Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture

Sharp, Patrick B. Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Jason W. Ellis in SFRA Review #289 (Summer 2009): pp. 24-25.[1] Ellis finds that

Savage Perils is a unified work [...] chronologically organized to reveal how the association of race and technology developed in the United States. The book aims to chart the circuits between race and nation, civilization and savagery, Occident and Other, and overcivilization and frontier [...]. The author shows that throughout American history there has been a racist identification of whiteness with civilization and the accoutrements of technology, and nonwhiteness with savagery and backwardness. [* * *]

The linkage running through it all is an implicit understanding that to be American is to be white; that the American frontier and its savagery creates Americans as better than their European origins; and finally, that Darwin’s concept of “man as toolmaker” points the way to evolutionary superiority by means of our technology and war-making with those peoples of color, also considered savages, on an expansive frontier. (Ellis, p. 24)

Among the works covered, Ellis mentions "Jack London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion,” H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free ([...] nuclear apocalypse [...]), John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Philip Francis Nowlan’s The Adventures of Buck Rogers, Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, [...] Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Frank Pat’s Alas, Babylon (the latter two examples deconstruct racist civil defense messages by penalizing prejudice)" (p. 24).

RDE, finishing, 21Feb21