Posted by Gabriele Guenther on June 27, 1999 at 13:01:15:
A couple of people have asked me about Eric Frank Russell, and
his racist & anti-racist short stories.
1) His deliberate anti-racist stories are in the EFR anthology
"Somewhere A Voice". They are trite & banal, but well-meant,
and quite moving.
2) His very racist short story is: "The Timeless Ones". You will
find this in the EFR anthology "Far Stars".
The story more or less claims that Chinese are driven
(through fairly peaceful means) towards world-domination,
accomplished through breeding with the enemy (illogicality
number #1 --- do all the offspring then turn into little full
Chinese?), and through simple plugging on (taking any job,
no matter how lowly).
The story seems to me to be based on the Jungian idea of
a "race/racial-consciousness", i.e. in the racial subconsciousness.
One person asked me why I thought this story was not deliberatey racist.
It seems to me that EFR simply came across that Jungian idea,
and made it into a short story (lots of other similar examples
of him taking an idea and writing a story around it.
I don't think he went out of his way to write a "Yellow Peril"
story, and most people seem to think he was a nice person ---
maybe he himself would have been horrified to have all the
(very nasty, also illogical) aspects of his story made clear
to him.
LASTLY: may I recommend to everyone the following books by EFR:
a) "WASP", still a great idea today
b) "THE GREAT EXPLOSION", also still a great idea, an exploration
of a society built upon Gandhian ethics. Way to go!