Philip Francis Nowlan (1888–1940)

I read this for no particular reason. I believe it's essentially a 1962 re-editing of the original pulp stories from 1928 (the quotes below seem to be from the originals, but they're almost identical to the edition I read).

It was really awful. The forgivably awful things were that it was
fairly dull; that a man who'd been asleep for 500 years could awake to
find himself a tactical military genius; and that the science was just
nonexistent. But those really just arise from it being a pulp I
guess. But, apart from all that, it was just amazingly racist.

The narrator gleefully annihilates the "Mongol Chinese" (known as the
Hans), who had conquered America, at every given opportunity - soldier
and civilian alike as "not even the terror could conceal the hate in
those faces".

Nowlan also transforms some North American placenames in an
offensively simplistic way - for example Nu-Yok, Bah-Flo, Si-kaga,
and, possibly the best, the "Nu-Yok-A-lan-a liner".

His racial theories go further than just the Mongol Chinese: "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."

That last quote was from the final couple of pages, and he does
attempt some kind of reluctant climb down from his 200 page
hate-crime, speculating 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". He probably could have left it
at that, but no: "The theory is that these creatures ... with a mental
super-development, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something
we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans". I don't know why
the Tibetans had to be dragged into all this.

Anyway, a far cry from the Gil Gerard series from my childhood. This should really be 1 star or less, but it is interesting as a cultural artifact. And, as Umberto Eco may have said, it's a good example of a bad book.

Still, cool covers.… (more)

The previous book, Armageddon 2419 AD, had a big dose of Yellow Peril, but was generally an exciting story. This book relishes the genocide of the Han race, murdering civilians with glee whether individually or wholesale (with atomic bombs). A thoroughly disgusting book.

Here is a quote from the tail end, after the glorious destruction of the city Lo-Tan:

...though it was several years before one by one their remaining cities were destroyed and their populations hunted down, thus completing the reclamation of America and inaugurating the most glorious and noble era of scientific civilization in the history of the American race.

The chapter is titled "Victory".

I wish I had not read this book.

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This is a darned entertaining bit of classic pulp sci-fi, complete with post-apocalyptic dystopia and evil overlords. It's also the first appearance in print of Anthony Rogers, who in later treatments got the nickname "Buck", although this one takes place completely on Earth, and in fact in North America. And once you get past the idea that a man could pass out in a Pennsylvania coal mine full of radioactive gas and then awaken, 500 years later, perfectly fit and preserved, well, the rest of the science isn't actually all that bad. OK, except for the death rays. But: death rays!

This book and its sequel [b:The Airlords of Han|6328975|The Airlords of Han|Philip Francis Nowlan|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1328308448s/6328975.jpg|6514606] demonstrate what seem to me to be some really progressive ideas about the capabilities of women and their roles in society. While there may appear to be a racist tinge or even bias to the book, if that bothers you I encourage you to read on through the sequel; things are not quite as they seem at first.

Now, if you're a fan of the Buck Rogers comic strip, serials, or TV show, I should warn you that it's not the same, and some familiar characters will be absent. It's also not Flash Gordon :-).
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