I don’t know when I first started reading science fiction, but it must’ve been no older than seven or eight years old, going to the library on friday evenings with my mum and browsing the children’s bookshelves (that is until, inevitably and like so many others, I’d read everything in them and went on to the adult stacks). The first books I can remember reading were by Isaac Asimov: Buy Jupiter, I, Robot and a bit later the Foundation trilogy. One of the first books I bought for myself was The End of Eternity. I read everything of Asimov I could get my hands on and thanks to his writer, got to discover Clarke and Heinlein and Bradbury and all those other sf writers I’ve read since.
One of the things that made his collections so great was how chatty he was in them, writing introductions to each story, talking about how his life was going at that time, how he got to write those stories etc. From those, especially those in his later books, I slowly got the impression he was a bit of, as he would also call himself, a dirty old man, a lecher, somebody who had an eye for the women, all those other things we’d used to call men who were a bit dodgy regarding women, a bit too randy but harmless, and really, what’s the harm in being hold down by two strangers so dear old Isaac can grab your breasts?
Now of course you always hear that you shouldn’t judge the work by the person, but the more I hear about how much of a serial harasser Asimov was, the less comfortable I become keeping his books on my shelves. Fortunately for me I can justify it for myself because a) he’s dead and b) every one of those had been bought secondhand, so it’s not like I’ve been directly given money to a harasser…
A more difficult example is Elizabeth Moon, who back in 2010 said dumb, xenophobic things about Muslims. Which was one of those things I didn’t pay a lot of attention about at the time, but since then I’ve been reading a lot of Elizabeth Moon and it worries me now. Partially because, you know, I’d rather not give money to wingnuts if I can avoid it but also because that sort of politics has a tendency to bleed into a writer’s novels. Case in point: Dan Simmons.
Luckily again, Moon seems to have behaved since that outburst and so far her politics, as far as they appear in her novels may be on the conservative side, but nowhere near wingnut territory. Therefore I can justify keeping her books, which is a good thing, as I like them. unlike say Orson Scott Card, who has awful politics and who doesn’t write books anymore I like anyway. For the most part I’ve been lucky that the writers I like aren’t arseholes and those that are I don’t like.
