Book Review: Tales of Tharassas

Title: Tales of Tharassas 

Author: J. Scott Coatsworth 

Date: 2023 

Publisher: Other Worlds Ink 

Quote: "Why is your skin so light?" 

In a far-off future humans have colonized a few other planets. One of them is Tharassas, whose indigenous populations include animals called emps that ride around on their humans and observe what others are feeling about them. 

 You might think that this would make it easier for people to get along with each other. You'd be wrong. The population of Tharassas are descendants of a group of Earth people who rejected enforced "diversity" guidelines so you know they're vicious White racists... Sigh. It is possible to write good stories that happen to express fashionable, politically correct, ideas but it's all too easy for p.c. thinkers to crank out political tracts that express nothing but p.c. ideas, and that's what Tales of Tharassas is. The identity politics that are so tedious today, according to this book, will never end. How discouraging. 

There's a story about race hate, during the stage when people on supply ships from earth are hailed as "angels" so a little Black boy gets to see his grandfather as an "angel," and a story about lesbians who don't get to become a couple, and a story about homosexual men who get to be a couple briefly, and that's all there is to this book. 

And of course socialism is taken for granted. Farmers live on land granted to them by the government, not land they've claimed by agreement with their fellow colonists. Is that the problem? In a more libertarian fantasy series, the author had written ten or eleven volumes about the world he'd invented before someone complained that no one in it seemed to be Black. Actually most characters weren't described and many weren't human...anyway the author promptly brought in a lot of Black Americans and led them to a likely spot for a new human settlement, near a lake that featured a population of alligator-like creatures called chobees. Their local guides asked someone in the settlement on the other side of the lake, "Would you like to see more humans across the lake from you?" They would, their spokesman said. "Do you care what color they are?" After some thought their spokesman said "We might prefer that they not be green, to avoid confusion with the chobees." When people are free to take responsibility for their own lives, do the ones who are not trying to coexist with alligators care whether their neighbors' faces are green? 

Coatsworth isn't young but neither does he seem to be old enough to be excused for writing stories that imagine that political debates that are really behind most of humankind in 2023 might be forgotten by the year 2400. It's like reading fiction from the year 1700 in which the writer expected Barbados to be a penal colony for Britain and the other British colonies in 2023 and imagined that slaves would still be needed to tan the hide to make buggy whips. 

"Did you love these stories? Click to buy more," a link in the e-book shamelessly advertises. I did not love the stories. Tharassas is a relatively appealing science fiction planet, with sentient plants and three-winged birds; too bad the best thing to be said for its population is that they make real human beings look nice.