Per Wikipedia, “On occasion, authors insert themselves under their own name into their works, typically for humorous or surrealistic effect.” Have you ever seen this? What book/author?
Second question: if you started reading a story where the main character’s nickname is the same as the author’s name, what would your reaction be? Would it affect how much you enjoyed the story, regardless of the writing quality?
Isaac Asimov has characters in his Black Widower series and his Azazel refer to Asimov by name (generally disparagingly). Philip Jose’ Farmer had a character named Peter Jairus Frigate (a fairly obvious pseudonym) in his Riverworld series.
Heinlein had a character in “The Number of the Beast-” with a name that contained the letters of his own name, scrambled. In addition to Asimov’s Black Widower and Azazel stories, he wrote at least one novel, Murder at the ABA, with a rather thinly disguised Harlan Ellison as the narrator and himself (undisguised) as another character.
I’ve also read a couple of books in which the characters were reading another book by the same author. Sorry, I can’t remember the names of the books or the authors, they were definitely B-listers, though.
Charles Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe” has a main character (a fictional one, not a direct representation of the author) named Charles Yu.
ALL of the Black Hats in that book are Bob under his own name or a pen name, scrambled.
Clive Cussler has shown up as a grizzled old coot that Dirk Pitt encounters several times in his books.
Did this affect your opinion of the book when you read it?
Clive Cussler is fairly famous for inserting himself into his books. He’s done it something like 6-9 times.
He ALSO has a strong tendency which I believe is unique, or nearly so. He writes his cars into his books. He collects and restores cars from the 1920s and 1930s, and he’s written something like a dozen books where the main character is described as owning a car that Cussler himself owns.
Incidentally, his collection is open to the public on a limited basis. My parents and I went there once.
You’re probably right. I’m still trying to forget that book, so I try not to think about it too much.
Yet another Asimov . His short story " The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline " was a parody of a scientific research paper and dealt with a fictional substance that dissolved *before * contact with water. In one of the sequels to this story, a reference is made to the original description of its properties “by Azimuth or possibly Asymptote .”
No, to me it fits in with the other metafictional/experimental aspects of the book (the character meeting a time traveling version of himself, “How to Live Safely…” itself being a book within the narrative, etc.)
The doctor and narrator in the K-Pax books was Gene Brewer, the same name as the author. I thought it was kind of gimmicky, but even though I enjoyed the books at the time, they’re kind of gimmicky in many ways, so that was the least of it is.
Paul Auster did this in City of Glass, and J.M. Coetzee did this in three of his fictional memoirs. I didn’t find that it impacted my enjoyment of the work one way or the other: I suppose it complicates the relation between fiction and fact a bit, but I think that can be a compelling tension.
Kurt Vonnegut not only appeared in Breakfast of Champions, according to wikipedia he was the book’s deus ex machina. It’s been too long since I read it, so I don’t remember how he saved the day.
Stephen King appears as himself in his Dark Tower series, somewhere toward the end (book 5 or 6).
Heinlein referred to himself in the opening of “And He Built a Crooked House”
It used to be somewhat common for authors to explain how they acquired their stories by creating fictional forewords describing themselves finding some old manuscript - The Scarlet Letter starts that way. More recently, William Goldman put himself into the story by describing how “he” found a copy of fictional, unedited “The Princess Bride” for his (fictional) son, and then created the “good parts” versions.
Like a lot of other techniques, when this kind of meta stuff works, it works well.
Quite funnily too, I might add.
Ellery Queen, of course (though “Ellery Queen” was a pseudonym).
In The Lion’s Game, by Nelson DeMille, one of the main characters takes a flight from the East Coast to the West. The in-flight movie isn’t named, but from the description it’s obviously The General’s Daughter - based on another book by DeMille.
“I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.” One of my favourite opening lines…
I don’t recall the title but Philip K. Dick put himself in one of his books as a thinly disguised “Horselover Fat”.