XPost: rec.arts.sf.written
Lynn McGuire wrote:
Tony Nance wrote:
I just ran across this article about an hour ago - it was published
two days ago:
https://bookriot.com/the-most-influential-sci-fi-books-of-all-time/
<snip>
The fact that the list does not mention Perry Rhodan, David Weber, or
John Ringo makes the list very suspect in my mind.
Popularity's probably positively correlated to influence. And
_Perry Rhodan_ is the most popular science fiction ever, with over two
billion novellas sold. Bubonicon's a takeoff on a PR character named Gucky/Pucky. PR's matter transmitter's appeared years before Star Trek's transporters. PR's spherical space ships debuted decades before Star
Wars' Death Star.
George Lucas supposedly said the American translation of PR was an "inspiration, less strong than Flash Gordon, but it influenced the
design of many starships of Star Wars." Unfortunately the translated
Lucas quote seems absent from the two sources typically cited: [1][2]
The above situation brings to mind the time a friend of mine
mentioned how a set of data was treated as gospel in medical journals
for decades. Until someone actually replicated the original experiment
and ended up with different data.
It surprises me to learn Robin Cook belongs to a rarefied club of
authors with nearly 400 million books sold. Steven King's in the club,
as well is James Patterson (who's relatively unknown to me).
Robin Cook grinds an axe with his fiction. He writes to influence
others.
His faintly fictional first novel, _The Year of the Intern_, bombed.
So he upped his game. He brilliantly reverse engineered a formula out of _Jaws_, _Love Story_, and other best sellers, then used it to create his
own best seller, his first of many: _Coma_.
What a shock: Robin Cook fuses stem cells with a suspenseful tale
Robin Cook's latest medical thriller may seem like yet
another example of the author's uncanny ability to anticipate
national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal
funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the
Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been
writing well ahead of the public-debate curve since his
breakout novel, Coma, nearly 25 years ago. ...
Cook admits the timing of Shock was fortuitous. "I
suppose you could say that it's the most like Coma in that
it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned
about," he says. "I wrote this book to address the stem cell
issue, which the public really doesn't know anything about.
Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people
interested in some of these issues, because it's the public
that ultimately really should decide which way we ought to
go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell
research." ...
And after 23 books, he has come up with a diagnosis to
explain why his medical thrillers remain so popular.
"The main reason is, we all realize we're at risk. We're
all going to be patients at some time," he says. "You can
write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you
can say I'm not going in the ocean or I'm not going in
haunted houses, but you can't say you're not going to go in
a hospital." [3]
Formulas fascinate me. One of these days its my intention to reverse
engineer Levinson and Link's formula out of the first half dozen seasons
of _Colombo_.
The checklist enumerated in "Is it possible to write a best-selling
novel simply by following a formula?" [4] contains a lot of elements
found in the typical Cook:
1. The hero is an expert.
2. The villain is an expert.
3. You must watch all of the villainy over the shoulder of
the villain.
4. The hero has a team of experts in various fields behind
him, etc.
5. Two or more on the team must fall in love.
6. Two or more on the team must die.
7. The villain must turn his attentions from his initial goal
to the team.
8. The villain and the hero must live to do battle again in
the sequel.
9. All deaths must proceed from the individual to the group:
i.e., never say that the bomb exploded and 15,000 people
were killed. Start with "Jamie and Suzy were walking in
the park with their grandmother when the earth opened up."
10. If you get bogged down, just kill somebody.
Then there's Lester Dent's formula. [5]
"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no
one knows what they are." - W. Somerset Maugham
Note.
[1]
https://books.google.com/books?id=cKLlUnyG4IQC&pg=PA342
[2]
https://www.handelsblatt.com/panorama/aus-aller-welt/science-fiction-serie-aus-rastatt-soll-verfilmt-werden-perry-rhodan-fordert-darth-vader-zum-duell-seite-2/2504942-2.html
[3]
https://web.archive.org/web/20071016063803/http://www.bookpage.com/0109bp/robin_cook.html
[4]
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-to-write-a-bestseller-formula_b_1542587 [5]
https://steegerbooks.com/lester-dent-and-the-master-fiction-plot/
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