Gee, I can't wait until I'm a mega-famous NYT bestseller so I can spout my views about a volatile issue, get criticized for it, and respond by fictionalizing my criticizers as truly heinous characters in my books. Thanks, Michael Crichton. You've taught me a lot about the industry. How you can stop writing good fiction for the sake of movies. How you can stop writing good fiction for the sake of theme-bludgeoning. How you can stop writing good fiction and still earn crap loads of money. How you can stop writing good fiction and fling mud at a critic my making them a child rapist in your next novel.
Via John Joseph Adams, who links to the affair while getting a jab into Crichton that the author has become boring and pedantic. This is what I discovered with Prey and will never read another Crichton book because of it.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
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2 comments:
Now, a reasonable author, with a grain of sense, would know that if you plan to toss an enemy into a book, you do so quietly, so that no one knows who it is. You don't shorten his name, still making it obvious that you're having a temper tantrum.
Guess I should be glad the last book I read of his was The Lost World.
Yeah, I probably should've stopped with The Lost World as well, but the call of nanotechnology in Prey was too much to resist--at least when it came to borrowing the book from a friend. I probably wouldn't have bought it. And after Prey, seeing Timeline on my friend's bookshelf didn't tempt me to pick it up at all.
I actually tried to fictionalize a real-life annoyance, but the damn character turned out to be rather smart and not the stupid patsy I was hoping for. At least I didn't use the man's last name, and I think I even sufficiently tweaked his first name so only I would see the connection.
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