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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 1686986" data-attributes="member: 5171">Glad I didn't give offense.  I mean, I figure you wouldn't be too put off, what with that prison tattoo avatar and all... (cough)As far as the "all events fictitious" thing, I agree with you in principle.  However, I still remember being mightily honked off upon reading some continuation of the Riftwar Saga that brought back Macros the Black (um, spelling up the wazoo here, it's been awhile).  And in this later series, he said, "Hey, remember all that stuff I told you about being tens of thousands of years old and from another dimension, cursed to never die?  Yeah, I made all that up.  I'm actually a 400 year-old guy from Churt," or something like that.In theory, this is a legal infodump.  In practice, it made me put the book down in anger, because in the earlier book, all the things he told our heroes were not lies.  It's possible, sure, that the author had this in mind the whole time and this was some great trick.  "Haha, the Merlin figure will tell them a big lie here in the main series, and then, on the off-chance this gets picked up for another sequel series, I can let him reveal the truth!"  It is indeed possible. However, 1) Feist doesn't bluff that well, 2) My Sense Motive is pretty high, and 3) The way the original story was told, as a story and not a dialogue, made it clear that this was supposed to be an infodump, not a clever lie.  If it was supposed to be a clever lie, you'd be giving the reader little clues here and there, bits of eye contact, description of what Macros is doing as he talks, that kind of thing.So -- in theory, this is just a surprising development. In practice, it violated the reader-author contract, in my opinion, and screwed up my enjoyment of the series.  Even going back to the first novels didn't work anymore, because the "Oh, this is all a lie" stuff is still there.  It's like watching "The Empire Strikes Back" and thinking, "Why doesn't Yoda just tell Luke that his midichlorian count is more than high enough to lift the X-Wing out of the swamp?"It's not the same situation, of course.  But I think it's analogous.  Brown didn't make up authority figures to say, "Hey, this stuff is true!"  He used real-world people.  And when his publisher, who should know this stuff, hears their names, he says, "Wow, this stuff is all true," instead of "Wow, those guys are all in the New Age Mysticism section at Borders, not the History section.  You don't have any credible sources."  He plays all kinds of cute little "break the fourth wall" tricks to tell the reader that this is not just fiction -- this is based on factual stuff, even though the characters aren't real.Then there's his website:<a href="http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/faqs.html" target="_blank">http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_code/faqs.html</a>I'll heartily agree that he's being very careful -- for example, I would've sworn that "organizations" was listed as "true" in that first question until I read it again and saw that he was careful only to list architecture and art as being a true, factual thing -- but I also think that he's doing his darndest to build up the mystique in a manner that is more than a little dishonest.But that is solely my opinion, based as it is on overhearing a number of workmates talk about how life-changing this book was and how many powerful secrets it reveals and how it could totally undermine the Catholic church...</blockquote>

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