I have a slightly different (complimentary?) take on it.
something called the sexual revolution, relatively little talked-about nowadays, happened. the sexual customs and attitudes of the west changed and, previously forbidden things got talked about, presented and done. this ranged from nudity to multiple partners to gay relationships to teenagers having sex with people in their thirties or older. the plots of the movies The Graduatet and Harold and Maude have to do with young men getting involved with older women. (in the case of Harold and Maude, one of my all-time favorite movies, a teenager with a woman in her seventies.) I remember seeing some photos from a 1970s sf convention. it had among other things, women at a costume contest walking around with bare breasts. people just did not care. they didn’t care.
flash-forward to now: certain aspects of that era have gone from possibly okay to definitely okay. others have gone from possibly okay to definitely not never okay.
human psychology works, particularly in reference to looking back at your own past, in a lot of ways like Schrodinger’s cat, where observing the event freezes the ambiguity of an event into a definite Dead or Alive state. the culture of the present dictates a lot of how we look at our own pasts.and like they say, the winners write the history books. I think that the winners write our own internal mental histories as well, if we allow them to do so.
Many years ago, I boycotted my college graduation because Asimov was the speaker. I was a full-of-myself teenager and had corresponded with the man because I’d found a logical error in something he had written and when he refused to admit even the possibility of being in error, I dismissed him as an asshole. I’m a lot older and at least somewhat wiser now, but I still think I was right and he was not. Anyway, some years ago I was telling my business partner this story, and decided to search for any stories about his commencement speech, etc. and I ran across this article. Note that any references to “I” in the italicized quote refers to the author of that article, not me.
“In the late 1970s I thoroughly enjoyed a commencement speech Asimov gave at Ramapo College. He spoke of the enormous creativity and curiosity of the young child, creativity and curiosity which are usually lost in the process of schooling. Ramapo’s strait-laced academic vice president, a former seminarian, was pleased to meet this popularizer of science and science fiction. Afterwards, he commented that during the processional and the ceremonies the speaker kept propositioning the good-looking valedictorian in her early 20s – less than half his age. The administrator, who is now back to teaching philosophy, wondered aloud if the secret of Asimov’s literary profusion was an uncensored quality which allowed him to let it “all out.” I thought there might be some merit in this suggestion; certainly, Asimov wrote so quickly that he had little time to censor his own thoughts or words. I also wondered if the vice president was as “straight-laced” as I had imagined.” [Source: Clio’s Psyche 4-1 June 1997 (PDF)].
I don’t read SciFi for fine writing or the literary creation of new human beings, I read it for the imagination and sense of wonder. (The only genuinely memorable character in SciFi is Marvin.) WBYeats was a great and wonderful poet, and he believed in eugenics. If he could have such a great insight into the human minds of the rest of us, but none into his own, what hope is there for the humble purveyor of speculative fiction? (Ah, what other sort is there)
What complete nonsense. For folks who aren’t familiar with Chambers, she writes works with deep sociological underpinnings, societies much more plausible and well-imagined than anything Asimov ever dreamt of, and has had 2 of her 3 novels nominated for Hugos.
I’m writing a history of science fiction that requiring me to read about the lives of almost all the participants in the small world that sf was in the Campbellian Golden Age.
They lived in a different world than we do, and their actions and beliefs seldom match ours. I’ve come to believe that the only reason I haven’t found a reason to cast all of them to perdition is that not enough has been publicly written about the behavior of some.
It’s interesting that so many people here seem to be just learning this about Asimov. Insiders have known about this forever. Asimov’s behavior at conventions, which contribute most of the anecdotes, occurred when the Worldcon, the largest annual sf convention, drew fewer than 500 attendees. Regional conventions were much smaller. The same faces were seen over and over, much like an extended family. The same code that applies to bad behaviors within families apparently was standard in this small world of fandom and writers, a hugely overlapping grouping.
When Worldcons got bigger - they hit 1500 in 1967 and then doubled and tripled - the big-name authors could no longer mingle as equals. They hid away from their adulators and mixed with other authors except when on public display. At about the same time, Asimov married Janet Jeppson and from all I’ve heard, his bad behavior toward other women drastically declined. Does that mitigate what he had done for the previous two decades? Not for me to say, but it’s fascinating from a biographer/historian’s perspective.
The issue of how to reconcile enjoyment of the works of creative artists with their personal behaviors and beliefs is an individual one and need not be applied evenly or even rationally to all. But. I am more and more firmly convinced that every single one of us is flawed. I have no idea how to reconcile this with the thousands of works of art I’ve enjoyed over the years.
Treat Asimov any way you please. His sins are well documented. Maybe though, just maybe, pause a moment before you move on to the next author and wonder if documentation is the only difference between them.
I mean, maybe? I’d be interested in hearing of how terrible Le Guin or James Tiptree, Jr. acted toward fans. I could be wrong, but “irascibility” seems to be the worst either of them has been accused of. They’re of a slightly later era AFAIK, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the salient difference.
I did my college work during my junior and senior years of high school. Long story, not relevant here.
[Not sure this post will survive - Chrome is reporting an expired SSL certificate for the SDMB and it looks like I’m posting this in the middle of a vBulletin upgrade or something.]
BTW, after a gigantic controversy about Tiptree murder/suicide of her ailing husband, the Tiptree Award had to be renamed. Here’s an earlier statement from the committee about it. That was in September. In October, it was renamed the Otherwise Award.
Nobody is flawless.
Well, maybe Ursula. But I only spent a week in her company so I’m not the best judge.
I have to agree with Darren Garrison. Becky Chambers’ books make me think of Barney the Purple Dinosaur in space.
I forced myself to read one and a half of her books (the first and half of the third book of the series) before I gave up.
There’s nothing original in her work. It’s only reworking of standard SF tropes along with a highly idealized version of present-day American society. And there are syrupy Little Moral Lessons to be learned. What fun! The average TV show for kids has deeper ‘sociological underpinnings’, and societies more ‘plausible and well-imagined’ than those of Becky Chambers. And better characters.
In her universe, 95% of all the sentient creatures in the galaxy have the same opinions, feelings, thoughts, and ways of speaking as woke, 20-something, early-21st-century, Californian progressive suburbanites. The other 5% are bad guys.
Now, I have nothing against comfort reading, or young-adult stories, or warm, wholesome, politically-correct light family novels… but the Hugo Awards? Please! It’s as though a candyfloss stall, producing only extra-sweet brightly-colored candyfloss, was nominated for a Michelin star.
See this thread, starting with post #62. I respect science fiction written by people that have at least a basic grasp of science, not Sweet Valley High-level “people having feels in space.”
That’s spiffy keen. Given her interest in xenobiology and sociology, the issue lies with you, not her. And her ability to write characters with complex emotions is, for most readers, a feature and not a bug–although your inclination to see it otherwise does explain your appreciation for Asimov!
I read the first and the second, and your analysis is spot-on. The first one has a main character that is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl–unironicly! That is almost as unforgivable as the perpetual motion machines in the second book.
Well, that is certainly an opinion, I have to give you that.
It is not, however, an opinion about Asimov, and I’m realizing that I’m enabling this hijack. If you’d like to discuss what you’re missing in Chambers that so many other people are getting, or why Chambers has skyrocketed to the top of the field in the past few years, or why two of her books have been nominated for Hugos, I’d be happy to join an appropriate Cafe Society thread on her works.
Neither do I. However, in the real world our opinions are not what rule.
For that matter, you or I may have opinions on which flaws should be treated more seriously than other flaws and I doubt that we will agree across the board.
And that is exactly my point. There are so many ways that humans can be flawed and so many groups who consider some particular flaw the most egregious that singling one out and declaring the others moot is fraught.
Contrarily, concentrating on that one fault and dismissing every other aspect of a person’s life is oppressive. Nobody can live up to that standard and the seemingly inevitable devastation that follows when the fault comes to light throws the long and complicated lives of people into total imbalance.
There is no solution. We live in a period in which groups who could not in the past make their voices heard are finally speaking very loudly and publicly. The pendulum always swings to extremes. If you don’t like this period, too bad. It’s going to go on for a while.