Well, it seems like death is in style today, (Let’s kill people, music-like!) so who am I to complain? Recently, in the comic strip andiewear, the writer was in need of a corpse. So, what did he do? Why, in this comic, he killed off fellow cartoonist Steve Troop. What did he ever do to him?
Also, in the comics, the villain named Plasmus is a wholly fiction person named Otto Von Furth. However, in the cartoon, he is an unnamed criminal. That unnamed criminal just so happen to be David Slack, the real life story editor for the show.
Well, any other examples of fiction writer, and associated people killing, mutating, or crippling other writers? Oh, and while simply having other people guest-star is interesting, what I am really looking for is highly negative things, whether done out of fun or not.
It’s not another writer, but L. Sprague de Camp noted in his piece “L Ron and the City of Brass” that L. Ron Hubbard killed off one of the characters that he and Fletcher Pratt came up with for the Harold Shea (“Incompleat/Compleat Enchanter”) series. They thought for a while about illing off one of his characters in return, but ultimately thought it childish.
In Inferno Larry Niven and Jerry OPournelle put a thinly-disguised version of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. in Hell. He’s trapped in a mausoleum with “So it Goes” flashing perpetually in neon. They also put a thinly-disguised Forrest J. Ackerman in there under some form of torture because he let his house of treasures (clearly the Ackermansion) decay, unwilling to sell any of his mathoms to help pay for the upkeep of the others.
Robert Heinlein stuck a bunch of his critics in a kind of hell at the end of The Number of the Beast, but I don’t know if any of them are recognizable. I’ll bet one of the was supposed to be Alexei Panshin, though.
HP Lovecraft and Robert Bloch killed each other off in a couple of stories.
Bloch wrote a story called “Shambler from the stars” where a character who heavily resembles Lovecraft reads a forbidden text and is eaten by an [insert a dozern lovecraftian adjectives here] creature.
Lovecraft returned the favor by writing “The Haunter of the Dark” where “Robert Blake” investigates a creepy church in Providence and is eventually scared to death by the title character and it’s “Three lobed burning eye”.
They were buddies and it was all in good fun for them. If Bloch had wanted to be evil, he could have always had Lovecraft killed by a freaky Mama’s boy in a crappy little motel shower.
Hey there. This is a bump, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be on topic.
I seem to recall reading Stephen King’s claiming to have killed Richard Bachman. In fact, Bachman was simply a pseudonym. From wiki:
*Stephen King has also written 6 books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. King staged a mock funeral for Bachman after the pseudonym was made public, which in turn inspired the book The Dark Half, in which a novelist stages the burial of his horror author pseudonym after having a “serious” novel published, only to find that his alter ego does not want to leave quite so easily.
*
Continuing with people Larry Niven has killed - He had a character in the short story ‘Borderlands of Sol’ (IIRC) who was named Dr. Forward, named after Niven’s friend and fellow writer Robert L. Forward. Dr. Forward in the story was killed rather gruesomely.
As a follow-up, apparantly Dr. Forward’s early teen-aged son read the story and decided that the story’s Dr. Forward had to be a descendant of his - so he wrote a comic book story where the son hunted down and killed one of Larry Niven’s descendants.
Then there’s Joe Buckley, a fan of several authors who write for Baen books. At last count Joe Buckley has been shot, obliterated by weapon grade lasers, had his hand blown off by a handgrenade he was holding, has been hit by hypervelocity missiles, and has even been garrotted then tortured. (Let’s face it, if one MUST be garrotted and tortured, it’s better to get the garrotting done first.) There’s even a rumor that in a new book due for publication next year, the first sentence is:
It’s all in good fun, actually. It’s just a way for some authors to offer a sort of in-joke ‘thank you’ to a fan. Joe runs a web site that stores ‘snippets’ of books to be published, as a form of advertising for the books.
