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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28370 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Being glad that you're not the subject of someone is not the same as impropriety on the part of the person, though.

I'm reminded of Michael Crichton. He wrote a book that was critical of global warming hysteria. An editor of the New Republic stridently criticized it for that. In his next book, Crichton featured a (minor) character with the same name as the editor, with the same education and occupation. And he had that character be a pedophile with an extraordinarily small dick, whose only real characterization is someone who feels an urge to rape his fiance's infant child. Crichton points out that, despite the character's cosmically small dick, he managed to cause severe anal tearing in the infant child. Naturally, the editor sharing the character's name threw a hissy fit.

It's fair to say that this is much less sympathetic than the situation in the OP, maximally so, with clearly no literary value and just a way for Crichton to lash out at a critical review. But did Crichton deserve legal sanction for this? No. The only relevant critique is a literary one: did this help the story? It didn't, but to have good fiction, we need to reserve the space for authors to be petty assholes.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that part of the definition for libel is that it has to be believable. Crichton's character wasn't really believable, it just seemed like a weird joke where was lashing out at someone. Not very nice, but not libel. In this case though, lots of people reading the story assumed it was based on real life and asked for more details, and lots of people in the personal life of both the main characters and asked them if it was about them. To me that sounds more like "libel" than "fiction."

That's like Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. The actions of the character are so extreme that nobody would understand that book to mean that the real person actually did those things.

That scandal inspired one of the most memorably titled articles in Wikipedia history.

Strangely after reading that, I want to get Michael Crichton, Michael Crowley, and Michael Conklin in a room together to hash it all out.

"Mine's bigger."

"Give me a minute, it's cold in here!"

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