Pseudonym of US writer Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races (> Race in SF) have been restricted to North America while, in black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a Utopian world. A white Invasion suffers ignominious defeat, and the narrator – a (white) interloper from the twentieth century, whose incredulous response to black civilization is treated Satirically by the author – returns to his own time. Considering its period, the book is remarkable for declining to treat blacks as inherently inferior to whites; so offensive was this attitude in 1915 that the book's own publishers attempted to stifle its sales. [JC]
see also: Politics.
Roger Sherman Tracy
born Windsor, Vermont: 9 December 1841
died Ballard Vale, Massachusetts: 6 March 1926
works
links
Previous versions of this entry