this references an anecdote mentioned in the introduction to one of the stories in the Hugo Winners anthologies. according to the anecdote, he did that once, as a sort of gag at the expense of Harlan Ellison. I can’t remember if he prearranged it with the woman. saying that because the above implied he did that as a regular thing.
some or all of them might look just as bad from a vantage point of the late 21st century as Asimov does today. we just don’t know. Jemsin’s statement of “kiss my black ass” already looks bad to me.
we don’t even really know about him. what do we actually know about him other thirdhand via books and documentaries? I wouldn’t call anyone an “asshole” or a “creep”, though. I call them flawed human beings, some more than others.
I think you can fairly say that when you spend a lot of time alone writing, you get rusty with dealing with people.
No dispute with any of this. That’s the way the world works. Editors like getting submissions that they know are going to meet standards, by authors with good track records.
My wife writes non-fiction. She submits on time, with good quality, and gets good reviews. The publisher offered her her last couple of books, and two more under contract. I’ve had a column for 23 years. Some are good, some not so good, but I always meet the deadline.
I’ve been in enough critique groups to know that not every novice writer is as good as they think they are. My wife judges a writing contest where she gets boxes of books, many self-published. A lot of those are crap - you can tell from the first five pages.
Asimov in particular had many of these middling works voted as the best of all time by fans.
I assume they have on now, but Asimov, while alive, never had an agent. He could sell fine without paying anyone a fee. Perhaps he had one for dealing with Hollywood, I don’t know about that.
Hate to tell you, but even censoring works by those with low moral character is not going to get an incompetent writer published. Magazines have queues of accepted works - if a good story didn’t make it into this issue it might make it into the next one.
Egregious nitpicking: Asimov did have an agent for a short period - Fred Pohl.
Ah, the stereotype: writer sits in isolation all day, involved with the characters in his head instead of the very real people going about Real Life. It’s BS, frankly. Steven King, who writes assiduously and has been happily married for decades) used to tour with a band (Rock Bottom Remainders) made up of other writers, including Amy Tan. E.B. White wrote in his living room with people coming and going. F. Scott Fitzgerald had to cut down on partying in order to write. William Faulkner hung out with his friends from boyhood. Jonathan Irving and Kurt Vonnegut, like many writers, taught during the day. Tom Clancy wrote his first novel while working at an insurance agency.
And since writing doesn’t pay well unless you’ve written bestsellers, the vast majority of writers have day jobs.
Writing doesn’t warp people. Sometimes warped people become writers.
Ah yes, the “Sure people like Asimov enjoy a privileged position, and sure other people have more hurdles because they’re not Asimov or some similarly well-known artist. But just keep on trying and you’ll make it over those hurdles!” line.
Even if I grant that that is true, how do you justify letting the likes of Asimov (oh, and since iguanas.com mentioned it, Harlan Ellison, too) persistently rise to the top of a flooded market if they edge out even a single rising author who is NOT a serial sexual assaulter? How do you justify devoting any space at all to these men when there is even one author who is NOT, as you lampoon “incompetent,” but has written good work—work good enough to be published if it had Asimov’s name on it—but doesn’t make it out of the slush pile that month, that week, that quarter, or that year because the market is flooded with people who would happily see their work published for free, but somehow editors and publishers keep pushing the works of known abusers?
What I am proposing is this: you, the consumer, don’t have to shop Asimov’s catalogue. So don’t. Stop creating a demand for his work. Hopefully editors, agents, and publishers will figure it out if enough people refuse to buy what they are selling. If you think his work is irreplaceable, then you have my sympathy: I think you’re missing out.
If we are going to be banning works by morally dubious characters, then lets start with the ancient Greeks, half of whom were pederasts. Aeschines most famous oration can be summarised as Look, I’ll admit I have had my share of bum boys, haven’t we all? But Timarchus is a dirty-whatever-the-346BC-equivalent-term- for “fag” is
Really, truly, I think there was at least one good line in The Last Jedi: let the past die, kill it if you have to.
Not to godwinize this thread, but this argument recalls, in my mind, the final scene in American History X. The flashback around the dinner table where a young Ed Norton’s character and his then-still-living dad are talking about these “new” books that he’s reading in school. The implication (from the father) that the “classic” authors he would have read in school were somehow intrinsically better, that they had edged out other voices because of the quality of the work and nothing more, and that by extension any revision to the curriculum that would tend to broaden the repertoire of represented authors in the interests of diversity or inclusivity must therefore be at the expense of great authors being replaced by “lesser” authors who didn’t make the cut because their works just didn’t pass muster.
I beg to differ, and I welcome reevaluating both authors and their works to assess whether or not those once lauded as being worthy of our approbation and inclusion on our list of “must reads” should necessarily remain so.
Obviously, I am casting a down vote for Asimov, Ellison, and anyone like them.
Asimov the claustophile DID say he spent most of his life in a closet with a typewriter. That was after he quit the day jobs (teaching, and that WWII work).
I read all the Asimov I could when I was young oh so long ago. Haven’t touched him in many decades. I can’t recall a word, only a few images and themes. Well, I know the Three Laws of Robotics; they’re fun to twist and parody. But his writing didn’t influence me to try sexual assault and I missed out on swingers’ parties.
So I’ll express disappointment that he turned out to be a jerk. But IMHO his writings shouldn’t be purged. Yes, if jerks were banned, little art and writing would remain.
Do eeeet.
At the expense of Harlan Ellison?! Did Harlan get his boob grabbed? I’m going to have to re-read that article.
Why do so many people equate approval of an artist or authors work, with approval of his proclivities.
Has anyone actually called for his writings to be purged? There’s a lot of ground in between ‘lets celebrate this guy and continue the image he liked to project of being a geek who liked an occasional dirty joke’ and ‘let us remove any mention of him or his works forever’. Acting like any criticism of an author is a call for 1984-style erasure is a bit silly.
I believe you posted in the wrong thread.
Asimov is important, yeah. But have you read his stuff as an adult? His Robot series did a lot for me as a teenager. But I revisited some of his works in my early 20s and was appalled.
His characters were barely one-dimensional. His plots are ludicrous. In Foundation, there are like three female characters, who have less than three pages of the book, and less than five lines of dialogue (one of which is something about how the future will bring marvels like “nuclear laundries,” which through the power of the split atom will be able to fit inside a closet). One of his novels features a far-future society ruled by a despot, and someone is seeking plans to a superweapon from earth’s past that can bring down despots. They finally find and open the plans, and the last sentence of the book is the beginning of the plans: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”
The dude was an atrocious hack.
Regarding the New Wave of science fiction, which brought women and authors of color into a field previously monopolized by white dudes, he said:
Fortunately, the New Wave didn’t recede, it fundamentally reshaped the landscape. For all iguana.com’s baseless speculation about how future nerds will regard Jemesin’s defiant comment about her black ass as equivalent to sexual assault, I think we should all be tremendously grateful that Asimov was no better at predicting science fiction’s future than he was at predicting laundry technology.
Darn.
I can’t easily separate the artist from the art. If I find a particular singer/songwriter is a total jerk to their fans or family, I tend to avoid their music even if I really like it.
I have many of Asimov’s science essays on my book shelves.
It’s a bit of a surprise, but fits in with a “full of himself” vibe I noticed in many of the brief stories he used to introduce his science essays.
Ugh, the way that quote just… almost achieves self-awareness… and then pauses on the brink and goes, “Nah.”
It was fairly obvious and sickening throughout Foundation that his attitudes toward women were appalling. The Mule alone should give any woman pause if she considered dating him.
There are people whose personal lives are so abhorrent to me that I simply don’t wish to participate in anything they have created. I wouldn’t socialize with them, or permit them in my home under any circumstances. That is because I don’t wish to hear anything they might have to say. This extends to their creative work.
I read Foundation as a teenager in the late 1980’s. It was clear to me that it dripped with the attitudes we were then working so hard to be shed of. And while there were some ideas there which I found interesting, I wouldn’t recommend it to my daughter. I think she’d find it disgusting.
The robot work, hmmmm. Maybe. I think I’d be much happier if I could find another author who has explored the topic though.
The trouble is, there is a disturbing human tendency to assume that all those who are famous are good, and to then use their bad actions to excuse current bad actions. Even the most carefully complete history books will tend to be edited, re-edited and abridged, to the point that only the “important” positives will remain. Then when the negatives are re-discovered it’s a crap-shoot as to whether the historical figure will be de-valued, or the behavior excused.
I would add Jimmy Carter to that list, but don’t get me started on “Mother Theresa.”
Your point about financial benefit is an important one to me. If I can view the work through network TV, for instance, or some other means which doesn’t directly benefit, I may indulge my curiosity. More and more though, I find this to be a waste of time. It seldom occurs that the artist has not come through in the work.
Yet somehow Asimov found time to marry, have children (Quite impossible to do back then if alone in a small space), divorce, remarry, attend regular meetings of the Baker Street Irregulars, lecture at numerous sci-fi conventions and happily sign autographs afterward, regularly attend the Trap Door Spiders banquet/drinking sessions, attend Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and enjoy a long friendship with Kurt Vonnegut, among others.
I’m not arguing Asimov was just a regular guy, just that writers are not, as has previously been asserted here, warped into asocial paralysis by a hermetic existence.
The Foundation series and the Robot stories were published in the mid-40s very early '50s. Do you have evidence that Asimov was behaving badly back then? Do you have evidence that Campbell knew he was behaving badly if he did. Not to mention that some things considered assault today were not then. That’s not excusing it, but you seem to want Campbell to enforce morality that came in 30 years after his death.
As I said, if Asimov’s name on the cover sells 10% more issues of a magazine, do you have a problem with an editor accepting a good if not great story from him? As I also said, the first story that is put in the slush pile has to be better than a story from a know pro to be accepted.
People who want their work published for free get their work published for free these days. With rare exceptions, hardly anyone reads it.
Where would you draw the line on excluding people. Do you not accept work from them (to late in Asimov’s case.) Do you make their backlist disappear down the memory hole?
You’re also calling editors idiots. If a piece is good, then some editor will buy it some time. Nothing Asimov wrote (after the really terrible early pieces at the beginning of the Early Asimov) was incompetent. Try to read self-published stuff some time. There are occasional diamonds in the manure pile, but they are rare.
I have all of his stuff I care to own in my collection already. Be my guest, don’t buy his work, but that hurts his kids, not him.