On the positive side, I got to rec Lois McMaster Bujold

[rachelmanija]

This weekend an acquaintance of mine noticed that I was reading an sf book-- which one, I don't recall, but it was by a woman. He remarked that he had only ever read one female sf author in his life, Octavia Butler. (And liked her work.) I asked him who else he liked, thinking to rec more women.

"I love Niven and Pournelle!" he replied.

"Hmm," I said, and recced Bujold.

"Don't you like them?" he asked, noting my lack of enthusiasm.

"Not really."

"Not even Lucifer's Hammer?"

"No... The prose was clunky and it bothered me that once the apocalypse happened, suddenly there were gangs of rampaging black cannibals."

He denied the existence of rampaging black cannibals, and suggested that I had gotten the book confused with a different post-apocalyptic work containing rampaging black cannibals, Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold. I turn the matter over to the wisdom of LJ!

[Poll #1030388]

Comments

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

Have read Sixth Column (some time ago, and I haven't reviewed the crumbling paperback in my boxes lately), and it's plenty racist, in a very WWII Yellow-Peril-hangover way. It's so pronounced that it reads as satirically racist to any post-60s sensibility, issues blown up to comic-book breadth and, um, lack of depth, so it kind of has the opposite effect now.

I can't know, but I think it was written to appeal to the post-WWII-hangover readers of the early 50s. Heinlein always said that he was writing for a marketplace, whatever marketplace he had to.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I think it was written to appeal to the post-WWII-hangover readers of the early 50s.

Probably not, since it was published in 1941 (But written before Pearl).

The post-WWII-hangover story might be Water is for Washing, where a man who is phobic of water learns that thanks to a major geological event, the entire Imperial Valley region is about to become an inlet of the Pacific Ocia. This is of some concern to him because he is downhill from the Pacific when this happens. One of the kids he encounters while fleeing is a "Jap" and he's not pleased about the kid's enthnicity but he takes both kids with him. Later on, an unnamed tramp helps him keep the kids alive.

There's an interesting bit in the wikipedia article on Sixth Column:

The original idea for the story of Sixth Column was proposed by John W. Campbell (who had written a similar story called All), and Heinlein later wrote that he had "had to reslant it to remove racist aspects of the original story line" and that he did not "consider it to be an artistic success."[1] Heinlein did not provide details of his reslanting, but it is noteworthy that the mysterious force which has accidentally killed all but six[2] of the two hundred[3] American personnel at the beginning of the novel, is later revealed to be race-based, suggesting that the survivors were ethnic minorities. There are few clues to the ethnicity of the surviving personnel, though one of them has skin described as “brown.” [4] A possible clue is provided by the nickname of the one soldier who was not at the laboratory when the accident occurred: “Whitey.”[5] The irony is increased by the surname of the leading surviving scientist: “Calhoun,” the name of the prominent pro-slavery politician and political philosopher John C. Calhoun.[6]

If true, I completely missed it when I read it.

[strangerian.livejournal.com]

Wow, oops on the date. Hmm, apparently the anti-Asian prejudice of the 50s wasn't just an artifact of WWII. Was it a general xenophobia that included any non-American (or non-white) peoples? One cringes at the casual prejudice of all kinds in early and middle 20th-century American (and in British, to be fair) literature, let alone in more popular entertainment.

One trick Heinlein did use, in Star Beast and Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Podkayne of Mars (and probably other books), was writing characters who, somewhere buried in the middle or late action, would be described off-handedly as non-white. This might not address racism actively, but it shakes up a white reader's (that's me) assumptions pretty painlessly in a way that sticks.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Hmm, apparently the anti-Asian prejudice of the 50s wasn't just an artifact of WWII. Was it a general xenophobia that included any non-American (or non-white) peoples?

Anti-Asian prejudice goes way back before WWII.