The Race to Bomb (review of A History of Bombing)

Corson, Trevor. "The Race to Bomb," rev. A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg. New York: New Press, 2001 (W.W. Norton, dist.). The Nation 273.13 (29 Oct. 2001): 25-30.

TC is "managing editor of Transition, a magazine of race and ethnicity based at Harvard University" (25, italics removed) and knowledgeable about early-20th c. British "fantasy novels"—or SF—dealing with race and war. At the beginning of the review, TC cites Robert W. Coles's 1900 The Struggle for Empire "in which Anglo-Saxons conquer the world by destroying or absorbing all other races. Triumphant and enraptured by technology, the Anglo-Saxons invent flying machines and encounter" the alien Sirians—whose cities they bomb. TC balances Empire with Anderson Graham's 1923 (sic) The Collapse of Homo Sapiens, in which Africans and Asians steal atomic secrets and bomb "the Anglo-Saxons back to the Stone Age." A bit later, TC mentions J. Hamilton Sedberry's 1908 Under the Flag of the Cross, wherein Whites drop from their flying machines "'electrobombs,' which unleash the forces of raw matter"—upon no "imagined race but a real one: yellow people. Here, the atomic bombing of Japan has already happened, before bombing was even invented" (26), and 15 years before Collapse and 21 years before Philip Francis Nowlan's depiction of the use of atomic bombs in "The Airlords of Han" (the concluding tale to the original Buck Rogers stories) — and just three years after Albert Einstein elaborated the equations indicating in the real world that E = mc2 (Special Theory of Relativity, 1905).

RDE, Title, 27Aug19