I admit it. I read the first four novels in the Mission Earth series before an older family member told me about the history of Scientology and what it was promoting. The thing was, I was 14 at the time and was really into the story, but stopped reading because my relative was so influential to my thinking.
My question is did any folks here start reading a book and realize either during or after that it was written by a shill hawking their crazy worldviews? Did you give up reading because you recognized the messages that didn’t agree with your personal philosophy? Did you keep on reading, underlying message be damned, because the story was so good?
Not exactly, but Enders Game and Hyperion were authored by people (Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons) whose political views I’ve since learned are completely repugnant–to the point of being downright evil in the former case, and dangerously paranoid and possibly evil in the latter case.
It’s weird too–both of those books I would have characterized as really relying on a strong sense of compassion for their effectiveness, but the authors’ expressed worldviews outside those works seem completely incompatible with an understanding of the role of compassion in decent human interaction.