Quote:
Originally Posted by DuskyRose
I've been reading Urban Fantasy lately, and came across the Paul Cornell book "The Severed Streets". He has Neil Gaiman as a character in the book, down to the description of the guy. And not just a cameo, but looking to be a return character in the next book.
While I'm sure he's gotten permission, since he thanks Mr. Gaiman in the front of the book, I'm not really liking it. When I hit upon it in the book, it bumped me out of the story, wondering if maybe I was reading the character's name wrong. So I checked the name and description to make sure it was actually the Neil Gaiman I was thinking of.
Anything that bumps me out of the story, IMHO, is a bad thing. I didn't need it, the story didn't need it, and I'm sure no one would have missed out on it if the author had just created a new character to fill that spot.
I just find it really annoying when they do that.
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Paul Cornell talks about that at conventions, and also at
io9.com. IIRC correctly, he's not planning on using Neil as a character in the future books.
As far as using other authors as characters under different names, Anthony Boucher did that in
Rocket To The Morgue, which used a number of southern California SF writers as characters, and Larry Niven and David Gerrold wrote
The Flying Sorcerors, which had a number of SF authors (usually with names based on the actual name) as gods in an alien pantheon, and the protagonist "As a shade of Purple Grey" was Isaac Asimov.