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

[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.

[graydon]

My recollection is that the novel has the modern Chinese as the aberrant descendants of the aliens; the problem is someone woke the pure-strain aliens from suspended animation and they start taking over from that point. But it's been awhile.

[ba_munronoe]

Here's the original, thanks Gutenberg: apparently interior China suffered from the "one drop of blood" Han curse, but not the coasts?

"In the years that followed, Wilma and I travelled nearly every nation on the earth which had succeeded in throwing off the Han domination, spurred on by our success in America, and I never knew her to show to the men or women of any race anything but the utmost of sympathetic courtesy and consideration, whether they were the noble brown-skinned Caucasians of India, the sturdy Balkanites of Southern Europe, or the simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa, today one of the leading races of the world, although in the Twentieth Century we regarded them as inferior. This charity and gentleness of hers did not fail even in our contacts with the non-Han Mongolians of Japan and the coast provinces of China.

But that monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman yellow blight over the face of the globe—for that race, like all of us, she felt nothing but horror and the irresistible urge to extermination.

LATTERLY, our historians and anthropologists find much support for the theory that the Hans sprang from a genus of human-like creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century, causing certain permanent changes in the earth's orbit and climate.

Geological convulsions blocked this section off from the rest of the world for many years. And it is a historical fact that Chinese scientists, driving their explorations into it at a somewhat later period, met the first wave of the on-coming Hans.

The theory is that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the "Asiatic Bowl") with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further their mental powers.

Or, to put it the other way around. These Tibetans, through the injection of this unearthly blood, deteriorated slightly physically, lost the "soul" parts of their nature entirely, and developed abnormally efficient intellects.

However, through the centuries that followed, as the Hans spread over the face of the earth, this unearthly strain in them not only became more dilute, but lost its potency; and in the end, the poison of it submerged the power of it, and earth's mankind came again into possession of its inheritance.

How all this may be, I do not know. It is merely a hypothesis over which the learned men of today quarrel."

[conuly]

Wow that was gross to read.

[graydon]

There's this still-widespread thing where people think active supremacy is about saying mean things, so if you just don't say mean things, everything is fine. The whole notion that the taxonomy and categories and axioms might be the problem just goes whoosh, not so much over their head as gaining altitude and accelerating to orbital velocities.