As easy as ABC, by Rudyard Kipling
There are many positive things I could say about Kipling’s As Easy as ABC, not the least of which is the joy of seeing a literary heavyweight dipping his big white toe into the pool of speculative (Sci-Fi) fiction, but I am not a fan of him or his brand of colonialism, and his infamous (well, it should be infamous) “White Man’s Burden” looms too large over As Easy as ABC for anything else in the story to matter to me. The ABC of the book embodies Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” in the most patronizing of ways, patting its charges on the head once they are through whining about how difficult their charges are to manage and how none of those charges would ever step up to do the work they do, so their charges are just damn lucky to have them. It may very well be that Kipling is criticizing the tyranny of the ABC, but if he is criticizing the ABC, he is missing the very clear connection their tyranny has to his own Imperialist tyranny, the one he espoused and championed in this long literary career. I admit that I haven’t given As Easy as ABC a fair shake, but my bias towards Kipling is deep and profound.
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