Re: (Worst) Farnham's Freehold by Robert A. Heinlein

quadibloc wrote:

Since Heinlein has a mama's boy end up as an eunuch, it's clear he was
using the book as a platform for his views.

Since the sky is blue, it is clear that sea cucumbers are Riemann sums.

But that doesn't mean he was racist; the nature of the future society
was likely just there for the plot.
Instead, it seems to me that the view the book was sermonizing for is
one we've seen in other Heinlein works: extolling the virtues of the
rugged self-reliant individual, of which Farnham in this book is an
example.
What is a product of the time in which the book was written...

My memory may be failing, but I don't recall a lot of novels in the 1960s in which future cannibalistic black societies were portrayed.
Well, maybe by KKK publishing but they were not distributed up here, being banned by the grammar police.
  was

simply that one didn't expect the apparent possible racism to be an
issue.

One should have.
As a young white teen, in an all-white area, so far from woke that I was not clear on the difference between Nat King Cole and Martin Luther King, I was not happy with Heinlein's choice. Not deeply disturbed (see above), but not happy.
Had I already read "Sixth Column" it would have bothered me more.
People older and wiser than I, who knew of recondite subjects like Jim Crow, or even the civil rights act, could well be expected to be perturbed a great deal more.
A world "upside down" is a well known theme in writing through the ages.
The Romans even acted it out in Saturnalia, during which the slaves were free, and the masters fed the slaves (mostly food cooked by those same slaves the day before, admittedly). But the addition of castration, other casual mutilation, and cannibalism is questionable, at the least,
if such events are not common in the "upside up" society.
William Hyde