Red Prophet (1988)
Red Prophet is a 1988 fiction book written by Orson Scott Card.
The second Tales of Alvin Maker carries Card's alternate frontier deeper into its bloodiest fault line: the war between white settlers and the Red people whose land they are taking. Lolla-Wossiky, a half-blind Red man numbed by white liquor, hears a black noise no one else can hear and becomes the Prophet Tenskwa-Tawa. His brother Ta-Kumsaw chooses war instead of vision. Between them stands young Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son, whose growing knack for making draws him into a struggle older than his own family. Folk magic, prophecy, and a country dividing along its rivers.
Quick answers
What is Red Prophet about?
The second Tales of Alvin Maker carries Card's alternate frontier deeper into its bloodiest fault line: the war between white settlers and the Red people whose land they are taking. Lolla-Wossiky, a half-blind Red man numbed by white liquor, hears a black noise no one else can hear and becomes the Prophet Tenskwa-Tawa. His brother Ta-Kumsaw chooses war instead of vision. Between them stands young Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son, whose growing knack for making draws him into a struggle older than his own family. Folk magic, prophecy, and a country dividing along its rivers.
When was Red Prophet published?
Red Prophet was published in 1988.
Who made Red Prophet?
Red Prophet was written by Orson Scott Card.
Similar books
A few thoughts on Red Prophet
Orson Scott Card braids folk magic into the real cost of the frontier, so the mood sits closer to elegy than adventure. For the same clash of settlers and native nations, watch The Last of the Mohicans. For the wider ache of a wild American landscape closing in on the people who knew it, Red Dead Redemption 2 lands the same mythic, elegiac register.
Folk magic and reckoning on the American frontier
Red Prophet sets Alvin's frontier against Ta-Kumsaw's war with the settlers taking his land, a fight Seventh Son and Heartfire trace from Alvin's birth to older age. Hoodoo carries the same conjure-and-consequence folk magic into 1930s Alabama, while Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of the Mohicans put a rifle-and-treaty version of the same vanishing wilderness on screen and controller.
More of Orson Scott Card's alternate worlds
Red Prophet is Card working the same instincts he brings everywhere: a gifted outsider caught between systems bigger than himself. Speaker for the Dead and Ender's Shadow move that instinct into deep space and command school, Songmaster gives it a court composer with a voice that can undo an emperor, and Monkey Sonatas collects the short fiction where Card first tried these ideas out.