james_nicoll

And noticed this passage, which I failed to note the last time I read this book, probably back in the 1970s:

"You want to report by phone then, don't you?" Alan took a compact packet about six inches square from a holster attached to her belt and handed it to Wilma.

So far as I could see, it had no special receiver for the ear. Wilma merely threw back a lid, as though she were opening a book, and began to talk. The voice that came back from the machine was as audible as her own.

Is that text really in the original? Did Nowlan foresee mobile phones in 1928?

Yellow Menace Warning: the Americans are inexplicably hostile to the people who brought civilization to the Americas in a manner no more oppressive than the old Americans visited on their predecessors.

Something I did remember (more Yellow Menace stuff)
was that despite this being an Yellow Menace book, Nowlan also wanted his book to feature a brotherhood of all men theme, which as turns out is pretty hard to reconcile with treating one specific race as inhuman and beyond the boundaries of basic decency. Not that he didn't try to reconcile the two

"In the years that followed," Wilma and I travelled nearly every nation on the earth which had succeeded in throwing off the Han domination, spurred on by our success in America, and I never knew her to show to the men or women of any race anything but the utmost of sympathetic courtesy and consideration, whether they were the noble brown-skinned Caucasians of India, the sturdy Balkanites of Southern Europe, or the simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa, today one of the leading races of the world, although in the Twentieth Century we regarded them as inferior. This charity and gentleness of hers did not fail even in our contacts with the non-Han Mongolians of Japan and the coast provinces of China.

But that monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman yellow blight over the face of the globe—for that race, like all of us, she felt nothing but horror and the irresistible urge to extermination.

Latterly, our historians and anthropologists find much support for the theory that the Hans sprang from a genus of human-like creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century, causing certain permanent changes in the earth's orbit and climate.

by literally dehumanizing the Han. Although this could also be seen as less "how is it we're simultaneously preaching the brotherhood of man and committing genocide against one specific group?" and more "how do I deal with the fact the woman I have fallen in love with is merrily committing racially motivated mass murder in such a way as not to reflect badly on her and by extension on me for staying with her?"

I am unaware of any other book that is quite so confused about the distinction between Tibetan, Mongols and Han Chinese as The Airlords of Han, although Gregory Benford's The Stars in Shroud comes close:

"It was Tonji, his Mongol mask in place."

Tonji is from Japan.

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