Trevannock is my alternate history novel: the transatlantic slave trade, reversed.There is a scene in my alternate history novel where a man is taken from his home by force. The details are drawn from the historical record. The ships existed. The methods existed. The violence, the chains, the commodification of a human being, all of it happened countless times in that era, documented in ledgers and logs and the testimony of survivors.And yet, I know that scene could still feel false.This is the problem I wrestled with in writing Trevannock. Accuracy and truth are not the same thing. You can get every fact right and still miss what matters. You can describe the architecture of evil in perfect detail and still fail to convey its weight. Conversely, you can depart from literal accuracy in service of something deeper, emotional truth, the texture of lived experience, the reality that historical records do not capture.The transatlantic slave trade, reversed, becomes the premise of this book. I do not mean reversed in the sense of simple role inversion, as though swapping positions somehow balances accounts. I mean reversed in the sense that we examine a world where the Adunbi Imperium, not European powers, possesses the ships, the networks, the ideologies that drive large-scale human capture and enslavement. What does that reversal force us to see? What truths about power, about greed, about the mechanics of exploitation become visible when we refuse the familiar framing?Accuracy alone does not answer these questions. A history book can be scrupulously factual and still perform a kind of erasure, not through lies, but through whose perspective is centred, whose suffering is named, whose agency is recognised. The ledgers kept meticulous records, and they are accurate. But they did not record the thoughts of the person being recorded in them. Accuracy can be a form of silence.When I wrote about Elias Hollowell in his harbour, I was not trying to reproduce a documentary. I was trying to inhabit a moment of catastrophe from the inside. What does seizure feel like? What is the loss of everything known, not in the abstract but in sensation? The historical facts are there, men were taken from their homes, their lives were destroyed, the machinery of enslavement was real. But the emotional truth of what that meant, the texture of consciousness at the moment of shattering, cannot come from archives alone.This is what fiction can do that history cannot. Or rather, what fiction can do that history, constrained by its own rigour, often does not. Fiction can ask: what would you have thought? What would you have felt? And in doing so, it creates a different kind of accuracy, not accuracy to the record, but accuracy to the human experience within the moment.The challenge, though, is not to use this permission carelessly. The reversal of the transatlantic slave trade is not a thought experiment to be played with lightly. It is a framework for asking serious questions. Why does Western history treat European colonialism as inevitable while treating African or Asian imperialism as exotic? What assumptions do we carry about who has the capacity to build empires, to dominate, to commit atrocities? What does it mean to centre the experiences of people who are typically marginalised in how history is told?I wanted Trevannock to challenge the familiar scripts we have about who appears in certain stories and why. The fishing villages of Cornwall were real; the practices of maritime commerce are real; the vulnerabilities of coastal communities to raid and capture are real. But we do not usually imagine that a Cornish fisherman might be seized, that he might be sold across the water, that his family might be left behind in the wreckage of his abduction. We have been taught to see that narrative as belonging to other histories, other places, other people. Making it literal, making it happen to a man in his own harbour, forces a recognition of what is usually abstracted or distant.This matters because distance is a luxury that protects certain ways of knowing. We can read about historical events that happened far away and long ago and feel safe in our understanding of them. We can know that millions were enslaved and still not really feel it, because the numbers are too large, the timespan too vast, the people involved too removed from our sense of ourselves. But if you follow one man from the moment he is taken until the moment something else happens to him, if you sit in the uncertainty and violence and terror of that particular experience, the abstraction collapses. You cannot maintain the same comfortable distance.Truth, I think, requires that discomfort. Accuracy is about facts. Truth is about meaning. And meaning cannot emerge from facts alone; it requires interpretation, perspective, imagination. An alternate history novel is, by definition, a work of imagination. But it is not therefore untrue. It can be more true than many histories because it refuses to hide the choices being made about what to emphasise, what to centre, whose story matters enough to tell in full.Trevannock is on sale now. It is the first book of five in the Crossing-Kin series, set in a world that is not ours but that asks questions our world needs to hear. It is not accurate in the sense that it describes things that actually happened. But I believe it can be true in ways that matter more.Trevannock is an alternate history novel: the transatlantic slave trade, reversed.
Trevannock is an alternate history novel: the transatlantic slave trade, reversed.
https://trevannock.adeloye.com