“You have no idea how it spoiled things to me when I couldn’t managed to forget that the young women might be edging away.”
“Couldn’t managed”? Can I assume this isn’t a direct Asimov quote?
Asimov quote - mistyped by me…
Link to excerpt from the original place that Asimov piece was published Nebula Awards: SFWA's Choices for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 1987 - Google Books - doesn’t have my typo…
Hahahhaha, you actually linked to an Amazon comment page? Which one is your comment, Darren, is it the very angry SJW one?
I’ve no opinion on Chambers one way or the other, but the idea that if someone doesn’t like a particular work of art, there must be something wrong with them, is terribly toxic.
Tbh, I don’t really see anything “extreme” about the attitude that sexually assaulting and harassing nonconsenting people is bad, that the assaulters/harassers of yesteryear were doing something wrong even though they got away with it, and that it’s okay to criticize the assaulter/harassers of yesteryear, as well as the assaulters/harassers of today, for their bad behavior.
It’s possible that the “Me Too”/“Time’s Up” etc. movements may eventually morph into counterproductive extremism. But merely calling out asshole behavior and denouncing those who commit it, even “very loudly and publicly”, is fine.
That’s not at all what I’m saying, though. It’s the reasons offered for the dislike that are revealing, in much the same way that people who dislike the new Star Wars trilogy because it features a female protagonist reveal a lot more about themselves than a simple dislike for the series does.
I’m good with this one. And this one. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. (And not on Amazon, but I reiterate that this hits the nail straight on the head.)
How you managed to read something negative about “Me Too”/“Time’s Up” into my comment is beyond me. The pendulum swinging is overall a good thing. But of course there has also been some counterproductive extremism. Humans are involved, after all.
Sure. However, is there any indication her spouse wanted to be killed? The only information that he wanted to die comes from her.
I think she was commenting on the OP, which I appreciated.
While Asimov’s behavior may have been well known among authors and con-goers, I was not in his circle or old enough to go to cons. Happy Birthday, Mr. Asimov. You were a cad.
I’m not seeing anything in the criticisms of Chambers here that lends itself to that comparison.
Like what, exactly? I mean, I’ve seen a few individual “Me Too”-type accusations that I thought were misplaced or unjustified. But that’s what I’d expect to see for any reasonable, non-extremist social condemnation of bad behavior: occasionally, some individuals’ behavior is going to be unfairly misidentified as bad. That’s not “extremism”, that’s just normal human error.
If our criterion for avoiding “counterproductive extremism” is that no well-meaning person ever gets mistakenly accused of bad behavior, then I think the problem is in fact counterproductive timidity and defensiveness rather than “extremism”.
:shrug. Okay. I do. I don’t want to stay on a Chambers focus here, though; I only brought her up as a handful of modern authors who can write circles around Asimov, and Darren got his sneer on about her. If someone really wants a Chambers discussion, I’m happy to oblige over in Cafe Society.
I’m just saying that if you read a book by one of the Past (or Pastish) Giants like Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke etc. you can really tell that they are well educated in the physical sciences and math and were passionate about getting details right as long as they didn’t mess with the impossibilities needed for the story. If you read Becky Chambers, you can really tell that she watched lots of broadcast network SF in the 1900s-2000s. There is no depth to her writing in any field, hard science or social. I can think of many, many modern authors that can write circles around Asimov (I take no issue with your other mentions) but Becky Chambers couldn’t write circles around a 1990s MySpace Friends fan-fiction page. And that isn’t misogyny, it isn’t anti-LGBT, it isn’t anti-progressive, it is pure old fashioned intellectual snobbery.
(Sorry for the hijack, Sunny–I haven’t commented on it because I’m one of the ones for whom it was really old news. But I’ve never been one to idolize content creators instead of their creation.)
It’s easy for insiders to know this side of the man, but if they don’t write about it or call him on it, how does the average sf reader know about it? You obviously know the area better than most, so if it’s well-documented, so be it. But oddly, there has been nothing in the Wikipedia article on Asimov until just recently. From the talk page, there seems to have been reluctance to include it in the wiki article, which sounds like a conspiracy of silence approach by the sf community.
The renaming of the James Tiptree Award was an extreme reaction, for one. The resignation of the entire board of the Romance Writers of America, followed this week by the resignation of the new president and executive director, and the possible blow-up of a 9000 person organization occurred because a member of their Board of Ethics took offense to being told she couldn’t call another member the author of a racist book.
That’s two major overturnings of well-meaning literary-related groups in the past couple of months. If you don’t believe that the larger society is seeing 100 of these every week, I have to politely tell you that your opinions on the subject aren’t worth much.
I an NOT saying that there were not legitimate gripes, although it must also be said that the responses also seem legitimate. My point is that both of these particular cases could have been handled much better by both sides.
I have absolutely no knowledge of whatever is going on at Wikipedia. However, in general, from my half century of experience inside sf, I’d laugh at the notion that the sf community has a conspiracy of silence about anything, or that the sf community is even possible of being silent about anything. I would say instead, loudly, that the sf community has never been listened to for one second about anything ever. If the mainstream world is just finding out about Asimov it ain’t none of our doing.
Can you point me to published accounts of Asimov’s behaviour, then, by members of the sf community?
This is a vast over-simplification of the situation with RWA. The issues there have been festering for years. Forcing out part of the Board, creating an off-books ethics process, appointing a new president who invented at least one of the books on his CV and did not meet the criteria for office, all of these things were factors.
Yes, Foundation is mainly male characters, but that’s balanced by Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation, where the key characters are both women. if I remember the laundry system correctly, it was an illustration of how efficient the industries of Terminus and the First Foundation had become, compared to the huge inefficient systems of the Empire, a point repeated more grandly in the first half of Foundation and Empire. One of the principles of the Sheldon plan was that the First Foundationwas the technical pole, which waouldcdevelopmtechnologies that far surpassed the declining Empire. The laundry was simply one example of the first Foundationbsucceeding.
The Stars, Like Dust. True, the McGuffin is pretty silly (product of the early Cold War and the beginning of the US role as a superpower, I always thought), but the rest of the book actually hangs together without the McGuffin (it was the US Constitution, by the way, not the Declaration of Independence). However, Asimov would agree with you on this one. In A Memory Yet Green, he says it was his least favorite novel. Blamed the McGuffin on advice by his editor, who suggested the sub-plot. Youthful inexperience: he was 31 and it was one of his first novels.
A tremendous hack who managed to write what was considered by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best sf trilogy of all time (Foundation), and the best sf novella/ short story of all time (Nightfall). I should be such a hack.