I am usually the last person to comment on lj about egregiously racist failures, so I am a little surprised not to have seen more posts about this; maybe I've been missing them. The archive is here, if you want to trace the discussion. Plenty of people there are far more thoughtful and eloquent than I could be.

If you're wondering, the short version, as encapsulated by me and my husband --
Me: Let's say you were an editor or publisher and were handed a novel where the Europeans got to the Americas and discovered that there were no humans there, but the megafauna had survived the Pleistocene dieout. Would you think (a) mammoths! saber-toothed tigers! cool! or (b) you know, wiping out all the Native Americans from your history and replacing them by literal wild dangerous beasts is deeply, deeply hinky.
Him: Hm. I guess the second thing.
Me: Yeah, you'd think, wouldn't you?

Or, more eloquently, by hermetic, Fundamentally, I cannot escape the idea that [writing such a book is] an act that results in real-world harm because it disappears peoples who have already been systematically removed physically, culturally, linguistically, and spiritually, from their own landscape. It completes their erasure.

Which pretty much says it all, I think. I have pretty high standards for "immoral" as applied to a work of literature, but this one is pushing them.

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I have half-formed thoughts on alternate histories, and why I want to read them and almost always end up horribly disappointed; I guess it's that historical causality is too complex, and I end up waving my hands a lot and saying "but, but, but... once you've changed that, how do you end up there?" I don't have the same problem with fantasy, although most fantasy worlds don't work (historically, economically, whatever), but once people start playing with history my brain goes into overdrive.

I am also reminded of Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna, one of those books where the Roman Empire never falls; I remember it only vaguely, because it wasn't very good as a novel. It was more a collection of historical sketches, I think -- actually, it turns out that the book is a collection of short stories written over an number of years, which makes sense. But it seems relevant in this context, because IIRC Silverberg decided Christianity caused the fall of Rome, and to ensure that there were no Christians he short-circuited the Exodus: no Jews, no Judea, no Jesus, therefore no Christians. Except that actually there are Jews, still in Egypt, still waiting for the Exodus, which actually occurs in the final story -- in the punchline -- in spaceships. Which is what makes this book an entirely different proposition, I think: history isn't erased but postponed.

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Off and on in comments about this I see people looking for books which deal with America, and American myth, and in this context I keep thinking of Michael Chabon's Summerland, which I read again while in San Francisco. Has anyone else read this book? and if not, why not? People who like (or want to like) Supernatural but wish ithad more folklore and fewer race and gender issues should read this book. I think baseball is boring, but I love it. Which is not to say that it gets everything right; I mean, I'm not qualified to say whether it gets anything right, as far as the inclusion of Native American characters goes. My outsider perspective is that Chabon is trying here and is not failing utterly, but other people may feel differently.