"Writing something that purports to be an artifact of another culture is the most complicated, difficult kind of science fiction, because not only is it about strange things, it must also in itself be a strange thing. And when you have not one but several different narrators with different rhetorical stances, it becomes even more difficult. There are different perspectives, different personalities, and the culture must change across time, so that writers from the culture early on must somehow have differences from writers in that culture later on.
"So we're talking about a very tough project, one which is rarely attempted and which is almost never attempted under circumstances where the author actually tries to pass it off as a genuine document. Even those of us who write science fiction publish it with the word fiction somewhere on the cover. Our name is on it as author, and we expect to get credit for our inventiveness. We don't try to say we found it.
"There is a historical precedent, however. In the 1760's an ancient Scottish poet named Ossian was 'discovered' by a man named James Macpherson, who supposedly translated this work of ancient Celtic poetry which he found. In his own time, his work was taken very seriously as an ancient text. It was an era when people loved the idea of finding ancient manuscripts, especially manuscripts native to the British Isles. When the praised the poems, they praised Ossian, not Macpherson. It was an era when new work was not respected as much as old work, so if you could find a way to put out new work as old work, you'd get much more favorable attention for it. Macpherson was not a particularly good poet--but Ossian supposed came from a more primitive time, and therefore 'his' poetry was remarkably sophisticated for the time it was supposedly written.
"Macpherson produced exactly what people of his time expected or desired ancient Celtic poetry to be. But it also happened to be deeply, hopelessly wrong. It took only a little while before the fraud was exposed. Though most critics accepted Ossian, Samuel Johnson, accused Macpherson of forgery during his lifetime; Macpherson never did refute that charge or provide the originals, yet he remained a Member of Parliament until his death in 1796. Today, of course, the press would have seized upon Johnson's charges and hounded Macpherson to an early grave. It was a more courteous age.
"Today, though, when you look at the works of Ossian you can clearly see that this is the work of an 18th-century British writer. It has nothing to do with what you'd expect to find from an ancient Scottish writer. It's an obvious hoax, good enough only to fool people in a fundamentally ignorant time.
"Joseph Smith's project, if it was a fraud, was far more ambitious than Macpherson's; a much longer, more extensive work, with multiple authors. We're talking about somebody jumping off a cliff here, folks. His work should proclaim itself to be a phony on every page today. This is because every storyteller, no matter how careful he is, will inadvertantly confess his own character and the society he lives in. He can make every concious effort, he can be the best-educated scholar you could possibly find, but if he tries to write something that is not of his own culture he will give himself away with every unconscious choice he makes. Yet he'll never know he's doing it because it won't occur to him that it could be any other way."
