Encountering problems in loved material

Sometimes, growing up is just no fun at all.

I have been re-engaging with two book series I loved in my teens. (yes, we had writing then, smartmouth. We had left pictograms behind around the time I hit double digits) And both are bothering me a lot.

I've listed to the audiobooks for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series. It's been about three years since I last visited the red planet. And I am reading Julian May's Milieu and Pliocene series in order, which I have never done. I've read them all repeatedly, but never in order.

Let's start with Burroughs. I have fought my way from frozen south pole to frozen north pole beside Captain John Carter of Virginia scores of times. But this time... I am disappointed. I didn't remember Dejah Thoris being so much of an object. Kidnapped here, carried off there, desired by everyone but with almost no agency of her own. I don't think she says ANYTHING in Warlord of Mars, except her husband's name.
Carter is obsessed with his wife, with getting her back. It colors every page and feels more stalkery and possessive than loving. Everyone else is obsessed with her too.

Burroughs can write interesting female characters. Sola, the only green martian who has known love in a thousand generations. Thuvia, who can command the martian lions. Jealous, spoiled Phaidor, who redeems herself. Valla Dia, who finds herself trapped in the body of an elderly queen instead of her own beautiful shape, and Xaxa, the wicked queen who is willing to buy youth and beauty to continue ruling her people with an iron hand. Dejah Thoris is not interesting after the first book. I liked the movie version better.

The racism, as would be expected for books a hundred years old, is nearly painful. Anti-Native American sentiment. The blacks stereotyped as warriors and brutal ones. The cannibalism, I can almost write off as both black and white martians do it, feeding on the lower orders of human as humans feed on animals. The yellow men of the north pole, with their fierce black beards, are steeped in decadence and orientalism, including fiendish tortures. Although they are not the only race to practice it, the torture somehow becomes part of the general orientalism.

I am unsure I want to continue.


Julian May did her work in the 80s and 90s. Coming back to it thirty years later... and yeah, it has a lot of problems. I'm four books into the nine. Eleazer Wheelock for one.

The song used to be a Dartmouth staple and is no longer sung because it is racist as are the dining hall murals (shown in the video)

Yet, May has Dartmouth alums singing it into the mid 21st century, seeming unnoticing.

The whole idea of Ethnic Planets seems really awkward. I thought it sounded cool before. Hey, go emigrate to the Irish planet of Hibernia, raise sheep, spin, weave and dye, play the bodhran and sing the old songs, eating soda bread and coddle and swilling Guinness. I could do that. 

but these days, that feels very isolationist and a little racist.

Too the planets are so...white.
The Africans have to petition for more planets. their primary psychic groups were wiped out, and the Milieu wants colonists who are psychic. Ditto the Chinese. (and if the celtic genes are such hot stuff psychically, why do the Irish only have one planet)

This is by no means complete, since there are 784 human planets. But, in addition to the cosmop worlds, the planet wiki lists:
Canadian
French (4)
American (5), one an Alaskan planet
Russian (2)
Japanese (3)
African (2)
Scottish (2)
Laplander
German
Irish
British (2)
New Zealand
Brazilian
India
Albanian (yet Lithuanians didn't have enough "ethnic dynamism.")
Polynesian

It's going to continue to be interesting and a little difficult.

I still want my Dalriada Wind Surfer Racing Team tshirt though...