I’ve never been one for role models — once you see your role model’s feet of clay, things change forever.

The closest I’ve come to a role model is probably Terry Pratchett — from all accounts, he was a good person as well as a great writer. I’ve never met him, but in all my online interactions with him, that’s the impression that I got.

But before PTerry, one of my favourite writers (if not the most favourite) was Isaac Asimov.

I started reading Asimov in my teens. He wrote on a huge array of subjects, across multiple genres, and always spoke about himself in his writing in a way that made me think that I knew him.

It was only in the last 10 years or so that I learnt that I didn’t know him at all, and that he might have been *all* clay feet 😕 Apparently, Asimov was somebody who harassed women, a lot.

He appeared to have thought that this was part of his charm — or, his admirers/supports/apologists made that out to be the case. I don’t know. But what was evident was that he did harass women and seemed to think that it was fine — that it was all fun. I suppose for him it was.

Interestingly, I found out recently that Alfred Bester, another great from the golden age of science fiction, would effusively kiss Asimov on his cheeks and pinch his bottom whenever they met — somewhat similar to Asimov's behaviour with the women he harassed. Apparently, Bester did not do this with anyone else, and so one has to wonder if he was trying to make Asimov realize the error of his ways.

Asimov seems to have almost come to a self-realisation since he writes that this made him feel uncomfortable and he even wonders about the women he treated the same way. But that’s about where the self-realisation ends since he ends with “It took the joy out of my interactions” or something similar. Basically, going back to me-me and not worrying about his victims and how *his* behaviour affected *them*.

I was thinking about all of this a couple of days ago because I came to realize that I don’t trust anything I hear/read any longer, and I used to. I used to think that the impressions that I got from reading somebody’s writing defined that person. Alas, no more …

But in this day and age, where people believe that artificial intelligence exists and are happy to believe anything that is churned out by a glorified random word generator, can we afford to believe everything we read?

I wonder …

#Reflections #IsaacAsimov #AlfredBester #Harassment #RoleModels #Trust