Racism in Lucifer's Hammer
Does anybody remember the really vicious (because clever) racism in Lucifer's Hammer? The gang of inner city blacks, sex obsessed, violent, crooked to the core. It appealed to all the stereotypes, and was all the more effective for not being overdrawn. As far as racist propaganda goes, I have never read anything that even came close.
And then there's the anti-nuclear activist, also in Lucifer's Hammer who "admits" that reactors are safe "they've got fail safe on their fail safe" but says the real problem is that nuclear power will make people think that "technology solves problemss." Puting lame and ridiculous arguments in the mouths of people you disagree with-how self indugent!
Racism in Footfall was toned way down, just a black guy who was paralyzed with fear, blink and you'd miss it. Then again there is the totally gratuituous investigative reporter character who is sadistically killed (drowned in toilet) by a freaked out ecologist. Apparently investigative reporting was another Pournelle pet peeves.
And then there is the really embarassing arithmetic error in Footfall: the amount of water the aliens put into the atomsphere, one half a billion tons, is supposed to be devastatingly large. This number is repeated several times. DO the math, the atmosphere is equivalent in mass to a global layer of water 10 meters thick, or 1 cubic kilometer of water (a billion tons) per 100 square kilometers of earth's surface. Earth's surface is 500 million square kilometers so the atmosphere weighs about 5 million billion tons. If the atmosphere held half a billion tons of water, that would be one part in 10 million by weight! Actual water vapor continent is a few percent, or 100,000 times greater.
Oh and then in Oath of Fealty, there was the liberal college professor, presumably modelled after Angela Davis, who gets some of his students killed sneaking into an Arcology because he too is anti-tech.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
