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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8581435" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks for the thoughtful reply, and for bringing your ideas into this thread.If the indoctrination has been taking place, it's been taking place since 1975. And as I said, is a function of the work, not the author of the work. My Tekumel knowledge is pretty modest - I've got a copy of the Different Worlds edition with the pink cover, and have read most of it but never played it - but I've never noticed anything in it that suggests reactionary politics beyond what is fairly common in fantasy worlds. And I do regard myself as having a fairly good ability to read fiction for political and philosophical themes - I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher and I have taught Holocaust studies, though it's not my area of research; and Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust has had a significant influence on how I think about, and approach, political philosophy.It depends what sort of separation you have in mind. Obviously the art depends, causally, upon the artist. And the artist makes choices about what to include in, and how to present, the work. But the work then stands alone. Learning more about the artist can provide new avenues for inquiring into the work - eg maybe we learn that Barker embraced the ethnic and racial reification that is typical of fantasy fiction not because he was aping REH and JRRT but because it spoke to his political convictions. But the ethnic and racial reification is what it is - and the presence of that in Tekumel for one reason doesn't make Tekumel more or less likely to spread extreme right wing ideals any more than its presence in Greyhawk, or Middle Earth, for other reasons.I agree that they were stupid, if for no other reason than that it was bound to come out and when it did the blowback would be terrible.I doubt that Tekumel could have been saved, however. I think that the association with neo-Nazism would have been there, whether it came out ten years ago or now. And I think that association is likely to be fatal now and would equally have been as fatal then.That's a fair point, with two parts. I'm more doubtful than you that there is a moral duty to tell those who engage with an artwork everything one might know about the character of its creator. But there is a moral duty not to hurt people, and you give a clear account in these sentences of hurt that they have done.</blockquote>

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