If they do get something factually wrong, your response is a continuation of the conversation.
If they say something that you hadn't thought of but is provocative and interesting and inspires you to say something else, that too is a continuation of the conversation.
If you're having a conversation in e-mail or blog comments, the words you write are, or should be, still there even after you go on to say something else, even as the words you write in a book are still there.
Either way, the author is not dead.
I've seen literary papers delivered on the works of a living author as if that author were dead, with the author right there in the room. Now that's creepy.
I forget who (Paul Carter? Brian Attebery?) commented that we do an injustice when we reprint 1930s-50s SF stories out of the magazines in glistening solitude in anthologies. Read in original context, they seem like contributions to a continuing conversation that's rapidly developing the nature of SF.
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Date: 2008-06-28 06:14 am (UTC)If they say something that you hadn't thought of but is provocative and interesting and inspires you to say something else, that too is a continuation of the conversation.
If you're having a conversation in e-mail or blog comments, the words you write are, or should be, still there even after you go on to say something else, even as the words you write in a book are still there.
Either way, the author is not dead.
I've seen literary papers delivered on the works of a living author as if that author were dead, with the author right there in the room. Now that's creepy.
I forget who (Paul Carter? Brian Attebery?) commented that we do an injustice when we reprint 1930s-50s SF stories out of the magazines in glistening solitude in anthologies. Read in original context, they seem like contributions to a continuing conversation that's rapidly developing the nature of SF.