Talk:Kevin J. Anderson/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Book signings

Dave Wolverton also claims the world record for the most book signings in one sitting, which he achieved with A Very Strange Trip in 1998. Presumably one broke the other's record? AndroidCat 04:46, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

In his professional bio, he claims that "For a book signing during the promotional tour for his comedy/adventure novel AI! PEDRITO!, Anderson broke the Guinness World Record for "Largest Single-Author Signing," passing the previous records set by Gen. Colin Powell and Howard Stern." - David Gerard 20:18, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

stub

Is this article really a stub? sure it needs to be expanded, but a stub? Superstarwarsfan 19:43, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

J

What does the J. stand for? - Sikon 08:27, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Unsourced passage from main article

Please find acceptable sources to cite for the claims made in this passage before restoring any of it to the main article. "Revoltingly unreadable" (emphasis mine) is POV, no? (Make no mistake: I'm a bigger fan of Wikipedia than I am a non-fan of Anderson. This isn't acceptable.)

  • He is also often criticized as crafting flat, static characters that downgrade a story rather than the round, dynamic characters that make a story great, as well as crafting airy and insubstantial, occasionally superfluous story lines with in his stories, which also take away from the story. Although his Dune books coauthored by Brian Herbert have acheived much acclaim, simply trying to read one gives a person a headache, due to the fact that it is written as though, "It [was] an instruction manual." Just looking into his repitoire makes one ponder why in the world anybody would choose him to write any part of Dune, considering that the majority of his body of work consits of spin-offs and tie-ins, while having a grand total of only eight books of his claimed fifty-something being completely original. Further more, of these eight books, five of them are part of The Saga of Seven Suns, a series which even Anderson has said is merely to make some form of contribution to the 'Space Epic' area of Science Fiction, an intention made more clearly as the books become more and more revoltingly unreadable with each additional book.

SandChigger 23:25, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I can confirm this, he really does suck the shit. This text is perfectly NPOV and absolutely belongs in the article. 24.2.50.116 (talk) 18:10, 16 November 2008 (UTC)
Kindly refrain from inserting your comments between my comment and my signature. You can confirm it, can you? And just WhoTF are you? People who can't be bothered to create user accounts and edit in a responsible manner are one of the bad things about Wikipedia. And there is nothing NPOV about the above text. I have removed it from the article. If you can quote citable sources, fine, do so. Otherwise go play somewhere else. --SandChigger (talk) 09:36, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Uncited/opinion-based comments

Hey, I put the whole section back up, but I got rid of the part that was opinion-based. I do think I need citations in there, and I have them, but my problem is that I have no Idea how to put them in there. Can somebody help? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.165.16.247 (talk • contribs) 21:34, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Please list your sources here and we'll help you. SandChigger 17:55, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
Waiting... SandChigger 19:17, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Hold on awhile, I have more important things to do than slander somebody who deserves it. The citations ran off on me, and I'm kind of buried in work right now, so it will be awhile. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.165.16.247 (talk • contribs) 03:36, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Why am I not surprised? If "slander" is your objective, then maybe it's best we leave it out entirely, no? SandChigger 22:57, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Where do you come off? You're acting like you're so high and mighty, picking and choosing words out of my passages to demean them. Last time I checked, this website is for the public to monitor, not for people like you, who sit at their computers and inact their will upon others. The page is going back up, citations or no, and delete them if you want, you're only going to prove my point.

"Assume good faith and treat the other person in the discussion as a fellow editor, who is a thinking, feeling person, trying to contribute to Wikipedia, just like you - unless, of course, you have objective proof to the contrary, which can be validated by a third party. Someone's disagreeing with you is no such proof!" -Wikipedia Talk Page

If you're going to assume such bad faith towards myself, then I will do just the same, as you can see. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.126.74.181 (talk • contribs) 08:46, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm a member of the public, just like you, trying to contribute to this project.
Read the top of the page again:
This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Negative material that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous. The three-revert rule does not apply to such removals. Concerns relative to this policy can be addressed on the living persons biographies noticeboard.
Wikipedia policy requires all information to be citable. Look it up for yourself. (It's also standard practice to sign your comments on Talk Pages. And to create an account if you're really serious about contributing.)
You behavior in this makes it very difficult to assume good faith. A third party notified me of your newest actions. To me that seems like a validation of my evaluation. If you cannot or will not provide citations, the content goes. SandChigger 01:58, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

What I'm saying more than anything else is that I have a lot on my plate right now, and I don't really appreciate your tone in the last comment you made. For one thing, there was the specific quote of one and only one word; see, I've recently just lost a friendship with one of my best friends because of bad word choice in a post. Words don't always hold the same value to me as they do others, for example, my brother didn't talk to me for nearly a month because I said his band wasn't bad. In my mind, calling something 'not bad' is on par with 'really good,' but most people don't see things this way. A similar problem with my friend. Basically, I said something the wrong way, they took it the wrong way, and now I don't know if we can ever be friends again. It was also that that was the second time you had quoted one to two words and used it to critize the whole message.

Also in your last comment, you seemed to be taking this sort of overlordly, sarcastic tone, and saying anything in such a tone of voice is one of the few things that can really set me off. But you have to understand, with school really getting underway, I am seriously backlogged- I think now I still have like three hours of work to do. When I wrote that post, I was really in a hurry. I don't mean to "slander" Kevin Anderson; I mean to show the public that there is another viewpoint on his work, because if you look into it, he gets positive feed back from almost anywhere; this is also why citing specific examples of negative view point is so hard to do, because he has a whole company under him to bring out the good as opposed to the bad.

So please, just some patience. It could be quite a while. Don't dwell on this, I'm sure there are other things that need your attention right now. I'd be happy to supply you with citations, but it could take me a long time.

PS: Actually, I don't have any idea how to sign a post, so sorry about that. And as for creating an account, it's something that I avoid whenever possible because last time I joined a 'safe' site, I ended up with 9 different trojans and it took me three working days just to delete them, restore my system, and then defrag the C drive. So I'm not to kean on signing up accounts on websites.

OK. To mangle a quote, "Post in haste (posthaste?), repent at leisure." :)
The unfortunate choice of "slander" followed by "one who deserves it" seemed to confirm my suspicion that that was your main intention. Sorry. This isn't the first time my sarcasm has gotten me into it.
As I think I mentioned before, I'm no fan of Kevin Anderson's. (I haven't read anything he has written other than the Dune novels, in fact.) But I am a big fan of Wikipedia and, as I noted on the talk page associated with your IP address, citing sources is essential here. If it takes time for you to find where you read what you based the material on, that's no problem. The page isn't going anywhere! :) (Hmm...how many ways can that be taken?!)
(Believe me, I really do want you to find the citations, because I agree that the critical review thus far has been rather skewed!)
As for your computer catching something from using Wikipedia...I've never heard of it. (I've been coming here for several years--this is a special "Dune-only" account I created a few months ago, tho--and have never had any problems. Of course, I'm a Mac user, so YMMV. :) )
(To sign a comment, just put four tildes (~~~~) at the end and the system does the rest. There are also the Javascript buttons at the top of the window; in my browser (Safari) it's the eleventh one from the left, the one with handwritten letters on the icon. HTH!) SandChigger 03:53, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Just to let you know, Sandchigger is correct is his posts here and his edits on the main page. Anything...anything negative added to a persons bio page must be cited to reliable sources. Also the entire article must maintain a neutral point of view so if you add in negative reviews then you must also provide some positive ones to balance out the article. Right now there is no mention of reviews or people's opinions of his writing, that is probably for the best in my opinion, but if you insist on putting negative information in there then be prepared to have it deleted entirely or altered in many major ways, for example, you can't just say "some people feel" those are weasel words which are not allowed, now if you find a review by John Smith that states, "KJA is the worst writer in the history of the world" then what you must say is, "reviewer John Smith states that KJA is the worst writer in the history of the world" not that some people think he is a bad writer. Also this statmenet would have to be sourced to the actual review, which should not be about a specific book since this article is about the person, and that review must be hosted on a reliable source such as a major book review website, or an article in a published book and/or magazine with a high readership and much respect among the literary community Konman72 08:13, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for understanding. And yes, I know what the article needs, and I know my little passage needs to be rewritten. Don't worry about that, I'll fix it when it comes to that. And as for not having an account, I might get one when I get more serious about editing the pages. My sources (well, friends) tell me that it's clean, so whenever I feel the need, I will. Oh...and, just as a goodwill sort of thing, would you delete that comment about me having a "chubby" for KJA? Personally, I think it's a witty analogy, but it just kind of scares me is all. It's on Konman72's talk page.67.165.16.247 19:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I'll move it to my archive, and if Sandchigger is ok with it then I'll delete it from there. Konman72 20:22, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. 67.165.16.247 23:48, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

(Chubbies are like sandworms...safe as long as properly contained. And who didn't love the Checker?! Delete away, Kon! SandChigger 00:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC))

Last Days of Krypton?

How to classify this one? (Not due out for a while, so time to think about it.) --SandChigger 17:52, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Writing with a Ouija board?

How did KJA write "Ai! Pedrito!" with L. Ron Hubbard in 1998 when Hubbard died in 1986? Was there any collaboration between the two? Where there midnight séances with Xenu? DC-9s in space? What, what? Would it be more accurate to say KJA finished the book the Hubbard started? With may be more ascetically pleasing in the list but what is more accurate? 198.6.46.11 16:18, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

You're entirely correct. To write that Anderson wrote the book "with" Hubbard is a misrepresentation of the facts. The situation is similar to that for the new Slan Hunter novel: he completed the unfinished work begun by the other author. I have corrected "with" to "using materials by" and added a subsection for Slan Hunter as well. If anyone can come up with a better way of phrasing this, please do. -SandChigger 09:59, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

How to properly handle reader critcism on WP

The preceeding discussions here about the unsourced negative comments about KJA bring up an interesting point. Even if they were sourced (though I don't know how they really could be - to someone's blog? Another wiki?) - they are still opinions. It is not clear how opinions *can* be sourced, or even if they should be. I suppose the best thing would be some kind of "number of negative KJA comments out there by readers", but that somehow seems worse than the 'negative' sections in WP.

Nonetheless, there is negative sentiment on KJA out there [[1] (this 'source' is the KJA talk page on the Star Wars wiki Wookipedia). To not put in this information, which being opinions by people cannot really be said to be false or true, seems a disservice to someone who want's a 'balanced' view of KJA, not just in terms of objectives such as what he has written, but also in terms of the reading-public's reaction to that materal. This kind of negative reaction is not restricted to KJA either - a lot of people seem to hate Barabara Hambly - at least when she writes in the Star Wars universe.

I believe it is important for there to be some way to 'objectively' convey the fact that these negative beliefs exist in the reading/fan community in order to present a full view of the author and how his works are recieved, especially if a writer (established or amateur) is going to write using characters or events he has created or largely expanded.

To turn this situation around, would it be equally unfair to say a particular autor was 'widely praised for the quality of his/her characters and dialog?' even if this was unsourced because the sources themselves are unreliable (being opinions themselves), or so diverse as to be impossible to locate in total (and useless if so located - too much information is as much a problem as too little)

-Jim (unreistered as of yet, but I'll get around to it)

(The preceding comment was added by 216.9.143.185 11:25, 21 July 2007 (UTC))

Blogs and other wikis, as "self-published sources" are not acceptable as citable sources. See WP:SPS for more information. Specifically, from Wikipedia:Verifiability:
Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional researcher or writer; see WP:BLP.
Hope this helps. --SandChigger 06:15, 21 July 2007 (UTC)
KJA is an awful hack, but there is no fair way to convey this using facts. The closest you can come is to point out that despite being a prolific and multi-bestselling science fiction author he has never won a Hugo or Nebula (never will, either, but you can't say that... yet.) silsor 01:41, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Even if he died tomorrow you wouldn't be able to include that. Not really good form, is it, filling a bio page with a list of things the person didn't do? Like "Never wrote a book while hiking on Mt. Everest," or "Never had to pay much for haircuts after age 40," or ... that sort of thing. --SandChigger 03:25, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, so how to relate the prevailing opinion on someone's work? In the case of a movie, would a link to and a mention of the result from Rotten Tomatoes be OK (as they tally a rather large body of professional critics)? Would a users' rating from IMDb be acceptable? What to do in the case of SF? Not even ISFDB doesn't keep a score of reviews... --bonzi (talk) 16:53, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

The Martian War as "Original"?

Something about classifying this book as "original" bothers me. The only original part is the combination [read: mishmashing together] of (fairly incompatible?) Wells characters and story elements into one book. Just saying. --SandChigger (talk) 09:56, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Biography

It is stated that Anderson worked in LLNL - in what capacity? In other words, is (was) he a physicist or similar, or was he working, as his wife did, in a more "liberal arts" role? --bonzi (talk) 16:58, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, please, you must be kidding, him work as a physicist there? He has a BS in Physics (with a minor in Astronomy) from the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He was a technical writer at LLNL, nothing more. --SandChigger (talk) 02:51, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Awards?

How do high sales qualify as an "award"? Almost every other SF author's bibliography only lists actual awards on their lists. This article also does not state if the X-files novels and Star Wars anthologies listed as bestsellers were actually written by KJA alone, or if they topped the (unnamed) lists by sheer volume, and there are other issues with this list. It looks like it was deliberately compiled to critically legitimize his work. 76.227.155.19 (talk) 05:52, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Bestselling is an accomplishment, and deserves mention somewhere, but Awards is most def' not the section for it. I'm going to remove them; if they are re-added, I hope they will be re-added with citations. --Gwern (contribs) 01:03 28 December 2009 (GMT)

Hellhole Trilogy

According to this blog post from April 2008, the "series" is to consist of three books:

These three novels (HELLHOLE, HELLHOLE INFERNO, and HELLHOLE IMPACT) give us an opportunity to showcase our skills in creating a large, well-developed canvas.

Editing the listings accordingly.

(Or has Hellhole been reduced to two books as well, like the Heroes SERIES?) --SandChigger (talk) 07:02, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

Missing Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. Short Stories

Since there is a listing of short stories within the Dune universe, and then a listing of stand-alone short fiction, I'm of the opinion that his Dan Shamble short stories should be listed under the Dan Shamble section.

The two I am aware of are:
Stakeout at the Vampire Circus (novella? ~100 pages in e-book format)
Road Kill (~40 pages)

I'm not sure of the order of these as I haven't yet read the series. I have Stakeout at the Vampire Circus marked as 1.5, and Road Kill marked as 2.5, however (following Death Warmed Over and Unnatural Acts, respectively.) 24.253.192.189 (talk) 19:58, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

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