I’m still chuckling at myself and the other commenters, and the reviewer David Axe, who missed the fact that cannibalism is a leit-motif in Heinlein’s novels. His single most notable novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, has a whole bunch of white cannibals in it toward the end (well, it’s more “mortuary feasts” to honor the dead departed which made a virtue of necessity on protein-starved Mars, where protagonist Michael Valentine Smith learned the custom as a “foster Martian”, not unlike the mortuary feasts of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea). There are also hints that before the Time Corps enters the life of the protagonist of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, he was a member of a small group who owed their lives to nourishment from the cadaver of one of their number marooned somewhere.

I think that Farnham’s Freehold, clumsy as it was in some ways, deserves a break from charges of knee-jerk stereotyping of Africans. Like a previous novella of Heinlein’s, Logic of Empire, the book explores the evils of colonialism and of slavery. It is no more a book dealing primarily with nuclear war than Camus’ The Plague is about epidemiology, or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is about sailing — it uses nuclear war as a plot device and the close quarters of the shelter during the bombing as a metaphor for the “middle passage” suffered by African slaves on the way to the New World. How these things became contemptible escapes me.