[…] a picture like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a horror film, for it deliberately, atmospherically and painfully puts horrors on show, even if they are credible horrors performed by humans.

What chance has the species homo superioris, of the poets and eugenists, of being born from racial stocks depleted mentally and physically by the environment of violence?

Shielded from China proper and the central government by mountains, Szechwan is a huge rice bowl whose population of seventy to eighty million makes it larger than all but nine countries in the world. When the Communists took Szechwan in 1950, they were determined to bind the province tightly to the rest of the nation. National leaders, despite objections from Szechwan, concentrated on doubling Szechwan grain. In achieving an agricultural surplus, Szechwan 's leaders won a reputation for astutely applying mechanical innovation, work incentives, and technical training. In the Cultural Revolution such pragmatism was denounced for neglecting politics and pursuing capitalist restoration.

There he became acquainted with maids in service to Ekaterina Alekseevna, Peter the Great's half-sister, and through them, he gained the tsarevna’s favor.