I will blame my Canadian upbringing, for a whitebread population in most of the stories I read back then. And I up my admiration for Hamilton an extra couple of notches, for including such a character in a book that was written the year I was born!


Speaking of "City", which it seems I can never recommend to enough people, how's this for one of the great opening "grabbers" of all time:

Kenniston realized afterward that it was like death. You knew you were going to die someday, but you didn't believe it. He had known that there was danger of the long-dreaded atomic war beginning with a sneak punch, but he hadn't really believed it.

Not until that June morning when the missile came down on Middletown. And then there was no time for realization. You don't hear or see a thing that comes faster than sound. One moment, he was striding down Mill Street toward the plant, getting ready to speak to the policeman coming toward him. The next moment, the sky split open.

It split wide open, and above the whole town there was a burn and blaze of light so swift, so violent, that it seemed the air itself had burst into instantaneous flame.


The whole book is available online, here:

http://www.xooqi.com/iboox/chaps/0069/0001.html

PS. Eskimo is now a bad word. The "correct" term is Inuit. I bet most Americans didn't know that they are racist if they use Eskimo. Shows how nutty Canada has got.

I thought Esquimaux was a tribe.

IMP.

Hamilton was a remarkable writer -- one of the very few to make a successful transtion from late-30s over-the-top space opera to something wamer and more humanistic.  Many of his later SF novels -- City...., Doomstar, Star of Life, etc. -- are real gems.and the three Starwolf* books he wrote for Ace are top-notch adventure stuff.

And his wife was pretty good, too!

*No relation to other works with the same name.

****

Unfortunately, in far too much of this country other terms for people of African ancestry include "angry", "frustrated", "violent" and "vengeful". Mostly because a couple of other terms are "poor" and "uneducated".

Until such time as serious inroads are made into solving the enormous problem of that last one, it won't really be a whole lot of help thinking up clever things to call them. The system has largely betrayed Black Americans. They probably wouldn't care what other races call them, if someone would just fix that!

***********************************************************

I couldn't agree more, John. I've had it taught to me by people who have suffered indignities that I couldn't have even imagined, accompanied by emotional pain at a level I've never known. While people of good will attempt to work toward a future when observations like yours will be history instead of current events, I like to remember the childhood song I was taught: "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin WITH ME".

I have no idea why that posted in BOLD. Please be assured it was computer ignorance and not egotism.

I think its a word the French adapted from a term other tribes had for "Eskimos".