Sujet : Re: "To Sail beyond the Sunset" by Robert A. Heinlein
De : usenet (at) *nospam* mikevanpelt.com (Mike Van Pelt)
Groupes : rec.arts.sf.writtenDate : 04. May 2024, 22:04:15
Autres entêtes
Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <v167sf$1d4e4$2@dont-email.me>
References : 1 2 3 4
User-Agent : trn 4.0-test77 (Sep 1, 2010)
In article <
nbp33j5auirk4n86p8jfdmu7tb2sgfskhr@4ax.com>,
John Savard <
quadibloc@servername.invalid> wrote:
Incidentally, it has been argued that Farnham's Freehold wasn't
_really_ racist. It's true that it didn't depict cannibalism as a
natural tendency, for genetic reasons, of America's black people, just
something imported by foreign black people who were also converted to
Islam. I don't think that, though, is quite enough to qualify it as
"not racist", since saying false bad things about foreign people of
other races still qualifies, not just American people of other races.
It's been decades since I've read it, but I recall the cannibalism
in "Farnham's Freehold" came about because the total collapse of
civilization resulted in mass starvation, people resorted to
cannibalism to survive, and it got incorporated into the culture.
The dominant culture was black because the USA/USSR/Europe/China
nuclear war just about completely destroyed those nations, and
Africa was all that was left.
The out-of-story explanation for having cannibalism in there
was made pretty dang clear: Heinlein saying that on the scale
of evils, cannibalism is less of an evil than slavery.
-- Mike Van Pelt | "I don't advise it unless you're nuts."mvp at calweb.com | -- Ray Wilkinson, after riding out HurricaneKE6BVH | Ike on Surfside Beach in Galveston