> On Sep 14, 2015, at 3:42 PM, Bruce A. Metcalf <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm curious to know how the list feels about the junction of fiction and > history. Your thoughts?
I’m working on a novella in which the 1975 Asilomar DNA conference is prominently featured. Several key scenes in the story are set there. I’m putting (my) fictional characters into a quite-real historical setting. This kind of thing is done all the time in fiction, of course. But some of the interactions in the book are between my fictional characters and some quite real people, people who are very much alive today (although some are in their 90’s now.) I’m having a hard time figuring out how much to fictionalize. For some characters it’s possible to create fictional cyphers or composites. But James Watson of Watson & Crick fame is hard to make into a fictional character. You can’t say “Bobby Smith, who along with his collaborator Francis Crick, determined the double-helical structure of DNA.” Or I guess you can do that, but sometimes it just seems too strained. On the other hand, it wouldn’t do to put my words in James Watson’s mouth. I don’t think he would appreciate that. Hrmm. . . I remember watching the TV show Manahttan, about the Manhattan Project and being confused. The real Robert Oppenheimer is a character in the series, and Neils Bohr shows up, and so forth, but most of the main characters are pure fiction. There’s no Leslie Groves, but there is another colonel who appears to be in charge of the place. The young smarter-than-anybody just-married Jew is a made up character. For the first episode or two I figured he was supposed to be a stand-in for Richard Feynman. And I thought the Brit was a stand-in for Freeman Dyson. But I was wrong. Certainly many real-world people of the Manhattan Project are kind of hinted at or alluded to; they kind of “inform” the characters. But the characters and plot are made up. Which was fine with me, once I got used to the idea. I thought it was supposed to be a show about the actual Manhattan Project. But it’s more along the lines of “inspired by the Manhattan Project.” I’m still not sure how I’m going to handle this dynamic in my book. jrs
