The irresistibility of the Joseph Smith story: Crown Colonies edition

I recently finished At the Queen’s Command by Michael A. Stackpole. It was okay to pretty good. It’s American colonial alternate history with (limited) magic. There were things I liked, and things that bugged me. But what I found interesting for this audience was Stackpole’s mention of the Joseph Smith story. Of course, if it was analogous to U.S. history, the timing of this book would be 50-75 years prior to Joseph Smith even being born, but that’s neither here nor there since it’s alternate history.

On page 146, a couple of the main characters are speaking about the frontier of Mystria (aka America) and about an encounter they have just had with a young man who was preaching democratic/republican ideas from a Thomas Paine-style book but adding in some of his own extra radical revolutionary fervor, and one of them says:

“Makes a man wonder why a man would be saying them sort of things.”

And the other replies:

“Oh, I don’t know, Magehawk, seems obvious. Men, they come out here, they cut a town from the wilderness, they have an edge to them. The ones that come after, though, ain’t leaders. They’re followers. Sheep. Every now and again comes a wolf looking for sheep. If it weren’t Qunice, it would be some minister or a messiah. Down Oakland I hear a man dug up his own Bible and has been preaching it. Says Mysteria is the promised land and that the Good Lord wants us to make a Celestial City in the hear of the Continent. He says every man should have a dozen wives and they should bear a dozen children and God will come again to bless them all.”

Nathaniel [Wm notes: Nathaniel = Magehawk] smiled. “You going?”

“Cain’t find me one wife, so I don’t reckon there’s a point to it.” (146)

I found the reference amusing. Reductive and not flattering, I suppose, but it works well enough for the scene, and I found it amusing because it was both obvious and very almost inevitable. This is the first in the series so I wonder if it will come up again in the story (although I don’t know if that curiosity is enough for me to read the next book), but even if not, it suggests, yet again, how irresistible the Joseph Smith story is to fiction writers (and even just Mormonism as a movement [cf. all the Mormon references in science fiction]).