At least you’re now admitting that those posts were bullshit.
According to Wikipedia, FWIW (Marion Zimmer Bradley - Wikipedia):
In response to these allegations, Victor Gollancz Ltd, the publisher of Bradley’s digital backlist, announced that it will donate all income from the sales of Bradley’s e-books to the charity Save the Children.
Can they DO that?
Two follow-up questions:
(1) With the current information you have, do you believe it is more accurate to describe Breem as a “pedophile” or “ephebophile”? Do you believe it is more accurate to call his crimes, overall, “pedophilia” or “ebebophilia”?
(2) Why DID you bring it up in the first place? If you’d left off one parenthetical remark in post #112, you would have saved yourself, and me, and the hamsters, an enormous amount of grief…
Starting to regret charging in on that white horse?
(3) My OP clearly states 3 year olds in the last line. You said on multiple occasions that you read my OP and were sick of everyone assuming you hadn’t read that. How do you reconcile that with your shiny brand-new stance that: oops, you read the OP but didn’t click on the links because you thought you knew it all and besides the stuff about the three year old wasn’t clear enough, despite it being the final line.
You’d think so but Broomstick apparently had even more to say.
Presumably, they mean the profits they keep as the publisher, and not the profits that go to whoever is in charge of Bradley’s estate.
In my defense, I am tired.
And also stupid.
Duh.
No, I’m not. However, since I am unable to provide physical evidence for something that happened 30+ years ago I can certainly understand why some people doubt the attempted rape claim.
Why people doubt I was sexually harassed in my work place is baffling, but then, question/blame the victim is nothing new.
Since I think those terms describe people whose primary sexual focus is in those categories and it now seems the Breen was less discriminatory I’m wondering if there is better term for someone who rapes and molests anyone who can’t move faster than he can.
I didn’t think it would result in that level of shit storm. It wasn’t like I planned for an eruption followed by a dogpile.
You don’t say! why, who would ever do such a thing :rolleyes:
This is not Breen. It’s abundantly clear Breen liked young children over everything else. Paedophile fits just fine.
Ok, I’ll go with your assessment then, Mr. Dibble.
Interesting that you’ve conveniently forgotten the biggest thing people point at when calling your stories into question, the super-hero level of strength you showed as a child when you “broke” that guy’s femur.
No it sure isn’t.
Because between posts 1 and 92 your story changed drastically in tone and details. In post one, a guy made a very slightly creepy pass at you. By post 92 it turned into a LIFETIME movie of the week about sexual harassment and a mustache-twirling villain right out of “The Perils of Pauline”*. And you were a complete bitch to most of your supporters in that thread.
You also complain how “Of course, I now expect I will be told my story doesn’t hold water and I’ll be berated for not giving all the details from the get-go or accused of changing my story because, you know, the woman is always wrong.”
Perhaps if a man (or better, a male relative like, oh, hypothetically, a brother, perhaps) could verify one of your claims, we’d have taken it as more likely to be accurate.
*Yes, I know that movie isn’t “The Perils of Pauline”. But it should be. 
Hi all,
I know this thread is a little old now, but I discovered this horrific truth just few days ago and I was in search of a place to share my feelings and elaborate my reactions.
I’ve always thought that art should be completely separated from their authors and appreciated for its own value.
This for me was a solid principle, even though it never happened to me to be able to put it to the test.
So… this is the story of how the test went.
First of all let me say that till a few days ago I had never read anything by MZB, nor known anything about her, apart that she was a must-read for any fantasy reader.
Just 4 days ago, I picked up “The Fall of Atlantis” and I started to read it with no knowledge of MZB’s life, works and the monster she was…
Then, after reading say 20% of the book, I became curious about her background. This was triggered by the fact that I vaguely remembered she was seen as a feminist, but since the start of the book, it struck me for its poor depiction of women.
All of them appear to be impossibly beautiful and oh-so-sensitive and apparently manipulable. Everything about them revolves around fertility and pregnancy, every sacred rite that involves them entails nudity.
It’s all about women and reproduction, women and restrictive laws about their sexual behavior, women and sacred sexual rites, women and the blood and the mistery of pregnancy.
I always feel disturbed when women are treated like this. Being a woman is not about pregnancy and to be considered “sacred” because of maternity is a really really poor thing in exchange of being only secondarily considered as a person.
In the book, also, right from the start there is this tension between the mature Riveda that tries to seduce the adolescent Deoris.
To be honest reading the book I was already perceiving a bad vibe.
And that’s why I searched for MZB’s background… and discovered the unimaginable horror behind it.
Then what? Then I went on reading because I was overwhelmed and stunned by this discovery and I wanted to see if my early sensations about the book were going to change or be affected someway. In other words I wanted to understand if it was possibile to read the book in spite of its author, even though I already had sensed something in it that made me uneasy.
So I went on reading… (contains spoilers necessary to explain my perspective).
In time Riveda comes to completely control Deoris’ mind, he couples with her, he uses her in a dark rite to impregnate her.
Another young girl, Demira, is raped by her father in order to get her pregnant of “a superior being”. More than that, Riveda clearly states that the girl was programmed and procreated in virtue of the future plan to rape her, committing incest to get her pregnant.
The description and behavior of the two sisters that should be the focus of the narration (Deoris-Domaris), appear to me as the portraying of suffering puppets at the mercy of external wills. They traverse their own sorrows without understanding each other, divided by the very forces that control their programming. There’s something subtly wrong in these portraits, like there’s self-indulgence in describing how these tender, beautiful, innocent hearts are chained to other’s will. It goes like “she is so young and beautiful, she suffers and yet she is so beautiful… and then she bends to the overpowering will”. This is so insisted that smells… wrong.
I should be clear that I’ve not yet finished the book at this point, but I cannot help but think that Riveda is the author’s channel for her abominable obsessions, no matter how much consolatory the ending will turn to be.
It seems to reveal all the obsession to control the young and the innocent ones, to abuse them, to play on their own weaknesses and lack of experience. To derive joy from having control over them, from owning “things of beauty”, young and malleable, from inflicting them sufferings.
I can feel in this book the cruelty that Moira describes in her mother so much that it is creepy.
For example I totally cringed reading the dialog in which Riveda tells that Demira was procreated and raised only in virtue of the future plan to rape her - his own daughter - and get her pregnant.
I could not help but think… a cruel woman meets an acknowledged pedophile, marries him and has children with him.
But why in all the world should a woman desire to have children with an aknowledged child abuser? It could have been understandable only if she was truly convinced of his innocence or inner change.
Then you discover she knew so well otherwise, and took active part in those abominable crimes and they even abused their own children (along with others), so in retrospective how can you doubt it was planned right from the start?
How can you doubt Riveda is voicing something too disgustingly close to MZB’s real deeds or thoughts?
So here you can see how can be impossible to separate author from art.
I felt there was something that made me uneasy reading this book and that’s what in the first place made me wonder about the author’s background, but after I knew everything turned for the worst.
The things that maybe I would have just dismissed as ugly and unpleasant, became an unbearable horror, like looking through a fancy disguising veil into the revolting fantasies of a skewed mind.
Probably it is a matter of content, and I’ve been unlucky reading “The fall of Atlantis” of all the books that MZB wrote, but here it is for you: reading this book after knowing about her monstrosities was a sorry, sorry experience to me.
I’m feeling like I have a need to wash myself, to be healed… really I have difficulties to explain clearly how this makes me feel 
I’d like to know if any of you has gone through this and would like to reach out and share its own experience?
Myria
Haven’t read it, and I’m not about to. Just Heritage of Hastur took on enough ooky overtones. Sounds like this book, or the raperific Avalon series, would definitely make me go :dubious: at those who said “Oh, but it doesn’t show in her actual work!”. Suuure it doesn’t.
Having read only one of her books (MoA, and I wasn’t even able to finish it, I found it so bad), I can’t say one way or another. I don’t think that’s the case with ALL artists, but in MZB’s, it certainly sounds like it.