(One thing about DW that's tempting to me ... longer comment limits!)
I think deciding on a change like this because it's a "whee! cool!" concept is a legitimate choice, as legitimate as an in-depth, detailed, well researched handling of the issue.
I'd totally agree with you if it was something without the huge amount of cultural and historical baggage associated with it, because I am very prone to the "whee! cool!" reaction myself. (F'r example, any combination of dinosaurs + mammoths + dirigibles + magic + modern world is pretty much guaranteed to get a *\o/* reaction from me. Under different circumstances I'd be thrilled to read a book like this.) But considering that we do live in the real world, I don't think it's that easy to tease apart the real-world milieu in which the book is written from the fictional tropes of the book. Whether we like it or not, a book in which a plague killed off all the white people (like Bear's "Carnival") has a totally different import than a book in which a plague killed off all the black people (like Sewer Gas Electric, to name one). It'd be like, say, playing the Cambodian Killing Fields massacres for laughs; oh sure, you *can*, but just because you can doesn't mean you should, because there are a lot of living human beings for whom it would be one more hurt on top of many. This, I think, falls into that category -- it wouldn't be that much of an insult by itself, if it weren't falling on top of a virtually infinite line of similar insults and worse.
Part Deux!
I think deciding on a change like this because it's a "whee! cool!" concept is a legitimate choice, as legitimate as an in-depth, detailed, well researched handling of the issue.
I'd totally agree with you if it was something without the huge amount of cultural and historical baggage associated with it, because I am very prone to the "whee! cool!" reaction myself. (F'r example, any combination of dinosaurs + mammoths + dirigibles + magic + modern world is pretty much guaranteed to get a *\o/* reaction from me. Under different circumstances I'd be thrilled to read a book like this.) But considering that we do live in the real world, I don't think it's that easy to tease apart the real-world milieu in which the book is written from the fictional tropes of the book. Whether we like it or not, a book in which a plague killed off all the white people (like Bear's "Carnival") has a totally different import than a book in which a plague killed off all the black people (like Sewer Gas Electric, to name one). It'd be like, say, playing the Cambodian Killing Fields massacres for laughs; oh sure, you *can*, but just because you can doesn't mean you should, because there are a lot of living human beings for whom it would be one more hurt on top of many. This, I think, falls into that category -- it wouldn't be that much of an insult by itself, if it weren't falling on top of a virtually infinite line of similar insults and worse.