The funny thing, though, is that most science fiction writers still get it wrong, still come up with dozens of needless and often unpronounceable alien or "modern-sounding" names for commonplace objects. We've had computers for two generations now, and no one has yet felt a need to call them "puters," for instance—and yet I still find brand new science fiction novels that feel the need to come up with a stupid futuristic name for computers. When a science fiction writer wants to show a futuristic book, which is read digitally, he'll often come up with some fancy new name for it. It doesn't seem to occur to him that futuristic books will be called—get this—"books." After all, when we wanted a name for the thing we drive around in, we called it a "car," even though automobiles were quite different from railroad cars. The word automobile also survived, of course, because English is a language that loves redundancy. But think of how often you talk about getting the kids into the auto. The common word is the word that already existed, and which was simply applied to the new thing. And we Americans are a people accustomed to new word coinages and technical innovations that demand new language. Most cultures are not so open to new language, and most languages are not so open to borrowing and coinages. They tend to apply old language to new situations.

We science fiction writers have generations of experience to guide us, and we still can't get it right. The author of the Book of Mormon, if it's a hoax, managed to get it right—even in cases where getting it right looks wrong to most people, who haven't thought it through. This is an important point. The natural tendency with storytellers who are trying to create an alien culture is to come up with all kinds of new words to show how strange this culture really is—but the author of the Book of Mormon didn't follow this almost universal pattern. Instead, he did something so sophisticated that even those who do this sort of thing for a living still don't usually get it right.

Of course, it can be argued that the hoaxer who was making up the Book of Mormon was so naive that it didn't occur to him that he was creating an alien society and so he didn't bother with new names. But this is obviously not the case—if he was that naive, he wouldn't have come up with an alien culture in the first place. His Nephites and Lamanites would have been culturally white Americans or North American Indians, which they definitely are not.

Great Spirit. Speaking of cowboys and Indians, why don't we see much more of the 1820s view of American Indians? Where is the Happy Hunting Ground? Where is the teepee or wigwam? Where are the moccasins and deerskins, the canoes, the peace pipes? What are we doing with cities instead of villages? Why don't we have any explanation of the great Indian mounds? In short, where is James Fenimore Cooper?

The only time we get anything that sounds like the 1820s white-man view of North American Indians is when Lamoni and Ammon speak of a Great Spirit. This may simply be the way Joseph Smith translated Lamoni's word for God, thinking, of course, as he did, of North American Indian beliefs. Thus it could be a matter of word choice. But I'm inclined to believe that it is a fair translation of the concept of God that Lamoni believed in; certainly it is not inconsistent with Meso-American beliefs, where a Great Spirit that was the God above all gods seems to have been an available belief.

Transportation. Nobody rides anywhere. Think about it. I don't have to explain to you about airplanes when I say I flew here, but I would certainly say that I flew here. People in Joseph Smith's day rode everywhere they could—either a horse or a wagon. When they took a long journey on foot, they said so, because it was remarkable. But no one in the Book of Mormon rides anywhere. How did Joseph Smith know to keep his made-up Nephites and Lamanites on foot—and how did he keep himself from ever pointing out the fact?

Networks and relationships. Today we use jobs and school for our networks of relationship. In ancient Rome, it was patrons and clients. In the Book of Mormon it was extended kinship groups. We see clear traces of that in Amulek and in the way that the families of the prophets are treated over the years. Lineage is the first relationship you assert. Family is the first guide to a man's worthiness to rule. Again, this doesn't match anything that Joseph Smith would be familiar with. Family was important in 1820s America, but not as a guide to identity, not as the system of networking. Instead people knew each other and related to each other through political parties or, sometimes, societies like the Masons. Mostly, though, the fundamental connections were between employee and employer, when the person hiring was of higher status, or between client and professional, where the person being hired had the higher status (as with doctors and lawyers).

So where are those trade relationships in the Book of Mormon? All of Joseph Smith's youth was spent working for hire for one farmer or another. But the one place in the Book of Mormon where one man goes to work for another as an employee is when Ammon goes to work for King Lamoni, and there is nothing in that relationship that remotely resembles the pattern of hiring for pay that Joseph Smith knew. Lawyers are also paid, but we don't see them hanging out their shingle and taking all comers. And that's it, as far as trade is concerned. The pattern of relationships outside the family that Joseph Smith knew best simply isn't echoed in the Book of Mormon.

In Meso-America, of course, there was no such thing as hiring tradesmen. Everybody did everything. When it was time to work in the fields, all the people of the working class did field work. When it was time to build public works, all the people of the working class built public works. And in the meantime, the rulers supervised them and the priests did their rituals and carried out their studies and observations and wrote their records. When people did specialize—as in engraving on stone or creating artworks—they did so only under royal order, and not as freelancers working for pay. There was no such thing as a middle class, or even a free working class. And this is the culture that best fits the pattern that we see in the Book of Mormon. When the Lamanites come to rule over the people of King Limhi, he does not assign them to any new tasks, but rather takes an oppressive percentage of their crops. Yet he still is able to set taskmasters over them, though he does nothing to reorganize their society. Why? Because their pattern already was to work the fields together, so that they would pursue their normal labors. The only difference was that instead of having their own rulers lead them in the fields, they had Lamanite rulers watching to make sure that they didn't slack off or steal.

The common people of any Book of Mormon city seem to be able to be assembled at any time. When Alma wants to speak to the poor who are ruled by the Zoramites, he doesn't have to go house to house, or find them in their various jobs. They already work together; he has only to ask for their attention and address them. Yet Joseph Smith does nothing to point out how different Book of Mormon jobs and trades are from the ones he knew. Why? Because he was translating a document that was written by somebody who didn't think to point out these patterns for the good reason that he didn't know there was another way to organize labor. Again, the Book of Mormon acts like a genuine document from the culture it depicts, rather than a story written by someone making up a pseudo-alien culture.

Swooning. Where did Joseph Smith get this business of people swooning to show great feeling? Especially men! That was unthinkable in the 1820s. A man fainting and then lying as if dead for several days? That doesn't reflect any social patterns in Joseph Smith's culture. In fact, it's embarrassing, right? We resist fainting, we don't celebrate it. And yet Meso-American culture is quite comfortable with people responding to emotional stress with a swoon—especially a religious experience.

Kings and Sub-kings. And what's this bit about a king having a father—alive—who is also king? That makes perfect sense in Mayan culture, where a son of a king can be a king somewhere else. There are sub-kings all over the place. But the only system of kingship that Joseph Smith knew anything about was the European pattern, and in Europe if you have a son of a king who proclaims himself king, you end up with a civil war. So how did Joseph Smith, if he was creating a hoax, dare to depart so radically from any pattern of kingship that anybody had ever heard of? And in doing so, how did he happen to get it dead right for Meso-American culture?

* * *

Writing Matters

Why do these elements escape the notice of most critics? Because the text doesn't emphasize them in any way. You only get them by implication. There are, of course, those who argue that because they're only found by implication, they're not there at all, but I think that when you compare them with documents from other alien cultures, we can see that these cultural difference are definitely real. All that's missing is the stuff that should have been there if Joseph Smith made it up.

Authorial Interests. The Book of Mormon never explain a lot of things that we wish it would. No one ever tells us, for instance, what the people eat and drink. We are told that the rich have fine clothing, but no one describes what they actually wear. While the people seem to work collectively, we are never told exactly what their daily work is. Why? None of that is relevant to the historian, or his purpose. The Book of Mormon never loses track of the rhetorical purpose of the author—but also changes the rhetorical purpose with each author. Nephi and Jacob are not writing for the same reason as Mormon and Moroni, and therefore they include different kinds of information. Nephi glides over battles without detail; Mormon gives us detailed campaigns, but only when telling the story of a heroic captain who is a spiritual as well as a military example. And it's worth noting that the only captain whose battle strategies are given in detail is the very one that Mormon named his son after. It is arguable that Gidgiddoni's military achievements are at least equal to Moroni's—but we get no details of his campaigns.

Thus the Book of Mormon not only reflects the rhetorical purposes of the writers, but also reflects their personal interests and concerns. They should be and are different from each other. Nobody else is as interested in military matters as Mormon, and nobody else writes about them. And, in fact, it is worth pointing out that nowhere else in all of Joseph Smith's writings do we get the slightest hint of his having an interest in military strategies or achievements. Whoever wrote the Book of Alma cared a great deal about military matters—but nothing in the rest of Joseph Smith's writings gives us any sense that he cared much about this at all. Even when he founded the Nauvoo Legion and dressed up in uniform, there is no evidence of his plotting military campaigns—yet if he were the author of those accounts of Moroni's and Helaman's campaigns, it is unthinkable that he would not have talked and thought about military matters, especially during those times in early Church history when such conversation and thought would have been appropriate. There were others in the Church who reveled in military matters—Samson Avard, for instance. But Joseph Smith was not one of them. To me, that says that he could not have been the author of the Book of Alma. I have read too much not to know that writers repeatedly return to whatever fascinates them. Just as Mormon brings up military matters again and again, though never with the same detail he brings to the campaigns of Moroni, we also find that Nephi and Moroni never bring up military matters with any detail at all. They are not interested and Joseph Smith was not interested, but Mormon was interested and his writings reflect that.

Exposition. When science fiction was just beginning, it was common for writers to stop the action in order to explain the cool new science or technology that they were introducing in the tale. It was not until Robert Heinlein that science fiction writers began to weave their exposition more subtly into the action of the story. The classic example is when, in telling of a character leaving a room, Heinlein wrote, "The door dilated." No explanation of the nifty technology behind dilating doors—just a simple statement that seems to take the new technology for granted.

This was a great step forward, allowing science fiction writers to introduce a vast amount of novelty into a story without stopping the forward movement of the plot in order to explain it. It required that readers adopt a new way of reading, however. Now, instead of the writer immediately telling the reader everything that was strange in the world of the story, the reader has to hold his sense of reality in abeyance, waiting and watching for each new bit of information that allows him to build up a picture of how the society differs from here and now.

However, this more subtle kind of exposition is only practiced within the field of science fiction. Whenever mainstream writers who are not familiar with science fiction venture into the field—as with Margaret Atwood or Gore Vidal—they have no clue how to handle exposition. They go right back to stopping the action cold to explain things. And this is exactly what we should have expected the writer of the Book of Mormon to do.