Here's a thing about Great Men of Science Fiction who have reputations for things like sexual harassment and "But we'd have lost al ltheir work if we were all PC like that today":
Maybe they would've been better if they'd had reason to be expect and fear consequences?
Maybe they would've been better if they'd had reason to be expect and fear consequences?
They assuredly drove people out of the magic store with their conduct, so if they had been kicked out for that conduct, it's not that we wouldn't have magic, we'd just have different magic by different people.
Buuut maybe if the magic store had had better rules from the beginning, they wouldn't have gone about it acting like making magic made them the lords of creation.
Despite it being the province of science fiction and fantasy authors to imagine hypothetical worlds, we can't say what *would have* happened instead if they'd been checked at the time. Only think about what might have been.
And it's not a foregone conclusion that the only two possibilities were to allow the Greats We Know to behave horribly or never know their work.
Can we not imagine a world in which we expect both great things and good things? I think we can.
Can we not imagine a world in which we expect both great things and good things? I think we can.
And the idea that the ones who did great things couldn't possibly in any universe have also done good things, if they'd been held to better standards, is a more scathing indictment of them than just pointing out the bad things they did is.
