I’m just gonna pull from the Wikipedia summary, which I think speaks for itself:
The group finds that it has not been transported to another world, but instead is in the distant future of their own world. A decadent but technologically advanced black culture keeps either uneducated or castrated white people as slaves. Sexual slavery and cannibalism are widespread and generally accepted. Adolescent girls are sexually exploited as “bedwarmers” by their owners. Other children are bred on ranches for consumption and slaughtered during puberty (when their flesh is considered particularly tasty) or sometimes earlier.
Hey Robert what you working on?
Oh a book where black people enslave white people!
To demonstrate the inhumanity of chattel slavery and racism to a racist audience right?
…
Heinlein considered himself a conservative and was quite annoyed with how much the hippies liked stranger in a strange land.
Still my favorite author, we get closer to some of his prophecies every day.
The New Republic, while conceding Heinlein’s desire to “show the evils of ethnic oppression”, states that in the process Heinlein “resurrected some of the most horrific racial stereotypes imaginable,” ultimately producing “an anti-racist novel only a Klansman could love.”
“Wow, that story sounds like a very intense and difficult but ultimately enlightening critique of slavery, racism and the meat industry!”
“It is a satire, right?”
Fuck Heinlein. Especially “Friday”.
What‽ Friday is a good book.
The opening chapter goes into graphic detail on how the female protagonist’s preferred form of gang SA defence is to just let it happen and try to enjoy it. Fuck that shitty book.
Is Heinlein the most overrated writer ever? Starship Troopers is a lengthy diatribe on why spanking is good.
For people who may think this is a bit, the novel literally has the protagonist recounting a lecture from high school wherein his teacher explained that hooligans lead to a societal decline during the 20th(?) century because not enough people were willing to spank their kids
“Clearly this is great literature, it’s because Heinlein breaks all the rules, he’s writing page after page about spanking on purpose!” — science fiction aficionados 🤓
I write science fiction while being aware that so much of this genre is garbage.
Also has Johnny Rico explain how Marxism bad because mud pies
One thing I do kind of like about CHUD writers is that they will tie every single bad thing in existence back to whatever personal bugbear they’re freaking out about at that moment.
Ray Bradbury is IMO also overrated.
The US does have some good scifi writers, but a lot of the ones pushed as greats are not good.
Asimov my beloved
Asimov took whatever points from his understanding women stat and put them in his knowing Orwell was a fucking hack stat
You’re not wrong but also man writing women in the 60s is not expected to be real progressive.
After several distant nuclear explosions rock the shelter, Hugh and Barbara become sexually intimate, after which the largest explosion of all hits the shelter.
Imagining this like the scene from Oppenheimer where the guy does the “I am become death…” line right as he nuts in his wife.
Hugh and Barbara
wife
barbara is not hugh’s wife in the book, she is his daughter’s friend from college
Take the cannibalism out and I would’ve joked “Oh, so they built futuristic Rome”
I just learned about Farnham’s freehold
I legit thought you meant there was a better author called Farnham who wrote a book called ‘freehold’ who got overlooked in his lifetime in favor of Heinlein, lol
This is what satire ultimately leads to
