Posted by Dom Ciocca, Jr. on April 22, 1999 at 14:56:45:
In Reply to: Re: Why I Think Farnham's Freehold Is Racist posted by Rohan on February 08, 1999 at 22:19:18:
Vancites: In JV's first novel "Vandals of the Void" the kid protagonist makes friends with a (at that time) Negro midshipman
who's been reading Kant's "Metaphysics of Ethics" over and over again trying to understand every word, a very favaorable treatment of a Black man. And in ""Bad Ronald" there is a perfectly decent and respectable minor sharacter (again at that time) Negro couple looking over Ronalds house and Ronald's race hatred is treated as one of his more heinous characteristics. This was from the "there goes the neighborhood 60s. And anyway
am I being a white chauvinist when I point out that not very many black authors get into SF, Sam Delaney being the only great
one I can think of. I once picked up a book by Andre Norton called "Voodoo Planet" and was all excited thinking it would be
about spells reanimated dead, chicken chopping, etc. But the only reason the book was titled "Voodoo Planet" was because the
denizens of the "planet" where for no particular reason I could divine identical with the Blacks living in Earth's Africa?!