So excuse the hell out of me for choosing badly when I picked other examples of famous people in entertainment. I choose ones that were disproportionately famous above him, mea culpa, mea culpa. My point is I didn’t drop into mmm’s 957 threads on “the most famous song starting with a schwa that were written on a Tuesday in 1983” to point out how many of the songs I hadn’t heard of, I just stayed out of those threads that obviously weren’t for me.
To the OP it would seem it is of note because Gaiman has some fame and success.
There’s an issue with defining Gaiman as a Fantasy writer; his oeuvre is much larger than that. He’s probably best known for The Sandman graphic novels and has authored many other comic books/graphic novels as well (Marvel 1602 and Eternals are both excellent). His fantasy novels such as American Gods, Stardust, Neverwhere, Anansi Boys and the collaboration on Good Omens are all very popular. I re-read The Ocean at the End of the Lane every year and it has a deep emotional impact for me. He has multiple short story/poetry collections, of which The Problem of Susan, a critique of the Narnia chronicles which were a formative influence on him, is a stand-out. He translated the English language script for Princess Mononoke. His YA and kids lit works have won many awards. Recently his Norse Mythology novel was a huge best-seller and he’s been devoting a lot of time to Executive Producing and Showrunning video adaptations of his works. So he crosses a lot of genre boundaries and has fan groups in many different camps. He also does a very good job of connecting with these fan bases.
You can correctly presume from all of the above that Neil is one of my favorite writers and I’ve read most of his canon and taken great pleasure from it. You can also correctly presume that if these allegations are accurate I will be absolutely gutted and much of that pleasure ripped away. Always hard to separate art from the artist, and in this case the artist has always portrayed himself as an ally to those suffering exactly this kind of predation.
I especially like How to Talk to Girls at Parties and especially hate the movie made from it.
Not to all of them. Of course, I am indulging in possibly outdated stereotypes about the usual science fiction base of young males, who seem like the last people to care very much about this sort of thing.
I knew this sentence would get taken up to the exclusion of the rest of my post; probably I should have left it out. I’m much more interested in this:
Note that the article that I linked in the OP is from the feminist website The Mary Sue, which at this moment has 641 articles mentioning Neil Gaiman.
The allegation in the OP was that he had sex with an employee, in one case, and that he penetrated a woman who asked him not to, in another case. There would be nothing inappropriate about sleeping around with lots of women; as you say he was long known for that.
Will also note that the OP suggested sex acts with underage females; both of these accusers were in their 20’s when the sexual relationships occurred. The questions revolve around consent and physical abuse, not age.
Which seems to not be a response to anything I asked or wrote, especially not to what you quoted. Perhaps you meant this comment for someone else?
No doubt those cretins exist but it remains a very broad category of people. Too broad, I think, to paint with one brush.
To be precise Gaiman really works entirely in fantasy, not science fiction. Which may seem like splitting hairs, but I’d say the fantasy side of speculative fiction has far more of a partially female fanbase than the sf side. And Gaiman in particular I’d say has a larger female fanbase than is typical. Works like the Sandman volumes and Coraline seemed more female-friendly than many.
The parallel might be drawn to Joss Whedon, who attracted a lot of female fans for Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, with their assorted strong female characters (we’ll just put Dollhouse to one side, but that came later). Of course then it came out Whedon started sleeping with some of those fans and some of his actors, cheating on his wife out of some urge to live out a sexually frustrated teen nerd’s fantasy of having sex with hot woman (literally as he has admitted to exactly this - also apparently he can be quite cruel behind the scenes in his writer’s room and occasionally on set). His feminist credentials were thus tarnished as being at least partially performative bullshit. Though to the best of my knowledge he was never accused of assaulting anyone, just of being a philandering dirtbag and general asshole.
I hope this isn’t true about Gaiman. I believe he had an open relationship with Amanda Palmer, so I don’t think he could have technically been cheating like Whedon. But assault is quite a ways worse and Gaiman has always seemed to me to be a bit squirrely and quietly egocentric. I could easily imagine a Louis C.K. moment where he “believed” he had consent, but really didn’t because he was being an oblivious dickhead. And nothing shocks me anymore, really.
Fantasy is a genre dominated by women, both as authors and fans. It’s been an amazing phenomenon, millions of fans, vast social media presences, and an almost complete annihilation of science fiction as the first thing people think of in f&sf. Sci-fi makes money by the carloads in movies and television, not so much in print. Some authors, like Gaiman, have an oeuvre that also appeals to male fans. I’d guess if the Mary Sue has 641 articles on him he also has a gigantic base of female fans. “The usual science fiction base of young males” probably exists in comic book and movie fandom, but is no longer any realistic depiction of print f&sf readers as a whole.
A term that definitely means someone hasn’t been paying attention to the Hugos lately.
I suspect he is best known by nerds older than your stereotype.
No, he is not as popular culture well known as King or Lucas. But up there. And in general well respected.
Right now the story is that over his many sexual partnerships and groupies two women are stating some combinations of feeling like they did not always enjoy the rough consensual sex and/or that there were at least single episodes of lack of consent, including penetration during a sexual episode that she claims she had stated she did not want that. Over a twenty year period.
Minimally he comes off as a skeevy dude who failed to pay attention to partners’ wants and instructions. Not quite a Cosby or a Weinstein. He still writes good stuff.
One way to deal with consent in a BDSM scenario is the use of pre-arranged safewords. Like I said, though, I don’t know what exactly he was into or how it usually played out.
Ah, yes, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
Several times in this thread posters have said that a lot of people in the U.S. or the world have no idea who a given writer is. You do realize that many people in the U.S. and the world hardly ever read books, don’t you? If you’re going to measure a writer’s fame, you have to limit yourself to someone who actually reads books regularly.
It’s never been entirely accurate for any form of science fiction or fantasy. Women and girls have always been there, both as readers and as authors – even when stereotypes caused some of the women to use male-sounding pen names.
While that’s true, it’s also true that there are plenty of people who read books regularly who never read F&SF. And that I’ve fairly often seen someone assume on this board that everyone has heard of something, in any field, that’s commonly known in their particular social circles but not known to many others on the board. I agree that Gaiman is famous – and I also agree that there are going to be a lot of people, including some who are avid readers (and/or watchers) in other areas, who have never heard of him.
This is the big point for me:
My impression was that he and his work had been discussed often enough here on the SDMB that I was surprised how many regular posters didn’t recognize him.
I’m familiar with a lot of his work, but I’m not aware of anything he’s written that’s not fantasy. Unless you’re referring to comic books and young adult as separate genres from fantasy, but all of his comic book and young adult works I can think of are fantasy, too.
As for folks not knowing who he is, the preview box of the link in the OP refers to him as an author, and the two quoted comments tell us that he frequented conventions, and that one of his works was Sandman. If someone wasn’t familiar with him, that should be at least enough to get them started.