Talk:Eric Flint

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[edit] Added by Eric Flint

Added by Eric Flint: Since this article involves me, I don't feel it's proper for me to simply edit it. I do feel, however, that some of the information contained above concerning my editing projects is very inaccurate, and I will state here what I feel to be the actual facts of the case.

1) "Unfortunately, his original description of these edits was rather flamboyant." What actually happened was that someone, without asking my permission, excerpted a few short phrases from several very long descriptions of my editing of James H. Schmitz that I posted on Baen's Bar, the discussion area in Baen Books' web site. Taken out of context and artificially stitched together, these phrases -- not one of which, as I recall, was even a complete sentence -- gave a completely skewed view of how I approached the editing. The "flamboyance" involved was thus, in my opinion, nothing but an artificial product of the shoddy -- indeed, dishonest -- methods used by the person who produced the pastiche.

2) "for example, many references to smoking in situations where it might jar modern readers were removed from the stories." This statement is typical of the ridiculous exaggerations made by my critics, and has precious little relationship to the facts. In reality, in the course of producing over twenty thick volumes of reissued material, I removed references to smoking in a _few_ instances. All told, probably not more than half a dozen. Most references to smoking were left in. The ones I removed were simply those that I thought would be so jarring to modern readers as to break their concentration on the story. Someone lighting up a cigarette in an aircraft, for instance, and offering a cigarette to the woman sitting next to him. When I read that, I burst into laughter. I'm a smoker myself, and I can just imagine how people would react if _I_ lit up a cigarette in an airplane and offered one to the woman sitting next to me, who is almost a complete stranger. :)

3) "and some of these edits have been extremely controversial"

Extremely controversial to _whom_? In general, all of these comments seem to be taken from the relatively small group of my very vocal critics on _one_ web site out of millions: "rec.arts.sf.written" on Usenet. I think it is unfortunate that the person who wrote this essay chose to devote 55 out of the 86 words he wrote on my editing -- 64% of the total text -- to publicizing the opinions of this small group of critics, and then concluding that the editing has been "extremely" controversial. This is akin to saying that the notion the earth is round is "extremely" controversial because a handful of people in the world insist it isn't true.

Only in the final sentence do we start returning to the real world, outside of Usenet: "Nevertheless, the resulting story collections have been very successful, commercially."

They certainly have. To date, the various volumes I've reissued of writings by authors who have been out of print or close to it for decades have sold in the vicinity of 250,000 copies. I think the opinion of those quarter of a million readers ought to count for more than 36% of an essay, most of which is devoted to a relative handful of critics, most of whom -- with a few honorable exceptions -- have engaged in completely duplicitous and distorted argumentation. To give just one example, a firestorm erupted in "rec.arts.sf.written" on Usenet when I was accused of cutting three sentences from Schmitz's short story "Novice." In reality, I cut nothing. The three sentences were cut in the _original_ magazine edition, by John Campbell, the editor of Analog. My critic, in this instance -- in the name of "literary authencity," no less -- simply didn't bother to determine what the original edition was in the first place. That's pretty typical of the methods used by my critics.

Eric Flint 11:57, 6 September 2005

I believe the article has been NPOVed soon after your comments - thanks for the clarification.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 18:14, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Related category

See Category:Eric Flint books.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 16:36, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Books need ISBN numbers

Just a note, I don't have time to add them right now. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 05:53, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

• Unless you are going to do a table, doing ISBN's for books that link to articles herein is nonsensical and a time waste. But it's your time, but the articles already have that info, so if linked, lean on it. I had similar decision working up cite book types of templates for the 1632 series... the book link is enough, since the articles contain ALL the ISBN's. // FrankB 06:37, 1 December 2007 (UTC)