Consider this: with no other author who wrote books about war do I have so small an intuition about what the author himself or herself thought. I find his characters and plots pure in this respect, and I see every bit as a point hard on the edge and axis of the Paretto curve such that he couldn't have let intrude his thoughts about war without lessening other positive aspects of his works.

It's possible the great distance between our times is what gives me this void when I think of the man's opinions, or that these feelings and thoughts are idiosyncratic to me, or that they are irrelevant in judging him.

But it's pretty obvious to me what earlier Chaucer thought about a lot of things, and with every author but Shakespeare I find the author leaking through his or her work, preventing characters from standing on their own. Reading Shakespeare, imagining what he thought about things provides me with a unique way to focus. Reading HPatMoR, I have to do the opposite and expend focus thinking of Harry as a character and not an AI researcher.