A month ago, on September 11th, speculative fiction author Elizabeth Moon posted a long article about her thoughts on the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on her personal blog. The article contained a few paragraphs on the topic of Muslim immigrants in the US and the big "mosque at Ground Zero" controversy. Largely due to a few particularly wrong-sounding sentences - intentional or unintentional - this led to a rather big fuss in the comments on her own blog and elsewhere, for instance here. It is not my intention to rekindle a controversy that happened a month ago, or to debate the merits of Moon's views or the reactions to them. Those who wanted to participate in that debate no doubt have done so somewhere in the blogosphere.

However, I thought it might be interesting to have a broader discussion based on incidents like this one or the big controversy sparked by this Dan Simmons story that saw such heated debate on the wotmania OF board four years ago (how time flies...). Where authors of generations past propagated their views on controversial subjects mostly through their books, or occasionally through interviews in the mass media, many contemporary authors now have websites, blogs, Twitter, etc., and can share their views with hundreds or thousands of their readers almost instantaneously. And if that causes enough of a stir in the blogosphere, even the mass media may get involved and spread those expressions of views even further. (Of course this is true for all "public figures", not only authors, but since we are after all a board for discussion of literature, I'm focusing on authors here. )

Of course, such controversies are not necessarily all bad for the author. One of the biggest maxims of marketing, after all, is that any publicity is good publicity. Inevitably, controversies of this kind cause some people to declare they'll never read author X or Y again, or at least not buy his or her books, but whether those authors actually notice that in their sales figures, is a different question, and they might get new readers instead. And certain authors actually have enough influence that by publicly discussing an issue, they can affect its outcome, such as J.K. Rowling's intervention in the case of the Romanian mental institutions.

I'll provide a few questions for people to give their views on, but don't feel like you are limited to the questions asked, by all means share any other thoughts you might have.



1) Are you interested in reading the views held by your favourite authors, or authors that you like in general, on topics not directly related to their books?

1a) If so, how much does it bother you when you find out their views are quite different from yours, or even offensive to you?

1b) If not, can your view of such authors still be influenced by hearing about their views involuntarily?

2) Have the political, religious, social,... views of an author ever been a factor in your decision not to read a book by him or her?

2a) Or in your decision not to buy it?

3) Have you ever had the opposite reaction to such a controversy, feeling more inclined to buy or read books by the author, rather than less?

4) Do you think, all things considered, that it's a good thing for authors to write on their blogs about things not directly related to their work? Does that enhance the reading experience, hinder it, or neither?