[BRIEF NOTE] Ben Bova and Me
Mar. 1st, 2006 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI used to be a big fan of Ben Bova until I read his 1993 novel The Trikon Deception, co-authored with Bill Pogue. The plot's interesting enough, with a private corporation operating a high-security lab in Earth orbit tasked with preventing Earth's ecological collapse, but one lthrowaway line in a character's bio tripped me. She was born in Quebec City; she had experienced, Bova and Pogue went on to say, in a community that had experienced language strike.
Quebec City is 95% Francophone. If there's any Québec metropolis not torn by ethnic strife, Quebec City is it.
The failure of his fact-checking in this instance made me wonder just how much of his material was similarly wrong, in areas that I was unfamiliar with. Later, I came up with more reasons for distancing myself from Bova, like his wooden prose style and his identikit plots.
Quebec City is 95% Francophone. If there's any Québec metropolis not torn by ethnic strife, Quebec City is it.
The failure of his fact-checking in this instance made me wonder just how much of his material was similarly wrong, in areas that I was unfamiliar with. Later, I came up with more reasons for distancing myself from Bova, like his wooden prose style and his identikit plots.
