently as Bewitched we find ludicrous remnants of a pre-feminist culture, and yet the writers writing in that time had no concept that they were giving away the fact that they were writing in the 50s. They would never have dreamed that they had better change the way they treat women in their fiction in order to make sure that people from the 70s still could understand their work and its context. It didn't cross their minds because it didn't occur to them that the relationship between men and women could possibly be any other way.

The same thing is clear in fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, wherever the writers depict the relationship between blacks and whites in America. Even people who would have thought themselves very liberal, open-minded, tolerant, non-racist people, nevertheless put blacks in a social role with attitudes that would be unthinkable in fiction today. You know when you're reading something from the 30s and 40s because of the perfectly blithe and innocent way in which these writers keep blacks "in their place." At the time, it didn't cross their minds that there could ever be a time when white people would actually seriously think of black people being their intellectual and social equals. And as for blacks and whites marrying each other and remaining acceptable to other people—that was unthinkable, even among the most liberal.

Even now, today, we have assumptions that we do not think to question. Assumptions about property ownership, for example, which are really not that widespread through time—but our fiction invariably assumes that people own the things they own and will continue to own them for quite some time. We even have the ludicrous assumption that after we're dead we still have the right to control the disposition of our property, and pass it along to our heirs. What a silly notion, really—but it's not questioned in our fiction. (Of course, now that I've questioned it, you'll be aware of it—but even at this moment some of you are incapable of understanding how property could be handled any other way; you are so deeply involved in American culture of the 1990s you can't even comprehend the Doctrine and Covenants.)

We make other assumptions. For instance, we assume that someone's job is somehow tied to his identity. Who are you? I'm an engineer. What is he? He's a doctor. In many other cultures it would be unthinkable to answer these questions in terms of career. The answers would refer to family, tribe, city, or caste. What would your occupation have to do with anything? But stories produced by contemporary Americans don't question the assumption that career is the most important distinguishing feature of character.

We make assumptions about education, about what formal education means, about how necessary it is, about what it's for, about who should get it. We make assumptions about family relationships and how important a particular family relationship will be in our lives. In America today, very little fiction actually includes family members outside the immediate family in any kind of important role. A cousin? Why in the world would cousins come up in the story? And if a grandparent is living in the same house with the main character, it is regarded as unusual; it is commented upon.

Most contemporary fiction writers don't even have questions about the fundamental morality of our culture, even though it has changed drastically in many ways over the past thirty years. We take a lot of things for granted that are not necessarily taken for granted in other cultures. How much fiction have you read lately in which the author does not assume that two people who are mutually attracted will sleep together at the earliest opportunity? And if they don't sleep together, it is only because of loyalty to an existing relationship, never because of any moral barrier to unmarried sexual congress.

The Book of Mormon, if it is a science fiction work, if it is an artifact of the 1820s, should be thick with similar cultural clues. 1820s America should leap out of every page, exactly the way 1950s America leaps out of every minute of every episode of I Love Lucy.

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Language

At the language and word-choice level, of course, the Book of Mormon, as a translated document, should be pure Joseph Smith. It should reflect what a man of his level of education in 1820s America thinks scripture should sound like. And of course we have exactly the ersatz King James version voice that the Prophet knew the translation would have to have if it were to be taken as scripture by the people he was going to offer it to. Fake or genuine, the Book of Mormon would need that. And, fake or genuine, the Prophet's attempt at old-fashioned formal English should reveal his lack of education—which it does, with numerous grammatical errors and misuses of archaic forms, many of which survive even in current editions of the Book of Mormon.

But it's no surprise that the translator repeatedly errs, because this is not his natural speaking voice. No one speaks this kind of language around him. He doesn't understand the grammar, and so grammatical errors are thick on the ground. Those who believe, like David Whitmer, that the translation appeared word for word on the Urim and Thummum, are ripe for disillusionment—or else they are accusing God of some really embarrassing grammatical errors. This is ultimately why David Whitmer ended up outside the Church—he refused to accept the idea that Joseph Smith could edit revelations previously given, precisely because Whitmer believed God gave them to him word for word. But Whitmer's view of translation was wrong. However the process of inspiration worked, it could only produce language that already existed in Joseph Smith's mind. Whether the Book of Mormon is a fraud or a genuine translated book, it will reflect Joseph Smith's language.

So the words are definitely used as 1820s Americans would understand them, or misunderstand them, especially an 1820s American of Joseph Smith's educational level. To a degree they even reflect some of his personal style—but not entirely. As with any translation, there should be word patterns, word orders, idiomatic expressions in the original language that survive translation, that bend the translator's language into new forms and directions. So in the Book of Mormon we should expect to find foreign and alien word patterns along with Joseph Smith's effort to sound scriptural. Much better scholars than I have already explored exactly these elements in Joseph Smith's translation, and I have no intention of trying to move into an area so far from my own expertise. (As a science fiction writer, when I do this sort of thing I fake it mercilessly. I make no effort beyond the most cursory to try to make my narrators speak differently from myself.)

There are many areas apart from language, however, where only a science fiction writer or a very perceptive science fiction reader is likely to know how very difficult it is—impossible, really—to tell a story without confessing the author's own culture.

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American Culture and the Book of Mormon

If the Book of Mormon is a fake, what should we expect an 1820s American to put into this book?