Persecution Flip / Literature

Persecution Flips in Literature.

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By Author:

• Harry Turtledove likes this kind of irony and often uses it:
  • In both his epic fantasy-retellings of the American Civil War and World War II, the slaves and the "subhumans" due for extermination are the white, Aryan-looking blondes.
  • In Ruled Britannia, the English Protestants must go underground after the Spanish invade and hand power over to the Catholics, Elizabeth I is imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the occupying forces include many Irish. The book is clear that, foreign presence aside, the situation is nothing new for England: Protestants were top dog with Henry VIII, then Catholics with Mary Tudor, then Protestants again with Elizabeth.
  • In the Southern Victory series, the Confederate Goebbels expy is a Jew. At one point, a character muses that if blacks were not scapegoated for the CSA's problems it would probably be the Jews.
    • In the same series, the rump United States joins the Central Powers during World War One and defeats Canada and Great Britain. This results in Quebec and Ireland (the whole island) becoming independent, CP-aligned republics, with Anglo-Canadians and Ulster Protestants becoming the second-class, rebellion-prone citizens.
    • Further referenced in universe, when Scipio (a Black Confederate) takes delight in reading the part of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the "dark skinned" Moors conquering the "blonde" Visigoths.
  • In The Disunited States of America, the states broke away into separate countries due to the Constitution never being passed, as the weaker Articles of Confederation couldn't keep them together. The southern states, as you'd expect, remain oppressive to black people, although they eventually abolished slavery. This oppression caused black rebellions, and one in Mississippi was successful. The victorious black people there then treated the whites much as they themselves had been earlier.
  • Vilcabamba rewrites the conquest of the Inca Empire as a conquest of Earth by spacefaring, centaur-like aliens who want to exploit its mineral resources. While the role of the Inca emperors is played by the Presidents of the United States, there is an off-hand reference to how the aliens' destructive mining technology has left Spain "uninhabitable".^note The joke here is that the Krolp wanted mercury. The largest mines in the world are indeed in Spain, and mercury was used historically to help extract gold in Spain's American colonies, chiefly Peru.
  • Subverted in the World War series. Space lizard people with attitudes modeled after 19th century European colonialists invade Earth during World War II, but they are brought to a stalemate by the actual colonial empires. In the ensuing peace, the United States, Britain and Japan surrender most of their overseas colonies, but retain their own independence along with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (who also retain nearly all of their conquests and puppets, one of the few exceptions being Poland).
  • Through Darkest Europe is set in a universe where the Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East are liberal and highly developed while Europe is full of small backwater countries dominated by corruption, tribalism, and Christian fundamentalism.
• From H. G. Wells:
  • The War of the Worlds has a variant in which the Martian attack on England is meant to parallel the real subjugation of Africa by The British Empire; the invaders have more advanced technology that makes their conquest frighteningly easy, and diseases that the defenders are largely immune to but which the invaders have never encountered before holds the invasion back. As the Trope Maker for Alien Invasion, this is what has led to similar subtext appearing in derivative works. The book specifically says that, before humans judge the Martians too harshly, they should remember events like the Tasmanian genocide (which had happened just decades earlier). Should they expect more mercy from alien beings than they gave to other humans who they colonized? The entire novel can be read as a massive Take That! against imperialism and Wells' own country in particular, showing what the British Empire did overseas happening to England.
  • In The Time Machine, The Morlocks are descended from the working classes and treat the formerly sapient descendants of the upper classes as livestock.
  • In the short story "The Country of the Blind," a society of eyeless people—who have honed their other senses and can function at least as well without eyesight—treats a sighted man as a freak. They have no idea what to make of his (to them) bizarre ramblings about a sense that none of them can imagine, and they ultimately decide to remove those weird growths above his cheeks that are causing him so much distress.

By Anthology:

• From a single Alternate History anthology (although some of these are a bit iffy):
  • "The Wandering Christian" by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman (Judaism becomes the major world religion; Christianity all but wiped out)
  • "Hush My Mouth" by Suzette Hayden Elgin (African former slaves rise up and seize power in the United States after the Civil War; white Americans all but wiped out)
  • "The English Mutiny" by Ian R. MacLeod (India colonizes England)
  • "Islands in the Sea" by Harry Turtledove (Islam becomes the major world religion; Christianity is practiced only in a few small areas)

By Title:

• Black Like Me is an account of journalist John Howard Griffin's dyeing his skin black and living in an area he had visited as a white man and describing the differences.
• The novel Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo is a pseudo-Alternate History novel taking place in a world where "blak Aphrikans" enslave "whyte Europanes" for the transatlantic slave trade. The title and premise are a flip on Roots.
• Many of the stories in the Chicks in Chainmail quintet, edited by Esther Friesner, deal with the male-female issues by gender flipping, or other plot device, some well-done, and some belaboring the point.
• Charles Beaumont's short story The Crooked Man takes place In a World… where somehow, homosexuality has become the norm, and straight (or "crooked") people are an oppressed minority. They used to simply be mistreated, but a rabidly heterophobic politician coming into power has resulted in them being hunted down and sent to camps for reprogramming. Which happens to the hero and his girlfriend at the end.
• In the Deathday and Earthrise duology, Earth is invaded by an alien race known as the Saurons. The Saurons have a Fantastic Caste System based on scale color: black-scaled Saurons (Zin) are the ruling class, brown-scaled (Kan) are the soldiers, and white-scaled (Fon) are the laborers. When the Saurons enslave humanity, they treat darker-skinned humans much better than white-skinned humans as a result, which sets the stage for racial strife among the humans even as they try to overthrow the Saurons.
• Zig-zagged in Earth's Children: Ayla, a young cro-magnon girl, becomes an orphan and is adopted by a tribe of neanderthals who consider her ugly, weird, and more or less mentally challenged. She doesn't meet a member of her species until the following book, when she discovers that the cro-magnons think the same of the neanderthals. They also happen to be matriarchal and assign her a high social status from the start, in contrast to the very patriarchal neanderthals. The third book makes Ayla run into an Amazon Brigade who has crossed the line into gendercide territory.
• William Tenn's story "Eastward Ho!" is set in a post-nuclear-war future where Native Americans are in power, and the oppressed whites keep fleeing further and further east. Eventually they plan to sail to the land of freedom—Europe.
• Robert A. Heinlein's controversial Farnham's Freehold posits a future where the members of a white family are the slaves of cannibalistic black masters. The cannibalism is what pushes it over the edge into "Black people are worse" territory and led to a reviewer in The New Republic calling it "an anti-racism novel only a Klansman could love".
• In a Fantasy Counterpart Culture version, Flora Segunda has the largely European-flavored (though apparently California-dwelling) Califans conquered and ruled by the pseudo-Aztec Huitzils.
• In the dystopian future of The Forever War, the protagonist is a relativity-time traveler, and upon one of his later returns to earth he finds that population pressure has made homosexuality the socially-acceptable choice. His subordinates—particularly the females—are creeped out, and behind his back call him "queer." He's understanding, realizing how they must feel about serving under a "sexual deviant.
• The Goosebumps book "Awesome Ants" is about a boy who wins an ant vivaria in a contest but starts overfeeding them, which results in the ants growing to massive sizes. At the end, he wakes up to find that ants have taken over the earth and secluded humans in their own vivaria. The TV episode based on this story was even weirder; it's said that ants have *always* been the dominant species, so the boy was really dreaming about a Persecution Flip inversion.
• Gulliver's Travels:
  • The talking horses ("Houyhnhns") domesticating humans ("Yahoos") as farm animals. Also, the horses had a strict hierarchy based on color... with the darker ones in charge.
  • Gulliver visits the countries of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, in succession, and is regarded as a freak of nature in both: In Lilliput because he is a giant among dwarfs, and in Brobdingnag because he is a dwarf among giants. The court jester of Brobdingnag is a dwarf who was reputed to be the shortest man in the kingdom until Gulliver arrived, and is delighted to finally have the chance to bully someone smaller than him.
• The hero of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness ruminates on the colonial relationship by invoking the Roman invasion of Britain and wondering aloud how the Ancient Britons saw the colonial system from the other side. Later he suggests a counterfactual scenario:
  The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious [Africans] armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon.
• In Waberi's "In the United States of Africa", Africa is the largest superpower while the Western world as we know it is plagued by the very maladies that current Africa faces, from the perspective of an adopted white French girl.
• The Left Hand of Darkness is a story where the cis male envoy of The Federation is sent to an alien world and his permanent maleness is a source of horror and disgust to the local Gethenians, who are biologically Gender Benders. He is a stereotypical "golden age sci-fi" protagonist with a very rigid and logical way of thinking, so he is left at a loss when the locals don't see the world the same way as him.
• Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood series is set in an alternate history world where African civilization and Islam became the dominant forces in world culture. The main story is set in an alternate American south, centering on a young (black) nobleman and his (Irish) freedman.
• In "Nontraditional Love", the world in the twenty-third century is dominated by homosexuals, and heterosexual relationships are forbidden. World history and historical literature have been altered to support that world's ideology.
• Both the book and stage version of Noughts & Crosses (black people are in power; white people are victims of discrimination).
• In Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story "The Other Foot", the population of Mars is entirely black. Because the planet was colonized within recent memory, adults have memories of segregation and lynchings, and when the news arrives that a rocket manned by whites is entering the atmosphere, a furious mob gathers, planning to institute Jim Crow laws in reverse. They are ultimately deterred when it's revealed that Earth has been bombed out after a nuclear war, and the story ends with the survivors settling on Mars and the hope of a new start for humanity.
• The original Planet of the Apes story is an even straighter example than the film, due to the apes having 20th century technology and attitudes. For example, the protagonists are initially hunted down by gorillas purely for sport, rather than to protect their crops.
• In Katherine Kerr's Polar City books, blancs (i.e., whites) are a lightly oppressed minority.
• Naomi Alderman's The Power is an exploration of what would happen if women suddenly became the more physically powerful gender (specifically, by gaining the power to shoot electricity from their fingers), and all the ensuing gender norms were upended by the shifted balance of power.
  • Alderman's central thesis is that patriarchy is rooted in the intersection of sexual dimorphism making the average man physically larger and more powerful than the average woman and most societies throughout history being organized on the principle of Asskicking Leads to Leadership, and that egalitarianism flourishes in societies where violence is not the basis of a leader's legitimacy. As such, the persecution of men at the hands of more powerful women is most pronounced in countries that were rife with violence (especially against women) beforehand, with India seeing female rape gangs attacking men in broad daylight and Moldova (a former hub of sex trafficking) subjecting men to what can only be described as "The Handmaid's Tale in reverse" and later exterminating 90% of them while keeping the remaining 10% as breeding stock.
  • In countries like the US and the UK that at least paid lip service to the principle of gender equality before the shift, the persecution is more subtle, as men see their legal rights and social status slowly undermined by casual sexism as they are pushed down to the status of what the feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir called "the second sex". The Framing Device, set in a place that resembles the modern world, shows a male writer (an Author Avatar for Alderman) making arguments that are recognizable as basic feminism, only to find himself belittled and sexually harassed by his female colleague, who dismisses his idea of a primitive world run by men as a silly novelty that she admits would be kinda hot.
  • Patriarchy refuses to go without a fight, and that fight ends with the world nuking itself back into the Stone Age. With the modern world wiped out but women still having their powers, matriarchy becomes the organizing principle of post-apocalyptic society just as patriarchy was that of Stone Age society. Civilization eventually rebuilds and a "masculinist" movement secures legal rights for men, allowing things to eventually progress to the status of modern-day sexism with the genders reversed.
  • It's also mentioned that, in the future, Africa and Europe have switched positions on the world stage, with Europe seen as a primitive backwater where male genital mutilation is still widely practiced. Given how modern civilization is portrayed as having ended with World War III, it's likely that the industrialized nations of Europe were some of the hardest hit, while Africa got off relatively lightly and had less trouble rebuilding.
• The Berlin of Proud Pink Sky is the world's first gay state – homosexuality is the norm, while opposite-sex relationships are (barely) tolerated.
• Save the Pearls: Revealing Eden is a controversial dystopian novel in which the white minority ("pearls") are oppressed by the black majority ("coals") after ozone depletion kills off people with low melanin. The pearls have to wear blackface in public. The author, by-the-by, is white.
• The Silerian Trilogy: The Valdani oppressed the Silerians for centuries while ruling Sileria, up to massacring entire villages. Once they withdraw, Valdani who remain behind there are then massacred in turn by Silerians.
• One Sheri S. Tepper novel, Six Moon Dance, is about a repressive matriarchal society. Tepper has a very feminist message in a lot of her work, so this is sort of like "examining demographics that would lead to men being oppressed in the same way as women".
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, after Daenerys frees the slaves of Astapor the council she leaves in charge is quickly overthrown by a former slave and butcher named Cleon, who takes the highborn boys to be trained as Unsullied-i.e. eunuch slave soldiers.
• In Kirill Moshkov's Special Expert, Legioner Tauk is sent to a Lost Colony, whose population is predominantly black, with the whites being treated as second-class citizens. Since Tauk is himself white, he has to pass himself off as a servant, while another agent, a black woman, can freely pass herself off as a member of the societal elite. She does explain to a local man that back on Earth, it is their people that used to be subservient to the whites. The man has a hard time believing it.
• Edgar Allan Poe's story The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather. It involves inmates taking over an aslyum which "coddled" them and treating their former doctors, now the inmates, in a Bedlam House way. It has the message if you treat those weaker than you with kindness, they'll just take advantage of you and then do worse. One interpretation of the story is that it's a metaphor for Poe's views of American blacks (which, considering that he was a proponent of slavery, isn't terribly implausible). The film Stonehearst Asylum was based on this story, and is far more sympathetic to the patients, given the kind of "treatments" used in 19th century insane asylums.
• In the original short story that named and inspired the To Serve Man trope, the Kanamit aliens are pig-like.
• In "When This World Is All On Fire", the trope is discussed when the Native American cop kicks the white refugees off the reservation. A woman asks him why he won't share the land; he responds, "We tried that, lady, and look where it got us."
• The Wheel of Time: Though societies throughout Randland are largely matriarchal, this is taken to the extreme in Altara, in which men are explicitly second-class citizens, and wives are legally allowed to murder their husbands. In fact, married women all wear ceremonial knives that they are supposed to use to "discipline" their husbands.
• Who Needs Men? has the white Christian men of the North struggling against an invading totalitarian Lady Land, the Republic of Anglia, in a genocidal Vietnam War-like conflict. The story is told mostly from the POV of an Anglian military officer, and also explores what it can mean to be sexually abnormal by showing the experiences of heterosexual women in a society where lesbianism is the norm.
• A Wild Last Boss Appeared!: Ruphas, despite being gorgeous by human standards, is considered horribly ugly by Flügels because they judge beauty by how close wings are to being pure white. When she was growing up the other children constantly threw rocks at her and her father would beat her if she fought back.
• In The Worldbreaker Saga by Kameron Hurley, the Dorinah Empire is a negatively-depicted Lady Land — a brutal matriarchal empire in which women rule and men are treated as chattel, homemakers and sex objects. (The setting also has unpleasant patriarchal states, and slightly more pleasant ones of both orientations.)
• Aliette de Bodard's "Xuya" Alternate History universe is based on the idea that the Chinese colonised the Americas from the West coast in the fifteenth century and then formed an alliance with the Aztecs against the Spanish. As a result by the twentieth century North America is divided between an independent Chinese-culture state called Xuya, a modern-Aztec-culture Mexica Empire, and a much smaller English-speaking nation centring on New England that is very much the poor underdog to the other two. A couple of stories depict white English-speakers in Xuya or Mexica in a manner that reflects this trope, although it definitely isn't the main focus of the series.
• The Years of Rice and Salt: The novel itself isn't really a conventional Persecution Flip, as white people aren't swapped with a minority, they're all but extinguished by The Black Death, so the novel has almost no white characters. But there are a few examples here and there. The few surviving whites are a curiosity, and it's mentioned a couple of times that white sex slaves are an exotic and prized commodity.

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