Description:

"Blackman's Burden" is one of Reynolds's earlier novels. His ideas are played out much closer to home, in a time much closer to ours. The time is the near future. The place is Africa. In a reaction to centuries of largely-botched colonialism, the rest of the world has chosen to leave Africa pretty much on its own. Aside from some modernization efforts by the Reunited Nations & aside from the efforts of various charitable organizations-- some altruistically motivated, others not--& aside from the presence of agents pursuing the interests of their several home countries. In "Blackman's Burden", & in its sequels "Border, Breed Nor Birth" & "The Best Ye Breed", a small team of those interlopers decides that what the Sahel really needs is not minor charities or piddling interventions, but political union & modernization. Needless to say, almost nobody agrees. It's an interesting book--a knowledgeable view of Africa combined with a cynical view of the human condition. There is a short-story epilogue to this trilogy, titled "Black Sheep Astray" "Border, Breed nor Birth": El Hassan, would-be tyrant of all North Africa, was on the run. His followers at this point numbered six, one of whom was a wisp of a twenty-four year old girl. Arrayed against him and his dream, he knew, was the combined power of the world in the form of the Reunited Nations, and, in addition, such individual powers as the United States of the Americas, the Soviet Complex, Common Europe, the French Community, the British Commonwealth and the Arab Union, working both together and unilaterally. A novel of colonialism set in North Africa, "Border, Breed Nor Birth" originally appeared as a serial in ANALOG under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr.