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.
no subject
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.