* * * This message was from John W. Kennedy to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
         * * * and has been forwarded to you by Lord Time * * *         
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{at}REPLY: 
John Duncan Yoyo wrote:
> On 15 Sep 2006 12:54:30 -0700, "John W. Kennedy"
>  wrote:
>
>> John Duncan Yoyo wrote:
>>> Well that's good I was trying to explain the phenomenon.
>> You are trying to "explain" my entirely rational and objective
>> complaint that a book is full of ignorant lies by dismissing me as a
>> religious bigot.
>
> We are all someone else's heretic.  You keep taking this personal.

You keep MAKING it personal by presuming to explain me away. I refuse
to be Bulverized.

> It is fiction and claims to be fiction.  All fiction is based on lies.
> So what is the real problem here?

There is a difference between fiction in the plot and falsehood in the
background, a difference that was pellucidly clear to me when I was
still reading my mother's old "Bobbsey Twins" books. I knew the Bobbsey
Twins weren't real, but I also knew, when they visited the Library of
Congress, in "The Bobbsey Twins Go To Washington", that /it/ was.

When the first Dell "Babylon 5" paperback said that Mars is boiling
hot, because the author was too silly to distinguish between Kelvin and
Celsius, he was rightly gigged. It was stupid and careless and
completely failed to pass a basic sanity test, seeing that Mars is half
again as far from the Sun as the Earth is.

When the final shots of "Atonement" showed zero-gee inside an
accelerating ship, JMS was rightly gigged for it, though this was a
lesser sin, since A) getting Newtonian physics right requires more
understanding of physics than estimating the surface temperature of
Mars does -- and Joe admits he's no good at math --, B) we knew that
Joe was /trying/ to get it right, and C) it was mainly about a sight
gag.

Good ol' Gharlane never failed to point out these things. I miss him.

"The DaVinci Code" is /full/ of historic errors from beginning to end.
Once you get beyond such basic concepts as that was once such a thing
as the Roman Empire, that there is such a country as France, and that
there was once an organization known as the Templars, Brown eats up
almost every piece of urban myth, misunderstanding, and outright
propaganda that he falls across (including the ravings and forgeries of
a 20th-century gentleman who thought he was the rightful king of
France). And he mostly got it from a decade-old book that, among other
things, suggests that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a real
historic document.

Reading "The DaVinci Code" makes you stupid, just as does reading
"Digital Fortress", and a mind is a terrible thing to piss in.

> No elevating the DVC to level where someone gets actively offended to
> rather than passing it off as a work of fiction isn't worthy of
> consideration.  Part of what lifted the DVC out of the pack was the
> religious elite going after it.

Dismissing propaganda, or plain slovenliness, because it is entangled
in the text of an acknowledged fiction, is either overly ingenuous or,
perhaps, disingenuous. No author is exempt from a duty to try to get
his facts right.

And now, pardon me, but the current #401 bestseller on Amazon has
attributed something to me, personally, that is both damned
embarrassing, and simply false. So Dan Brown is going to have to go on
the back burner while I try to get Random House to insert an errata
slip.

--
John W. Kennedy
[T]he attentive [Iroquois] heard her words with some such surprise as
an American of our own times would be apt to betray at a suggestion
that the great modern but vacillating ruler of things human, public
opinion, might be wrong.
           -- James Fenimore Cooper: "The Deerslayer"

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