posted
Well, it's not like I feel the need to personally admire someone because he's a literary great. I do think that it is a bit...myopic to attact individual celebrities rather than to recognize that fame is not a justification for personal misbehavior and leave it at that.
Orwell hardly had clean hands when it came to totalitarianism, after all. Nor have most modern SF writers, truth be told. The same can be said of eugenics, materialism, and whatever other trite but apparently very appealing ideas you care to mention.
In the end, a lot of people flunked the entrance exams because of poor math skills back then. But Well's made a place for himself as a writer based on his talents, not his deficiencies. That's much better than people becoming famous because of their personal worthlessness.
posted
I don't know who this John H. Miller guy is, but I find his ideas terrifying. He depicts H.G. Wells as a dangerous radical, then he says this:
quote:We should be grateful that he left his imprint on the science-fiction genre, and almost nowhere else.
Either Miller is slamming science fiction readers, or he is an advocate for the Thought Police. Either way, Miller seems like a real nimrod to me. What's the point of writing fiction if you just express the same ideas as everyone else, with no radical thoughts at all?
posted
Well, I think that he's barking up the wrong tree. I do happen to think that there are all kinds of things that are a lot more tolerable as inspirations for fiction than for, say, national policies.
The problem that I have with the above quote is that Miller clearly isn't grateful that Well's left his imprint on SF rather than somewhere else. I'm content to let H.G. Wells be known to history as a guy who wrote some very interesting and seminal works of SF. I'm glad that his personal beliefs and behavior made less of an impact on history, and would hate to see them overshadow appreciation for his actual work, which is of value to literature.
This guy, for whatever reason, doesn't feel satisfied with that. He's willing to say we should be grateful for the way things worked out, but he doesn't show it much, does he?
I think that there are many people that would have done great harm in the world if they were something other than entertainers/artists/writers. I think there are more than enough who have, because of their publicly accepted works, been allowed to exercise "real" power to some very bad ends. I'm all for letting a celebrities personal beliefs and behaviors be regarded as no more important than anyone else's. Only when that celebrity choses to make them public should they become a subject for discussion.
Of course, I do feel that most of that discussion should be censure rather than approval. Celebrities have no business playing on their fame in pursuit of their private delusions. If they will, they should pay the price.
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