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Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

> Let's not forget that Asimov had a questionable lifestyle [0].

I already know that sexual harassment and abuse of power are bad. If someone uncovers such behavior in a living writer, I will react appropriately, by demanding justice for the victims and doing all I can to change the writer's behavior. Finding out about Asimov's behavior doesn't change that.

As for Asimov, he is dead. There's nothing I can do to change his behavior anymore. And I'm not going to stop admiring his literary works because of his bad behavior.

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I think this is a valid stance if the writers now uncovered tendecies don't start to colour the decisions they took in their writing.

Good writing remains good writing, but realizing why somebody wrote something might just be something that cannot be undone for the informed reader.

I think you can see some of this sort of thing in his later writing but most of it is unaffected IMO. The other thing to remember about dead writers is that they're products of their surrounding culture. People freak out about HP Lovecraft for example but American culture was extremely different then.

HP Lovecraft's racism most definitely drove his writing and not in small ways. It courses through his narratives. The Shadow over Innsmouth, for instance, is literally entirely about the evils of cross-breeding with "lesser" people. The whole and full picture of terror from "the other" wouldn't gel as it does in his stories without his starkly racist ideas about the world.

That doesn't invalidate his art, in fact I think a knowledge of his profound racism adds another level of terror to his stories, in the realization that racism is a primordial horror that can and does haunt us all. To wave all this away by claiming he was simply a "product of his time" is to profoundly misunderstand his writings.

I read a lot of Lovecraft as a young teenager, and it was only years later that popular culture started to call out his racism. When it started to gain traction, I remember thinking, "um... well, duh."

I think it's very sad that because Lovecraft died so young the mellowed views he adopted on race never got to make their way into his body of writing.

Lovecraft is interesting in that regard. His racism is so interwoven with what makes the books good, that there is no real way to read one without the other.

It is far more problematic with authors where the trait that is later "discovered" always seemed like an alien stain in their work. E.g. someone who wrote all about freedom and equality, but has some weird misogynistic moments in the books that everybody glossed over before, but now they stain the whole idea..

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