Follow-up to the earlier question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Which mainstream science fiction or fantasy work would you say was the most racist mainstream science fiction or fantasy work?

(Mainstream = published by a legit publisher, not some vanity house)

Comments

[jessie_c]

Farnham's Freehold has got to be right up there. Possibly alongside Fifth Column. Closely followed by pretty much anything Campbell edited, encouraged or published.

[(Anonymous)]

I'll see your *Farnham's Freehold* and raise you *The Burning City*.

[philrm]

I certainly hope that Farnham's Freehold and Sixth Column are the most racist SF that I'll ever read. 'Cause that was way more than enough.

[ndrosen]

Sixth Column depicts cultural and military conflict, but is not strictly speaking racist. One of the good guys is an American of Japanese descent, and it is noted that the Asian conquerors are exterminating Asian-descended Americans. Also, the hero in question is described as being “as American as Will Rogers, and more American than that fox-hunting English gentleman, George Washington.” You can say that the book isn’t great literature, or that Heinlein was an American patriot, but I deny that it is racist.

[conuly]

Yes.

[(Anonymous)]

Was "Save the Pearls" published by a mainstream press?

[ba_munronoe]

What's the earliest we can go? Some early proto-SF was pretty genocidal (Jack London's "The Unparalleled Invasion" was hardly unique)

[ba_munronoe]

Krapman's "Caliphate", published by Baen, is pretty solid Islamophobia.

[jessie_c]

As is Steve White's Her Majesty's American. Misogyny an added extra, just for fun.

[rpresser]

HPL FTW

[jesuswasbatman]

Possibly Lovecraft's "The Street", although it has only very slight fantasy content.

[elusis]

Is that one more racist than "The Horror at Red Hook"?

[(Anonymous)]

"Good Indian" by Mack Reynolds?

[graydon]

Spider Robinson's Night of Power stands out, but if we count something like Isabel Briggs Myers' Give Me Death we're faced with the whole "Is this science fiction?" problem. There's a lot out there.

Then there's Philip Francis Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., the original Flash Gordon story, and well. Chinese people as literal eusocial aliens against whom a war of extermination must be fought to victory in a context of inherent white American supremacy.

[ba_munronoe]

Weren't the actual Chinese ruled over by a "Mongol" minority which were the aliens from space? Of course, that could have been a retcon for later editions: the one I read certainly wasn't a first edition.

IIRC, Heinlein's "Beyond this Horizon" had as part of it's backstory a successful war against an Asia which similarly had used eugenics/genetic engineering to recreate their society into something resembling a eusocial insect hive.

[dragoness_e]

IIRC, and it's been a while, in Armageddeon 2419 A.D, the "Han" of the novel weren't real-world Chinese; they were the result of actual aliens conquering China and interbreeding with the locals. Also, it was Buck Rogers, not Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon was from a comic strip series.

[carbonel]

Night of Power may be a classic example of the sort of thing Racefail was all about, but I don't think it belongs in any "most racist" listing, because that was clearly not authorial intent.

[jreynolds197]

I see your Tom Kratman and raise you John Ringo and Tom Kratman: Watch on the Rhine - the SS are the good guys! Liberals / Greens are quislings (who get killed off because of their stupidity)! The aliens are hordes of evil, stupid beings that can be killed with zero moral qualms! (Almost as if they are a stand-in for the yellow peril or Islam.)

And (it's been a LONG while since I read / skimmed it), the aliens that give high-tech stuff to humans seemed Jewish-coded to this non-jew: cosmopolitan and untrustworthy.

I would be happy to be wrong on that score.

[agharta75]

And the SS get along great with the Israel Defense Force.

Uh, no.

[dsrtao]

The only quibble available is that the Posleen are not (or were not intended in any other of the books featuring them) to be Islamic in any way at all. They were certainly designed by their author to be perfect war fodder that could be ethically exterminated by the billion.

[(Anonymous)]

If you have the misfortune to run into an SF fan who pretends that the Nazis were leftists, I suggest asking them (in horror!) why Kratman and Ringo made leftists the heroes who save humanity in Watch on Rhine.

[jreynolds197]

Regarding the previous post: Kameron Hurley just tweeted something apropos:

One thing that's really hard in this industry is that somebody can write one or two books and live on them forever, or write a great debut that launches their career so far into the stratosphere that they can use it to launch a solid career...and then...

The thread is here.

https://twitter.com/KameronHurley/status/1200576771072167936

[dragoness_e]

Any Fu-Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer. Actually, any story, short or long, by Sax Rohmer that has Asian or part-Asian characters anywhere near it. That guy had some serious anti-Asian bigotry going on, and most of his stuff was pulp horror or pulp thriller with an Orientalist theme and lots of faux-mysticism tossed in.

[dewline]

And that's the series that Marvel got one of their martial arts heroes from. The one who's getting a Phase Four movie: Shang-Chi. The people who made those earliest Shang-Chi stories are not unhappy about the prospect of the movie version severing that connection, though.

[ba_munronoe]

Then there's "The Camp of the Saints", described in an article on white supremacist literature ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/inside-the-world-of-racist-science-fiction.html )

"Sitting beside “The Turner Diaries” at the top of the white supremacist best-seller list is Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, “The Camp of the Saints.” It is a brooding parable that warns of the dangers of immigration and is something of a standout for being relatively well written, even in translation from the original French. Mr. Raspail’s caustic, often-humorous, ellipses-littered prose is reminiscent of that of his fellow countryman Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose own history as a Nazi sympathizer cast a shadow over his otherwise brilliant work.

The book’s central “problem” begins in Belgium, where priests are encouraging the adoption of Indian children as a form of charity. In an early scene, a roiling sea of desperate Indian mothers — “wretched creatures” — storms the gates of the Belgian embassy in Kolkata, each with a child in her outstretched arms. The country is soon swamped with these adoptions, and authorities announce an end to the policy.

But it’s too late; the mob gains strength as the Indians are joined by Arabs and other nonwhites. They eventually grow to one million strong, board a flotilla and set sail for France. The country’s liberal government hesitates to defend against the onslaught, and as it stammers and acquiesces, the immigrants begin to enter the country. France’s whites retreat northward, but are eventually absorbed by the demographic shift, and the trend spreads throughout Europe, as indigenous populations and other “hoards” are inspired to rise up. They eventually take over the world, erasing the white race from existence."

[dewline]

Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller are known...fans?...of this particular atrocity against both literature and human decency.

[typographer]

Lucifer's Hammer is the one that always leaps to my mind. But then I read it before I ever found an old used paperback of Farnhams Freehold... and I'd been warned about the racism in the latter, so that might be why Lucifer's Hammer seemed worse?

Do the original Fu Manchu novels qualify as fantasy?