They do. His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
He's hardly unique in that. MZB's Mists of Avalon has similar issues from a different gender perspective.
Asimov looks especially crude now, with the distance of a few decades. I wouldn't be surprised if more recent fiction suffers a similar reassessment in time.
SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it. Character design is more likely to be an aspect of fan service - give the readers a fantasy they can identify with, maybe add some flaws for spice - and not so much an opportunity for self-reflection.
> His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
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.
> SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it
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.
Mate, everything throughout history has been people-oriented. Almost every famous story throughout history has had a main character, because that's what humans find easiest to identify with: other people.
You are confusing 'character-led' with 'includes characters.' Plenty of stories are primarily about an abstract idea, place, or ethical lesson and the characters only exist to explain the ideas or move the plot along. This is in contrast to 'character-led' fiction, in which the primary focus is the character themselves and their development.
Quite a few early SF stories were gimmick-oriented.
As an example, one old short story - I've forgotten the name - involves a space race from Earth to Jupiter and back (or something like that). The participants usually go full blast 1/2-way there, invert to slow down, then repeat to get back.
The main character starts with an engine problem or something, can't catch up, then in a burst of inspiration realizes he can use Jupiter's gravity to swing around, at speed.
Everyone at first wonders if there's a problem, then when it happens they realize the brilliance of what happened.
My interpretation is the author had just learned about gravity assist ("first used in 1959 when the Soviet probe Luna 3 photographed the far side of Earth's Moon" says Wikipedia) and structured the entire story around that concept.
The people were secondary to the orientation.
While it's true what you said about almost every famous story, most SF is not made of famous stories.
(I would be grateful if anyone can tell me the name of the story I just summarized.)
> His female characters might as well have been written by an adolescent.
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.
Yeah, but his female characters like Bliss and Dors are especially embarrassing examples of authorial wish-fulfillment. He might as well have given Pelorat and Seldon his own name.
If the voice of an author can be heard through their writing, the act of reading can be affected by one's understanding of the author. "Death of the author" may be a useful critical technique but it's not the way most people emotionally or intellectually connect with art.
Having known this about Asimov for quite some time, it hasn't kept me from enjoying that of his work I really like, but it has somewhat dulled my enjoyment of him overall as an author. In particular, although it's never been a favorite of mine anyway, I can't see myself being able to avoid noticing that _Foundation's Edge_ has a plotline that pairs off a middle-aged professor with a young, pretty, sexually open-minded woman who is "bottom heavy".
I really enjoy the concepts in H.P. Lovecraft's mythos, particularly where horror intersects with science fiction, but I also enjoy it a lot less after learning about his rabid antisemitic and racist views[0], which were extreme even for the time.
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.
But more importantly, his behaviour kept others out of the field. It stopped them having their voice heard. His fame came at the cost of many other's. And there is no reason why we should allow that to continue. Don't read those who stole the voice others. They did not earn your attention, and you can give it to those who were less fortunate instead.
Many of the golden age authors rage from "just" problematic like Asimov to a lot worse (see for more: http://www.jasonsanford.com/blog/2018/2/golden-age-sf-not-go...). I still read these authors but I for one cannot help see the author in their books, and knowledge of their actions certainly influences how I interpret these books. I therefore don't believe in Death of the Author.
I think they're separate issues. "Death of the author" is a principle in criticism: do we care about the author's intention in creating the text? The older version of this was the "New Criticism", which tried to read the text in a vacuum, not paying attention to the historical and biographical context of its composition. But Barthes took this further by saying that the author had no control over the interpretation, even if s/he explicitly tells us what the text means. (A related idea is "reader-response theory", which begins the criticism with the unique response of the individual reader at the time). A simplified litmus test would be if you think a writer has the right to claim that one of their characters is homosexual, when the text doesn't indicate either way.
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 for one cannot help see the author in their books, and knowledge of their actions certainly influences how I interpret these books.
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.
Plato was a racist, had ~50 slaves and was a convicted public masturbator. Should we throw away his phylosophy work too?
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.
We should not throw it away, but we should keep it in mind when learning from him. Cause if we don't, adopting his values and thinking can slowly lead us toward slave owning and so on. It is related.
In that case, I would think that reading books by a particular author could become "less fun" once you know about their behaviour. In the same way, I used to have some Rolf Harris novelty songs on my iPod playlist for the kids - and sone Gary Glitter. Listening to those songs once they were convicted, certainly became "less fun".
I didn't care to read any of the Ender novels before or after I learned about the author's personal life. What does that mean about my enjoyment of Asimov books before and after reading this article?
It means you're an adult, capable of simultaneously recognizing the merits of artistic works and complex ethical realities.
Are Caravaggio's paintings less beautiful because he killed someone? I think to suggest so is absurd. It doesn't mean you have to like the artist as a person, but to directly tie the value of a work of art to its creator is dangerously reductive.
Serious question, though - how do you feel about performance art? Would you go to a concert by an excellent singer who beat up his wife, or was a convicted paedophile? Would you feel quite comfortable standing in the crowd and singing along with them? I'd suggest quite possibly not, even though the quality of their singing voice was undiminished.
I suspect that there is a spectrum here where some forms of art or expression are more directly tied to the nature of the creator than others.
Both of your examples are about social / public acceptability of the artist as a person, not the evaluation of their artwork itself. Of course most people would be uncomfortable associating with such a person, but I don’t think that’s inherently relevant to their work.
Nowadays we are in a marketing-focused era where serious aesthetic thought is basically unknown to everyone but academics, so the natural result is that the identity of an artist is often more important than their work.
(Side note: performance art refers to a separate art field, e.g. Marina Abramović. Performing arts is the right term to use for music, singing, etc.)
But yes, of course there are various approaches to aesthetics and certainly some would say that the artist as individual plays more of a role in some genres than others.
His books don't become worse because of alleged bad behaviour.