Loving the art; hating the artist.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I hate Orson Scott Card.

I love (some) of his books.



OK, so anyone with an internet connection has probably heard of the huge controversy about the film version of OSC's classic SF novel, Ender's Game, and the campaign to boycott it. Basically, Card is not only a massive homophobe, he's also on the board of directors of a notorious American anti-gay group, the National Organization for Marriage. This doesn't even count all of the truly vile things he's said about the LGBT community in the past. Now, although Lionsgate claims that Card had minimal involvement in the film, he does have a producer credit which means that every ticket sale, DVD sale, etc. will result in a small percentage of cash going into Card's pocket....hence, the call for the boycott.


Now, the thing is I love some of Card's books. I loved Ender's Game when I was a teenager. The man is a genuinely gifted writer, and when he's doing it right there are very few authors who can top him. This despite the troubling subtext of some of his works, be it unfortunate implications (A Planet Called Treason), rather one-sided and shallow (Empire), extremely troubling (Pastwatch), or just downright nauseating (Hamlet's Father). Hell, even his best known book is essentially the author setting circumstances up just right so that the hero can basically commit genocide without having any guilt whatsoever.

(The irony here is that, for a man being so anti-gay, some of his books are absolutely dripping with homoeroticism. Exhibit A being his novel Songmaster).



*sigh*

I probably won't see Ender's Game, mostly because the previews for the film didn't catch me (and I've already decided to spend my movie ticket money on Pacific Rim).

So, has anyone here ever had this problem?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Robert A. Heinlein is someone who's commonly mentioned in these sorts of discussions. Also Ezra Pound, HP Lovecraft, etc.

Personally I really like the commentary and writings of HL Mencken, even though he was very much opposed to socialism/egalitarianism in general.

[Red Commissar]

Yeah, this is something that's come up several times here and in my own experience. Orson Scott Card is one I share too- I liked Ender's Game and didn't really know Card was a nut until at around the 2008 elections when he jumped on board the tea party train going on about Obama's true birth and his communist conspiracies. Some of Card's views don't really come out in his early works that strongly (excepting the genocide part of course), but in his recent works it seems that he wants to jam in his views more- there's a book I remember seeing that was tied into the Ender's universe regarding their problems trying to get religious holidays on the space station because apparently they've been banned or some business.

A friend of mine reads a ton of fantasy books and he's often come up with the problems of Fantasy genre in general tending to promote some unsavory things- even if you look past those books that do so only for the setting, IE A Song of Ice and Fire there's still a ton that do it straightfaced. He's brought up his dilemma with Terry Goodkind and his Sword of Truth books, stating he liked Wizard's First Rule through about Soul of the Fire, then stopped reading because he felt Goodkind was dragging out the story too much and jamming in too much of his commentary into it. I looked this up and indeed it seems in his later books he does jam in a lot of his objectivist creedo and other zanyness- in one book he dedicates it to the US intelligence services which he claims are p. cool guys who fight for his freedoms despite attempts to make them look bad, and in another where he has a city ruled by pacifists who are so committed to their beliefs that they won't even defend themselves when the are getting destroyed. In that last bit some of his readers interpreted as a dig at peace activists.

Another favorite target we've had here is with JRR Tolkein. I'm sure most people at some point have gotten around to reading the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, and I'm sure many have liked it. Unfortunately JRR Tolkein also had some rather shitty views and it does come through in his books, though thankfully he doesn't try to beat it into your head. Still, I do like LOTR even with that in mind...

Sci-Fi's got some of this too. Heinlein has been mentioned above and that's indeed the case with him. Some sci-fi focus a lot on war to the point of arcadey nonsense, others kind of go into Cyberpunk worlds with a lolbertarian (in the right-wing sense) mentality in mind. Even though Cyberpunk is generally a dystopia where neoliberalism and its values reign supreme (I mean look at how common supremely powerful multinationals are in those books), it still has made room for some authors to try and reconcile their own market happy viewpoint into one where it has created a dystopia.

Another classic one for me is in the realm of comics. There is sooooo much wacky shit in comics sometime as well as what many of the characters could stand for, such as Iron Man or Batman as rich boys protecting the city (by beating up on people), or Superman types that embody that very characteristic of a superior human. I like Batman though despite some of the obvious conservative views that ooze out of him, say in the hands of Frank Miller (I'd say starting with DKR2) or Chuck Dixon. I'd say Alan Grant falls into this same fold, going from a leftish radical in the 80s and a bit of the 90s, then doing a 180 and becoming some randroid nutter (neotech or w/e).

That being it's not like I'd give a pass to authors with left politics. It's a bonus to me if the author has those values but if they have absolutely no knack for writing and it merely seems they're just rolling out these values with no attempt at making it meaningful, then yeah it's a crappy book.

[d3crypt]

This is how i feel about the band Burzum.

[TheIrrationalist]

I love Louis-Ferdinand Céline's books but I fucking hate the man. He was a reactionary, collaborated with the Pétain government, a holocaust denier and extremely anti-Semitic. Here is a nice quote from him:

Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler!

[blake 3:17]

It happens a bit. I don't necessarily judge artists on a right/left axis and tend to judge the work more for itself.

I am involved in the art and literary worlds and tend to boycott or dispose of or ignore work from people whose personal behaviour is or has been really bad. There's a gallery here where some friends show that I don't go to because the owner has punched me more than once. As a joke. Ha ha. One of my favourite poets here turned out to have molested his daughter and she committed suicide. I got rid of his books. I couldn't stand having them in my presence.

In less personal terms, I don't really care that much.

[blake 3:17]

double post