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by jiggawatts
1023 days ago
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Battlefield Earth brings back a memory: it was the first book I had read where I realised that authors can have serious mental problems. Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people. The books you'll read in a high school library are also curated by librarians. There's an expectation of quality you don't notice until suddenly you pick up a book at the local council library authored by someone with some serious untreated mental issues. After that revelation I started noticing the author of a book instead of just paying attention to the content of the book. Similarly to L Ron Hubbard, I found The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson impossible to finish. There's something deeply wrong about him that I can't quite put my finger on. (I did finish his Gap Cycle series, but felt dirty in my brain after.) I picked up The Dragonriders of Pern series based purely on the dragon on the cover and just started reading. A few chapters in, I though to myself: "This is written by a woman, isn't it?", flipped to the cover page and lo-and-behold: "Anne McCaffrey" -- I had guessed correctly! |
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Wait, what? Do you know how many famous authors suffer from some sort of severe mental illness? Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and on and on. In fact, most of the great artists in general have a mental illness they can ascribe their creativity to. They can also be quite intelligent and educated at the same time.