Disillusioned - Larry Niven (one of my favourite sci-fi authors) was/is a raging racist POS

[Celerity]

Yes this is very old (2008) but I had no clue. WTF

Science Fiction Mavens Offer Far Out Homeland Security Advice

3/1/2008

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2008/2/29/2008march-science-fiction-mavens-offer-far-out-homeland-security-advice

Now a fixture at Department of Homeland Security science and technology conferences, SIGMA is a loosely affiliated group of science fiction writers who are offering pro bono advice to anyone in government who want their thoughts on how to protect the nation. The group has the ear of Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Jay Cohen, head of the science and technology directorate, who has said he likes their unconventional thinking.

Members of the group recently offered a rambling, sometimes strident string of ideas at a panel discussion promoting the group at the DHS science and technology conference. Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven, the bestselling and award-winning author of such books as “Ringworld” and “Lucifer’s Hammer,” which he co-wrote with SIGMA member Jerry Pournelle.

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. “The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked. “I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied. “I cannot guarantee I’m going to be a great help to Homeland Security,” Niven said earlier.

snip

[JT45242]

1. Uninsured and underinsured white folks?

Seriously, what a racist piece of shit.

If we had a one payer system with ZERO for profit hospital then we would not have a problem. Maybe keeping people alive and healthy should not be driven by fucking greed on one side and radical catholicism on the other so that they can deny family planning to large parts of the country because they are the only hospital for miles.

[area51]

20. +1 n/t

[PurgedVoter]

2. Seperate the work from the writer.

There are a lot of great reasons to separate the work from the maker of the work. For one thing a writer's subconscious might help them write wisdom their conscious mind is having trouble grasping. Another reason is that art, even great art can be created by horrible, horrible people. Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Isaak Asimov, and a lot of others have given us insight and joy, while being less than they should have been or even monsters.
If you want to avoid their making a profit or their estate making a profit, then fine. This may be a good thing. But throwing out Harry Potter with an author who has internal demons, doesn't really help the world.
Niven was a joy, but he always felt a bit on the conservative side. Qanon has shown us how easily twisted the conservative mindset can be. To quote John Greenleaf Whittier, from his poem Icabod, "The tempter has a snare for all, and pitying tears not scorn and wrath befit his fall." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45486/ichabod By the way, Ichabod was written by an abolitionist in response to Daniel Webster, a hero of the abolition movement, voting for the Fugitive Slave Bill. https://owlcation.com/humanities/Ichabod-A-poem-on-the-Fugitive-Slave-Bill

Great men with great works have often had issues within those works. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn has suffered at times because it was sensitive to racial issues and at other times because it was not sensitive enough.

So while I still love the book, "Protector." I cringe at what foolishness Niven has fallen too. Especially on the issue stated. Truth is, that human health and failings in health care effect us all. If we think letting one person among us go without medical care and train them to fear it, we weaken us all. The anti-VAX people make us all less healthy. A person with a communicable disease that is avoiding or being denied care because of fear, oppression, poverty or politics, makes us all more likely to get sick. Niven is so insanely wrong. But then his ideas on Nuclear Safety have always been cray cray and without compassion.

[John Ludi]

4. A recent disappointment

has been seeing Ian Anderson prattling on about the "woke agenda" like some cranky old Tory in interviews pushing his latest output. Doesn't stop me from enjoying his earlier music, but I always wonder how long people have been of their mindset.

[TwilightZone]

5. A lot of people lost their minds when/since Obama was elected

That doesn't, of course, mean that they weren't always like that. They just seem to feel freer to opine about it since Trump opened the flood gates.

[John Ludi]

7. I guess the disconcerting thing

for me has been seeing people who were nuanced thinkers who seemed to have a decent amount of intellectual discernment and kind of floated above the fray go full tilt into jingoism and parrot the current lowbrow culture buzzwords and cliches. In some cases I think it's an economic motivation in that it's easier to make bank off of the right wing (or get more clicks, views, votes, etc.), but some of them almost seem like the ossification of aging minds. As I enter my older years I've found it harder and harder to get out of my own patterns, so perhaps that's an element in the mix.

[TwilightZone]

9. Agreed.

It's difficult to comprehend why anyone would still support Trump and the utterances of the extremist faction of the GOP at this point, much less those who seem to be somewhat intellectual. Some of it is economic, as you noted, and there's some legacy partisanship built in, but seeing people who previously appeared to be reasonably intelligent jump on the latest jingoistic nonsense can be a bit jarring.

[robbob]

6. Although I also enjoyed his earlier music

Ian Anderson always struck me as a cranky eccentric weirdo. I mean, have you read the lyrics to Aqualung? Very strange, twisted man…

[John Ludi]

8. There was always that

but when I think of Thick As a Brick (for one example) he very deftly lampooned the very type of person that he seems to have become. It happens, I guess.

[TwilightZone]

3. Niven was an adviser to Reagan on the Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as "Star Wars"

So, it's probably not too surprising.

There was talk at the time of his hospital nonsense (2008) that he might have been being satirical, but his staunch conservatism had been well-known since the 1960s or so.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

10. that guy who wrote the book with a race of non-sentient females?

the males are sentient and the females arent. wasn't Niven the author?

[melm00se]

16. Yes

but it was a plot device. The kzin (the race in question) manipulated their genetics to maximize their "heroic" qualities as those are what are valued by their society.

But this focus on maximizing the heroic also acts as a major societal flaw. The Kzinti race believes that the less certain of victory they are, the more heroic they are if/when they win. This leads the Kzinti to attack before they are ready and, in universe, this leads to their losses to the Humans.

In this context Niven is not celebrating this genetic manipulation evolution but pointing out the dangers and trade offs of doing it.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

23. ok... i didn't read that far into the book..

[ismnotwasm]

11. I knew.

Last edited Tue Jun 20, 2023, 10:30 AM - Edit history (1)

There’s a few of those guys—I think they had that libertarian mindset early on then turned into absolute assholes. Maybe they always were.

Orson Scott Card is another one, now him, I refuse to read. Fucker

[Deep State Witch]

14. Orson Scott Card

Andrew Card is a former Trump victim. Orson Scott Card is the writer of "Ender's Game", among others.

[ismnotwasm]

18. Oops--sorry! I better correct that

[hunter]

19. Orson Scott Card...

... used to frequent the Atari 800 forums, which is where I crossed paths with him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card

He was a libertarian asshole then, as too many science fiction authors have been. Stir that up in a pot with Mormon Fundamentalism and let it ferment and you'll get something truly foul.

I probably shouldn't be saying this as it reflects my own prejudice against the Mormon church. My family is Wild West. Our family religion is "Not Mormon." I've seen letters my great grandma wrote expressing her seething hatred of Mormon men.

[eppur_se_muova]

12. Never liked him. Seemed too impressed with himself.

One of his books includes a complete bibliography that's just stuffed full of trivial accomplishments. Never seen a resume so padded.

Also seems sex-obsessed, so a measure of misogyny is not at all surprising.

[hunter]

13. Pournelle was no prize either.

He and I had some interesting conversations back in the day.

I'd had plenty of practice. My grandfather was a similar character, but thirty years older, which made Niven's and Pournelle's bigotries seem sort of stale from my perspective. My grandfather had joined the Army Air Corp before World War II to escape rural Montana and Wyoming, and was an Army Air Force officer during World War II. Along the way he'd mysteriously acquired a knack for metals like titanium that were then considered quite exotic and was later an engineer for the Apollo Project.

Fortunately for my grandpa, all his woke family, friends, and diverse people he worked with constantly challenged him so he was forced to evolve. When my wife and I announced our engagement my grandpa had a fit because men in his family simply didn't marry "Mexican girls" (as he'd called my wife), but to his credit he got over it. He'd been much more disappointed when I changed my college major from engineering to biology.

I'm not so sure Niven and Pournelle, collaborating with one another and traveling in the largely libertarian "hard science fiction" communities, always enjoyed the same opportunities for personal growth that my grandfather had.

[highplainsdem]

15. Larry collaborated with Jerry Pournelle for decades, and while I

don't remember Larry as being as outspokenly political as Jerry (who'd had some professional involvement in politics, including for RW LA mayor Sam Yorty), I'd always assumed he probably shared Jerry's views. Which were very much on display in their 1977 bestseller, Lucifer's Hammer:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/from-lucifers-hammer-to-newts-moon-base-to-donalds-wallthe-sci-fi-roots-of-the-far-right
Archive page at https://archive.ph/Mntxj

-snip-

In partnership with Niven, Pournelle’s science-fiction married aggressive military might with Atlas Shrugged-style techno-futurist fantasies and nativist paranoia, offering what in retrospect looks like an uncannily prescient portrait of the Trump era and its cultural overtones. Take, for example, the pair’s Hugo-nominated 1977 novel Lucifer’s Hammer, which depicts a small ranch of patriotic American farmers as they struggle to survive after a comet hits earth. Early on, the farmers debate how to keep out undesirables:

“They'll all be here, all that can get here," Christopher shouted. “Los Angeles, and the San Joaquin, and what's left of San Francisco … How long can we keep it up, lettin' those people come here?”

"Be n**gers too," someone shouted from the floor. He looked self-consciously at two black faces at the end of the room. "Okay, sorry—no. I'm not sorry. Lucius, you own land. You work it. But city n**gers, whining about equality—you don't want 'em either!"

-snip-

This kind of scene — the asterisks are mine; they spelled the word out — plays on the same fears Trump stoked in his campaign of immigrants and undesirables invading the “real” America. Yet Pournelle and Niven yoked this divisiveness to an Ayn Randian view of technological progress, in which there are those who work and those who leech.

-snip-

Much more about that novel at the links. The article also mentions the quote from Larry that's in your OP.

Jerry was born in Louisiana. I have vague memories of having once read or heard that he'd been leftwing when young and then did the political flip some people with authoritarian tendencies do, but I didn't find anything just now on Google to back that up. (Sam Yorty, whom he worked for briefly, had been a liberal Democrat when young and turned jnto a RW populist before Jerry worked for him.) I don't have any idea where Larry's political views and racism might've come from. He's from a very wealthy California family (his great-grandfather was an oil tycoon), and he sold his first science fiction story soon after graduating from college, though I don't know when he started making enough money on it that he could have supported himself as a writer...or been able to afford insurance if his family hadn't been wealthy.

[Celerity]

17. thank you for the additional (and troubling) information

I have never read Lucifer's Hammer.

Do not think I am going to.

[hunter]

22. Speaking from my own youthful experiences...

... the only difference between the left and right wings were the clothes they wore and the food they ate.

There were prominent male leaders in both groups who expected "their" women to stand in their shadows, barefoot and pregnant.

In retrospect I think misogyny was the best predictor that some fiery young leftist male would later grow up to be a right wing asshole.

I could drop a few names, but I won't.

I was just a fiery young crazy person who was always getting into trouble. I started out as some kind of live-and-let-live libertarian with socialist tendencies who was drifting left. I continued drifting and these days I'd like to be labeled as a Social Justice Warrior and Radical Environmentalist. But I don't always live up to my calling.

[Rob H.]

21. I don't know the specifics of what happened, but...

my late brother met Niven at a con back in the 80s and came home saying he'd met him and Niven was such an asshole that he'd never read anything by him again.