“While working as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, he liked to snap women’s bras through their blouses—“a very bad habit I sometimes can’t resist to this day,” he recalled in 1979—and on at least one occasion, he broke the strap.”
Huh. It’s too bad none of those women–or their boyfriends/husbands–decked him.
We’re seeing a lot of this these days, someone famous revealed to have unPC or reprehensible practices. I prefer to be able to appreciate their positive achievements rather than allow people to burn everything about them to the ground.
Mr. W, you are a little late to this party.
The people seeking to bring the late Mr. Asimov down do not need the assistance of Rand along with his acolytes here on this fine Web site.
Rand is commenting on what Glenn Reynolds refers to as “The Annals of Left-wing Autophagy”, that is, “eating their own.”
So I take it then, that your view is that taking Isaac Asimov “down a notch” is an example of the Left taking whatever they embark upon to an unreasonable extreme?
Hey, everybody, Andrew_W thinks it OK for minor celebrity men to grope their women fans!
Mr. W, have you become “red-pilled”?
People are complicated.
“Instead of shaking her hand, he shook her left breast.”
George Costanza: “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?”
Asimov had the reputation of being overly forward towards women for quite some time. It wasn’t really a secret. My guess is that his being a good little socialist protected him while he was alive.
Which makes one wonder “why now?” Why are the wokescolds disinterring the this particular corpse and desecrating it now? Aren’t there plenty of living creeps like him in need of exposure?
If they go after dead people, the don’t have to deal with the living creeps.
Didn’t have anything to do with his substantially socialist viewpoint. He was a writer, and that meant near-total immunity in the eyes of the organized SF fandom of his time. Organized SF fandom of that time was largely a collection of asocial douchebags, mostly male, who suddenly had a non-judgmental peer group who would tolerate just about any behavior rather than go back to an isolated existence. Published writers were at the top of the ziggurat and basically could do no wrong. I was involved with that world off-and-on for a few years, and I got totally sick of it. Shatner’s famous sketch on SNL was wholly accurate.
All that said, while Asimov may have had highly disagreeable elements to his personality, and I sympathize with those who were harassed, I’ll still read the elements of his oeuvre that I like, without qualms. And he’s no Marion Zimmer Bradley in terms of reprehensibility.
I never met him, and attended only one convention (a local one in Denver in the early 70s), but even I knew of his reputation. If I knew, they all knew.
But yes, people are complicated. His sins do not mean that his work was worthless. And reading his books does not indicate approval of his less savory activities. But it’s “funny” to see this sort of attention now, given the fawning over Samuel R. Delany (NAMBLA supporter) by the current crop of wokescolds.
Wow, I wasn’t aware of the pedo claims against Clarke and Delaney. They certainly don’t appear in the mainstream (e.g. Wikipedia) articles about them.
I guess people have decided not to look too closely. For the sake of these two writers’ legacies, they should thank God they weren’t Trump supporters…
“They certainly don’t appear in the mainstream (e.g. Wikipedia) articles about them.”
“Surprise, surprise, surprise!” – Gomer Pyle
# I, Too
LOL, David.
The artist is not the art, but great works do not absolve bad behavior.
At least Asimov isn’t obviously a pedo like Delaney and Clarke.
#ChildhoodsEnd
Asimov’s son, on the other hand…
SF fandom is basically a Confederacy of Dorks, writers and all. All you have to do to is read Asimov’s enormous autobiography to understand this, and then go on to realize he was rewarded for having typewriter-mediated logorrhea. I wrote and sold books and stories for 40 years, but only went to cons (to try the promotion thing demanded by the gatekeepers of SF) for only 6 years before I could stand it no more. In the end, they weren’t my people.
Something else: Around 10 years ago, SF fandom was more or less taken over by the MFA Industrial Complex. Jetisoning dead writers is just one more way they can claim ever-diminish rack space for themselves.
I’ve been reading SF for 60 years. Read a fair bit of Asimov but not really a favorite. Heinlein, Clarke and the late, great Poul Anderson.
Anderson would be my favorite. Later years, Niven, Pournelle or both together. I just can’t imagine Larry or Jerry being sleazebags.
Larry, thanks for the Kzin and letting others play in that universe including the late Hal Colebatch.
I’m not the one to be telling you which famous SF writer is called “Short Eyes” behind his back, but you’re being a little naive here. When I first started going to cons around 1990, following the publication of *Iris* by Doubleday (my first hardcover), the Mean Girls of SFdom (many of them supposedly male) were anxious to tell me who was a pedophile, who was a drunkard, etc., etc. The inner circles of the SF/F world were and are a bubbling cesspool of jealousy and hate, Judging from Fred Pohl’s book “The Way the Future Was,” maybe that was always so, and it’s just human nature. I couldn’t take it, and walked away in the end.
I’d also like to remind everybody that “pedophile” means someone attracted to prepubescent children. People attracted to teenagers are ephebophiles (pedantic, I know). It’s also importnt to remember when people my age were young, the age of consent was an absolute, 16 in most states, as low as 14 in a few, and was 10 in the UK. When I graduated high school in 1968. the art teacher married the homecoming queen, who was 17. Now, that would be a double-felony; back then it was just the subject of jokes. And when I was in HS (I was 16 in the 12th grade) a cadre of moms were browsing the teenage boys, so that’s nothing new either. I got my fair share of offers from middle aged women but, unlike many of my friends, declined. None of them were as pretty as my mom, and most weren’t as pretty as my grandma, so they were just a bunch of old bags to me.
Yes, calling Epstein or Roy Moore a pedophile is a debasement of the language.
Not pedantic at all.
“10 in the UK”
Wait… what? Under English common law, it had generally been accepted to be 12 since the 13th Century, until the Offences Against the Person Act 1875 set it at 16 across the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, where it remains.
And if we really want to descend into pedantry, it’s probably also worth pointing out that the term “pedophile” was adopted in the 1970s by its advocates, who thought that they could make it the next frontier of “liberation” after homosexuality.* In strict translation from the Greek, it just means one who likes children. They felt this would make them sound less threatening. (They clearly didn’t understand how people use language.) The “correct” term – and the one which was used for centuries – is “pederast”.
*One of the lesser-known objections to the far-Left cabal surrounding Jeremy Corbyn is that, while there’s no evidence they were actively involved, many of them are on record as having been sympathetic to this movement.
Amazingly, I remember where I got that datum: it was in the 1967 Readers Digest Almanac, and I remember it because I was so amazed. Of course, no way to know if it was right in any detail (I certainly wouldn’t have been able to find out back then), or even if I misread the table still floating in memory, misaligning the rows and seeing the age of consent in Uganda (which I guess would be the one above United Kingdom!).
I used the term pederast when young, probably as a vocabulary item in the many historical novels I read. I was mighty impressed by all the sex in Frank Yerby’s “An Odor of Sanctity” back then. The main character is an excessively religious Visigothic nobleman who can’t seem to keep his mitts off the women wandering about Muslim Spain in the 8th century. I don’t actually remember if people were using pedophile at all in the late 1960s. It wasn’t something I would have talked about with any normal people, and I didn’t know many other readers of trashy historicals.
By the way, I regard Poul Anderson as a candidate for greatest SF writer to date. Niven was important primarily as the creator of one of the greatest featural universes to date. I never thought that highly of the so-called “deans of SF,” the trio of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Each of them wrote a number of great works, and in my opinion those are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (greatest mastry of narrative), The Sands of Mars (greatest subtext), and the Caves of Steel (greatest futility novel of all time!). Greatest neglected SF writer of that era: A. Bertram Chandler. While Heinlein was babbling about “torchships,” Chandler gave us an eigenvector drive dependent on Boehm’s Alternative to the Standard Model.
Eigenvector? I hardly know her!
Poul Anderson was very good; I particularly enjoyed Brain Wave. And I liked pretty much everything by Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury and McCaffrey.
My favorite all time though remains Alfred Bester for The Stars My Destination.
I still have a soft spot for Rudy Rucker. Something about being chased around Florida by a malevolent AI in an ice cream truck with the clown head and happy music playing. I just can’t get that imagery out of my head.* Or plugging into a dish antenna on the moon misaligned to point into deep space as a means for the AI to commune with ‘The One’. Yes….
*The AI was running on superconducting computer circuits being kept cool by the truck’s freezers.
At least we have the freaky geezers.
Brain Wave has been on my shelf, waiting to be read, for years. Thanks for the recommendation.
Brain Wave is ancestral to A Fire Upon the Deep. I did the guest of honor interview with Vernor Vinge at one of the Trinoc*Cons (videos of which my still be floating around, though I don’t have one) and had several long talks with him over dinner that week. He admired Anderson as much as I did.
Fan of the Psi Corps?
Poul Anderson is a criminally underrated writer.
Not by me. If Poul Anderson had written nothing but the Dominic Flandry and Nicholas Van Rijn stories his reputation would be secure, but of course he wrote a great deal more than that. He was prolific as well as excellent. Anderson and Clarke are, in my opinion, the two best wordsmiths in the history of SF. Even when Anderson’s later stuff got dark and pessimistic he was still a consummate prose stylist.
I named a couple of minor characters Van Rijn and Delacroix in one of my books, back in the 1990s, and the next time I was on a con panel, I was accused of “ripping off” Anderson. Turned out no one in the audience had heard of Rembrandt Van Rijn, much less another obscure artist named Delacroix.
IIRC, “The Pugilist” was set in 2020…
I’m glad that didn’t happen!
Brain Wave was Anderson’s first published novel.
Fantasy generally doesn’t cut it for me but “Three Hearts and Three Lions” was great and I really liked “The Merman’s Children”.
While the Flandry series can be described as James Bond in space, Flandry made his appearance some months before Ian Fleming’s character. I learned that from Karen Anderson in “Multiverse: Exploring the World of Poul Anderson” where a number of other writers play in Anderson’s universes. Who can forget “the Queen of Air and Darkness”? If the first part of “Murphy’s Hall” doesn’t reach in and squeeze your heart, you have no soul.
If you are jaded by much of what passes for SF nowadays, a couple of names: Michael F. Flynn and Travis J. I. Corcoran.
Have you read The High Crusade? And I highly recommend Flynn, who seemed a decent fellow when I met him at cons. Another great writer of the deeper past was L. Sprague de Camp. If you read nothing else, read “The Hand of Zei” (ERB with starships), “Rogue Queen” (introduced the subject of sex to SF in an important way, and prefigures “The Left Hand of Darkness”) and “Lest Darkness Fall” (the greatest Connecticut Yankee story of all time).
“I’m not the one to be telling you which famous SF writer is called “Short Eyes” behind his back, but you’re being a little naive here. ”
Short Eyes? I don’t get it.
Nor do I.
“Short Eyes” is prison slang for pedophile. Child rapists don’t tend to do too well in prison general population. They exhibit a notable tendency to die of decidedly unnatural causes in horrid, painful and disfiguring ways. One supposes this is because a sizable fraction of the prison general population were, themselves, victims of sexual abuse as children.
“While working as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, he liked to snap women’s bras through their blouses—“a very bad habit I sometimes can’t resist to this day,” he recalled in 1979—and on at least one occasion, he broke the strap.”
Huh. It’s too bad none of those women–or their boyfriends/husbands–decked him.
We’re seeing a lot of this these days, someone famous revealed to have unPC or reprehensible practices. I prefer to be able to appreciate their positive achievements rather than allow people to burn everything about them to the ground.
Mr. W, you are a little late to this party.
The people seeking to bring the late Mr. Asimov down do not need the assistance of Rand along with his acolytes here on this fine Web site.
Rand is commenting on what Glenn Reynolds refers to as “The Annals of Left-wing Autophagy”, that is, “eating their own.”
So I take it then, that your view is that taking Isaac Asimov “down a notch” is an example of the Left taking whatever they embark upon to an unreasonable extreme?
Hey, everybody, Andrew_W thinks it OK for minor celebrity men to grope their women fans!
Mr. W, have you become “red-pilled”?
People are complicated.
“Instead of shaking her hand, he shook her left breast.”
George Costanza: “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?”
Asimov had the reputation of being overly forward towards women for quite some time. It wasn’t really a secret. My guess is that his being a good little socialist protected him while he was alive.
Which makes one wonder “why now?” Why are the wokescolds disinterring the this particular corpse and desecrating it now? Aren’t there plenty of living creeps like him in need of exposure?
If they go after dead people, the don’t have to deal with the living creeps.
Didn’t have anything to do with his substantially socialist viewpoint. He was a writer, and that meant near-total immunity in the eyes of the organized SF fandom of his time. Organized SF fandom of that time was largely a collection of asocial douchebags, mostly male, who suddenly had a non-judgmental peer group who would tolerate just about any behavior rather than go back to an isolated existence. Published writers were at the top of the ziggurat and basically could do no wrong. I was involved with that world off-and-on for a few years, and I got totally sick of it. Shatner’s famous sketch on SNL was wholly accurate.
All that said, while Asimov may have had highly disagreeable elements to his personality, and I sympathize with those who were harassed, I’ll still read the elements of his oeuvre that I like, without qualms. And he’s no Marion Zimmer Bradley in terms of reprehensibility.
I never met him, and attended only one convention (a local one in Denver in the early 70s), but even I knew of his reputation. If I knew, they all knew.
But yes, people are complicated. His sins do not mean that his work was worthless. And reading his books does not indicate approval of his less savory activities. But it’s “funny” to see this sort of attention now, given the fawning over Samuel R. Delany (NAMBLA supporter) by the current crop of wokescolds.
Wow, I wasn’t aware of the pedo claims against Clarke and Delaney. They certainly don’t appear in the mainstream (e.g. Wikipedia) articles about them.
I guess people have decided not to look too closely. For the sake of these two writers’ legacies, they should thank God they weren’t Trump supporters…
“They certainly don’t appear in the mainstream (e.g. Wikipedia) articles about them.”
“Surprise, surprise, surprise!” – Gomer Pyle
# I, Too
LOL, David.
The artist is not the art, but great works do not absolve bad behavior.
At least Asimov isn’t obviously a pedo like Delaney and Clarke.
#ChildhoodsEnd
Asimov’s son, on the other hand…
SF fandom is basically a Confederacy of Dorks, writers and all. All you have to do to is read Asimov’s enormous autobiography to understand this, and then go on to realize he was rewarded for having typewriter-mediated logorrhea. I wrote and sold books and stories for 40 years, but only went to cons (to try the promotion thing demanded by the gatekeepers of SF) for only 6 years before I could stand it no more. In the end, they weren’t my people.
Something else: Around 10 years ago, SF fandom was more or less taken over by the MFA Industrial Complex. Jetisoning dead writers is just one more way they can claim ever-diminish rack space for themselves.
That last comment was sexist!
(ignore my other comment)
Now do Arthur C. Clarke’s pedophilia.
Arthur C. Clarke’s was never found to be one.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-03-24/arthur-c-clarke-not-a-paedophile-sri-lanka/1081914
I’ve been reading SF for 60 years. Read a fair bit of Asimov but not really a favorite. Heinlein, Clarke and the late, great Poul Anderson.
Anderson would be my favorite. Later years, Niven, Pournelle or both together. I just can’t imagine Larry or Jerry being sleazebags.
Larry, thanks for the Kzin and letting others play in that universe including the late Hal Colebatch.
I’m not the one to be telling you which famous SF writer is called “Short Eyes” behind his back, but you’re being a little naive here. When I first started going to cons around 1990, following the publication of *Iris* by Doubleday (my first hardcover), the Mean Girls of SFdom (many of them supposedly male) were anxious to tell me who was a pedophile, who was a drunkard, etc., etc. The inner circles of the SF/F world were and are a bubbling cesspool of jealousy and hate, Judging from Fred Pohl’s book “The Way the Future Was,” maybe that was always so, and it’s just human nature. I couldn’t take it, and walked away in the end.
I’d also like to remind everybody that “pedophile” means someone attracted to prepubescent children. People attracted to teenagers are ephebophiles (pedantic, I know). It’s also importnt to remember when people my age were young, the age of consent was an absolute, 16 in most states, as low as 14 in a few, and was 10 in the UK. When I graduated high school in 1968. the art teacher married the homecoming queen, who was 17. Now, that would be a double-felony; back then it was just the subject of jokes. And when I was in HS (I was 16 in the 12th grade) a cadre of moms were browsing the teenage boys, so that’s nothing new either. I got my fair share of offers from middle aged women but, unlike many of my friends, declined. None of them were as pretty as my mom, and most weren’t as pretty as my grandma, so they were just a bunch of old bags to me.
Yes, calling Epstein or Roy Moore a pedophile is a debasement of the language.
Not pedantic at all.
“10 in the UK”
Wait… what? Under English common law, it had generally been accepted to be 12 since the 13th Century, until the Offences Against the Person Act 1875 set it at 16 across the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, where it remains.
And if we really want to descend into pedantry, it’s probably also worth pointing out that the term “pedophile” was adopted in the 1970s by its advocates, who thought that they could make it the next frontier of “liberation” after homosexuality.* In strict translation from the Greek, it just means one who likes children. They felt this would make them sound less threatening. (They clearly didn’t understand how people use language.) The “correct” term – and the one which was used for centuries – is “pederast”.
*One of the lesser-known objections to the far-Left cabal surrounding Jeremy Corbyn is that, while there’s no evidence they were actively involved, many of them are on record as having been sympathetic to this movement.
Amazingly, I remember where I got that datum: it was in the 1967 Readers Digest Almanac, and I remember it because I was so amazed. Of course, no way to know if it was right in any detail (I certainly wouldn’t have been able to find out back then), or even if I misread the table still floating in memory, misaligning the rows and seeing the age of consent in Uganda (which I guess would be the one above United Kingdom!).
I used the term pederast when young, probably as a vocabulary item in the many historical novels I read. I was mighty impressed by all the sex in Frank Yerby’s “An Odor of Sanctity” back then. The main character is an excessively religious Visigothic nobleman who can’t seem to keep his mitts off the women wandering about Muslim Spain in the 8th century. I don’t actually remember if people were using pedophile at all in the late 1960s. It wasn’t something I would have talked about with any normal people, and I didn’t know many other readers of trashy historicals.
By the way, I regard Poul Anderson as a candidate for greatest SF writer to date. Niven was important primarily as the creator of one of the greatest featural universes to date. I never thought that highly of the so-called “deans of SF,” the trio of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Each of them wrote a number of great works, and in my opinion those are The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (greatest mastry of narrative), The Sands of Mars (greatest subtext), and the Caves of Steel (greatest futility novel of all time!). Greatest neglected SF writer of that era: A. Bertram Chandler. While Heinlein was babbling about “torchships,” Chandler gave us an eigenvector drive dependent on Boehm’s Alternative to the Standard Model.
Eigenvector? I hardly know her!
Poul Anderson was very good; I particularly enjoyed Brain Wave. And I liked pretty much everything by Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury and McCaffrey.
My favorite all time though remains Alfred Bester for The Stars My Destination.
I still have a soft spot for Rudy Rucker. Something about being chased around Florida by a malevolent AI in an ice cream truck with the clown head and happy music playing. I just can’t get that imagery out of my head.* Or plugging into a dish antenna on the moon misaligned to point into deep space as a means for the AI to commune with ‘The One’. Yes….
*The AI was running on superconducting computer circuits being kept cool by the truck’s freezers.
At least we have the freaky geezers.
Brain Wave has been on my shelf, waiting to be read, for years. Thanks for the recommendation.
Brain Wave is ancestral to A Fire Upon the Deep. I did the guest of honor interview with Vernor Vinge at one of the Trinoc*Cons (videos of which my still be floating around, though I don’t have one) and had several long talks with him over dinner that week. He admired Anderson as much as I did.
Fan of the Psi Corps?
Poul Anderson is a criminally underrated writer.
Not by me. If Poul Anderson had written nothing but the Dominic Flandry and Nicholas Van Rijn stories his reputation would be secure, but of course he wrote a great deal more than that. He was prolific as well as excellent. Anderson and Clarke are, in my opinion, the two best wordsmiths in the history of SF. Even when Anderson’s later stuff got dark and pessimistic he was still a consummate prose stylist.
I named a couple of minor characters Van Rijn and Delacroix in one of my books, back in the 1990s, and the next time I was on a con panel, I was accused of “ripping off” Anderson. Turned out no one in the audience had heard of Rembrandt Van Rijn, much less another obscure artist named Delacroix.
IIRC, “The Pugilist” was set in 2020…
I’m glad that didn’t happen!
Brain Wave was Anderson’s first published novel.
Fantasy generally doesn’t cut it for me but “Three Hearts and Three Lions” was great and I really liked “The Merman’s Children”.
While the Flandry series can be described as James Bond in space, Flandry made his appearance some months before Ian Fleming’s character. I learned that from Karen Anderson in “Multiverse: Exploring the World of Poul Anderson” where a number of other writers play in Anderson’s universes. Who can forget “the Queen of Air and Darkness”? If the first part of “Murphy’s Hall” doesn’t reach in and squeeze your heart, you have no soul.
If you are jaded by much of what passes for SF nowadays, a couple of names: Michael F. Flynn and Travis J. I. Corcoran.
Have you read The High Crusade? And I highly recommend Flynn, who seemed a decent fellow when I met him at cons. Another great writer of the deeper past was L. Sprague de Camp. If you read nothing else, read “The Hand of Zei” (ERB with starships), “Rogue Queen” (introduced the subject of sex to SF in an important way, and prefigures “The Left Hand of Darkness”) and “Lest Darkness Fall” (the greatest Connecticut Yankee story of all time).
“I’m not the one to be telling you which famous SF writer is called “Short Eyes” behind his back, but you’re being a little naive here. ”
Short Eyes? I don’t get it.
Nor do I.
“Short Eyes” is prison slang for pedophile. Child rapists don’t tend to do too well in prison general population. They exhibit a notable tendency to die of decidedly unnatural causes in horrid, painful and disfiguring ways. One supposes this is because a sizable fraction of the prison general population were, themselves, victims of sexual abuse as children.
The things you learn on a space/politics blog.