And in some cases, most definitely should. The Dark Herald reviews The Last Closet:
I first ran into Marion Zimmer Bradley’s work in college. A friend who had steered me right on several occasions, (Dune, Canticle for Leibowitz, Lefthand of Darkness) strongly recommended City of Sorcery to me.
He was overdue for a clinker. City of Sorcery had a number problems for me. It wasn’t an ideal first entry to the Darkover world. It was jumping into the middle of an established universe. If you weren’t all that familiar with the rules of this world as established by the author, then you had to puzzle out a lot stuff as you read the book. Bradley was disinclined to fill in the blanks. Also, back in those days I was Science Fiction Snob. Sure I’d read Tolkien and Leiber and yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons. But as an SFS I viewed science fiction books as vastly superior not least because they didn’t run to eight hundred pages and fantasy was starting to do that…a lot.
This book was clearly fantasy mascaraing as science fiction.
Also it was just a little bit…off. There was no one thing I could really put my finger on. Just a general feel of something that wasn’t quite right here. Sort of when you walk in to a mist spray of fine vinegar, you know something’s wrong but it’s a little too diffuse to say what.
There was a miasma of something very off putting with the women in this book. An unpleasant edge, almost like they were the anti-Bujold characters. The heroines were the Renunciates. It wasn’t explicitly stated what they had renounced but it was obviously heterosexuality. It was a club for angry lesbians with the quasi religious overtones of a goofy hippy religion, (which as as Gen-Xer I had little use for). The protagonist was the Chief Terran Agent on Darkover who had gone native and married another woman and were somehow raising a kid together. The enemy was a bunch of evil space lesbians who were plotting…something(?),..I forget what. It was the characters that mattered in this book and I didn’t like any of them.
When my friend asked me about it, I made some joke about, The Lesbians In Spaaaaaace. He didn’t like the joke at all and told me so. I replied that the author was clearly writing about that of which she knows. My friend laughed a little too loudly because he was about to ‘one up’ me, in true Gamma fashion.
“Nope, she’s happily married with two kids,” he smirked.
“Yeah, I got my doubts about the happily part,” I replied.
Holy crap, I never spoke truer words.
People often talk about the necessity of distinguishing between the artist and the art, but usually in the context of not rejecting the art on the basis of the behavior or character or politics or ideology of the artist. And this is correct, because to do so is to commit the genetic fallacy.
However, it is right and proper to judge the artist on the basis of the art. More often than not, the art created by the artist provides relevant insight into his psyche; it is very difficult to write the opposite sex well and it is also very difficult for a man to write characters who are different than his own socio-sexual rank.
Read Louis L’Amour and Robert Ludlum. Then read John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman. The difference is readily observable. Then read Piers Anthony and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Notice the creep factor? Exactly. This is one area where you can reliably trust your feelings.