Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall

Maybe people like Biden are the same. They just have a different sense of boundaries, and don't react themselves when other people touch or hug them. I don't know how asking them why they do something that feels perfectly natural to them would help.

Human cultures have adapted all sorts of symbols and codes for social boundary negotiation. One really obvious and ancient one is the Wedding Ring. The fact that Wedding Rings are an "opt out" by default model in many folks' view for what is "fair game" is a problem to redress.

Another example that comes to mind from books I've read is the 70s "handkerchief code": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handkerchief_code. That one at least is more opt-in. There are descendants of that coding system still in use, of course.

In several of the real world conventions that I attend there's a growing pin and button culture that tries to encode directly and explicitly in English some negotiations, across a wide spectrum of consent/interest lines, things such as "I'm a hugger" and "Yes, I'm interested in socializing right now" (plus pronouns, and so forth). The advantage of making plain English over some cryptic code is nice for avoiding some forms of miscommunication, and you can do that in constrained settings like sci-fi conventions. They become a useful laboratory for exploring which ideas should possibly grow out into the real world, even though I don't think there are many ideas of how to do that "at scale" just yet.

(They are also laboratory experiments that some of them still fail and various communities are continually learning from them. Almost every broad consent has exceptions and navigating the line, for instance, of "I know I've given broad consent, but right now you need to accept that this particular circumstance is a no" is probably always going to be a challenge.)

Arguably a large part of the evolution of human communications has always been about social negotiation and we keep building new systems to signal/communicate/explore it. We've never perfected it, but maybe a big part of our human drive is that we keep trying.

I think this is what dating apps are for to some extent. Except the 'catcall' becomes ... conversation on a date. Although some of the apps are more on the catcall end of the spectrum.

Where one person shrugs when a family member is insulted, another might come to blows to protect an idea of family. It's cultural, economic and political...it's belief.

would be an academic.

It affected his wife I think (she was actually good in math). I think Einstein behavior was more personal through. He was never in "public figure groping women while everybody knows about it and culture adjusts to accept and enable" category. And like, it is ok to talk about Einstein flaws too, why do we need to pretend that past figures were better then they actually were?

> they take issue for past leaders being lauded for their "within-the-field achievements" despite their personal behavior

Asimov was not successful despite his personal behavior. His personal behavior happened because of his success and escalated with success. It is the way people in power accepted the acts that they would not accept from somebody else.

The lauding of great people is often based on lie - either by omission or direct. The exactly same impulse of "must not criticize him" is what make people enable his behavior and would make people enable next successful person.

> then those people "driven out" weren't that driven to be in the field in the first place.

I think this is nonsense. Of course people take rational decisions about which field they can be reasonably successful in and where they can will be treated badly.

It is like with companies - most capable employees tend to leave faster when faced with toxic management.

Of course you can't really apply ceteris parabus to books, but normally you have to decide what you're going to read on limited information, two very different books might seem close enough given you know little about either. When you choose what to read you reduce all the context and comparison to a decision. "author was a creep" definitely makes me less likely to want to read his work, especially if they are still alive and could personally profit.

The relevance to the issue at hand is that science fiction is already a subgenre (though it is on the rise) that has a rather narrow range of fan base with an even more narrow range of potential authors. There are so few people writing good science fiction; I honestly wonder how much the carnal predilections of a now dead but no less prolific author is moving the needle.

If you could magically make science fiction authorship on par with being a YouTube personality in terms of perceived status, an army of Weinsteins and Dworkins couldn't keep little girls and boys out of crafting stories.

Next time you're at a conference, try pinching a woman's butt in the middle of a crowded room. Let me know how that works out for you.

> The damage he caused was inseparable from his power. In general, Asimov chose targets who were unlikely to protest directly, such as fans and secretaries, and spared women whom he saw as professionally useful. There were exceptions—he chased the editor Cele Goldsmith around her desk—but he preferred to focus on women who were more vulnerable, which inevitably raises the issue of mentorship.

> Yet many of these encounters were clearly nonconsensual. When the author Frederik Pohl questioned his tendency to touch women “in a fairly fondling way,” Asimov replied, “It’s like the old saying. You get slapped a lot, but you get laid a lot, too.”

He's deliberately finding vulnerable women -- who may be forced to laugh off or allow his unwanted advances in order to keep their jobs (keep in mind the time period also -- women even having some of these jobs was something special in itself), and he's doing it to, ultimately, get sex.

That may not quite be the definition of rape, but it certainly isn't "a[n] unwelcome pinch on the butt."

Sounds to me like Asimov wasn't that far off from Weinstein -- keep in mind for every accusation of rape Weinstein is facing, there were dozens if not hundreds of women who claim lesser degrees of inappropriate actions. It's more likely that the women who would today, in the #metoo era, have reported legal sexual assault or rape, were silenced back then -- I can't imagine we will ever know though; maybe he stopped at just "pinches on the butt," but I doubt it.

I also used to like Piers Anthony's books when I was young, and too naive to pick up on how much the author seemed to like writing about little girls panties and fetishizing pedophilia[1].

Some people can ignore the problematic elements, and some can't. You don't have to read The Shadow Over Innsmouth as metaphor for race mixing, but once you know it's there, you can't unknow it.

[0]https://lithub.com/we-cant-ignore-h-p-lovecrafts-white-supre...

[1]https://litreactor.com/columns/themes-of-pedophilia-in-the-w...

This is part of the reason why I avoid reading about authors. Like the practice of symphonies doing auditions blind in order to avoid bias, I don't want my personal opinions of an author's life to taint my evaluation of their work.

No, it's not. I'm not talking about literary criticism or text interpretation. I'm talking about reading books for fun.

How many historical works will we be left with after we've gone through all historical figures up to emancipation? We probably will have to give up even the theory of evolution.

What you're talking about is a moral judgment, not a critical one. So not saying "this book isn't good because the author was bad", but saying "regardless of the book's qualities, we shouldn't read it because the author was a bad person".

I really don't think it's true anymore, see all Hugo award SF nominees and winners from the past few years. They are all character-led.

I'm not sure his male characters are that much better.

Luckily, I don't feel that his books stand or fall by the characters in them. They are just vehicles used to explore the consequences of the technologies that Asimov presupposes.

I don't agree with this assessment at all.

The best SF I've read has believable characters with real motivations.

Off the top of my head:

* Paul McAuley's Quiet War series

* Ken McLeod's Fall Revolution series, "The Execution Channel"

* Bester's "The Stars My Destination" - a recent read, and the character arc is cribbed from The Count of Monte Cristo, but the SF parafernalia is a backdrop for the character.

All of Asimov’s characters are broadly drawn embodiments of simple concepts; to the extent his stories have depth it comes from the interaction of those simple characters with each other an the constructed environment, but from subtly drawn, realistic characterization.

This is very much not limited to female characters.

No they weren't.

> His fame came at the cost of many other's.

That's true for literally everyone that has ever been in the limelight.

> Don't read those who stole the voice others.

He didn't steal anyone's voices though, he 'just' (allegedly) sexually assaulted them.

> They did not earn your attention, and you can give it to those who were less fortunate instead.

Do you even hear what you're saying? 'Don't read these people because their works are actually good, read them because they're underprivileged!'

We cannot seriously talk about Columbus-the-brave-explorer without also talking about his acts of slavery and genocide.

We cannot take Asimov to court. We cannot take Columbus to court. But we can talk about them as real people, and look at their entire history, rather than as a single facet of their lives.

And how do you take someone to court for "being an asshole"? If you knew someone who is constantly doing extremely shady things, like screwing over their business partners or repeatedly cheating on their spouses, there's no way to "take someone to court" on those counts. Does that mean their shady dealings should never be exposed?

This sort of behavior makes community aspect of it all much different for both genders.

Have you ever had someone grab your ass or try to kiss you without consent in a professional context? Ever had a corporate officer seem interested in hiring you, call you in for an interview, ask you on a date, and then decide not to hire you when you rejected them? Ever been told on the first day by a new boss about their open relationship with their spouse, and their search for new sexual partners? Ever had a coworker make an overtly sexist joke about your gender to your face? Ever been propositioned for sex by a stranger at a conference? Ever heard a friend explain that “I would never work for a woman boss. No offense, you’re not like most women.” Ever been denied a new job or a promotion because the decision-maker thought you might have a child within the next few years? Ever been the clear expert or authority in a meeting with multiple people and been repeatedly interrupted by someone asking the clueless novice next to you to explain what you were just trying to say? Ever had a novice badly try to explain the content of your own book to you, even after you mentioned you were the author? Ever gone to speak at an event and had someone ask you which speaker was your spouse? Etc. etc. ad nauseam.

If none of the above, then you probably are misunderstanding what people say when they claim to feel frequently unwelcome.

Upon strongly suggesting hiring her my then manager replied: “but she’s a girl!”.

Granted, he was almost 60 at the time (different generation and times) but my jaw dropped... This guy who I really appreciated as a manager could have such views? I had no idea up to that point.

I’ve never personally known this happen to a “boy” in our industry.