Evil made marion12/31/2022 ![]() ![]() Many readers, myself included, will agree with Redditor CJGibson that "to read/support these authors in spite of their positions or actions sends a tacit message that what they're doing is OK". Readers will ultimately choose whether the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley are remembered and continue to be read. In critical terms Bradley was rarely considered seriously comparable to those writers, but as a writer of popular, mythic fiction she reached an audience those more acclaimed figures of feminism SF did not. EVIL MADE MARION SERIESHow far can we separate any cultural figure from the values they represent? And in rejecting the figure, do we risk rejecting values that should transcend the actions of any single individual? The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series made Marion Zimmer Bradley a leader of the emerging feminist movement in science fiction, alongside writers including Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Margaret Atwood. And when the Vatican reveals it has defrocked 848 priests for alleged abuse of children in 10 years, it's quite natural for people to question the values of the church that employed them. The DJ Jimmy Savile has become a byword for depravity, whose behaviour has left us wondering how trusted institutions such as the BBC or the NHS can have allowed him such licence to abuse. There are echoes here of the posthumous accusations levelled at Lewis Carroll, whose relationship with Alice Liddell has been under suspicion since Florence Becker Lennon's 1945 biography, or JM Barrie, whose relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family has cast something of a shadow over Neverland.īut writers are far from being the only cultural figures to pose us such problems. No doubt many will question, quite rightly, whether this and other honours should be revoked. Among many honours Marion Zimmer Bradley was awarded the prestigious World Fantasy award for lifetime achievement. A complex reckoning with the actions of a former colleague has begun. ![]() The wider science fiction community is still absorbing accusations that have been filtering into public consciousness over recent days. Established writers of SF and fantasy including John Scalzi and G Willow Wilson have expressed horror and concern for Bradley's alleged victims. Science fiction readers have been vocal in disowning Bradley. ![]() ![]() Bradley's reputation when alive had already been considerably damaged by the conviction of her husband on charges of child molestation in 1990. They include accounts of physical and sexual abuse, and were later joined by a brutally affecting poem written by Greyland in "honour" of Bradley, Mother's Hands. Published last week on the blog of Deirdre Saoirse Moen, these accusations come from Bradley's own daughter, Moira Greyland. The accusations of child abuse levelled at science fiction author Marion Zimmer Bradley, who died in 1999 age 69, are of the most serious kind. But when the actions of our cultural heroes go beyond bad behaviour, into to moral outrage, illegality and immorality, that separation becomes far harder. So we commonly separate the artist from the human being, the icon from the reality. The poet who expresses beauty in words is a drunken misanthrope in person. The transcendent singer on the stage is a bawdy lech in the bar. It's for exactly this reason that meeting our cultural heroes is so often a profound disappointment. It's a truism that the writer you read on the page is not the writer you meet in the flesh. ![]()
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