Livre d'Or

At that level, it seems that having human characters arguing about how the aliens are made some impact on the problem; the bigger issue of how to get the aliens in as not-funny-shaped-humans-but-genuinely-alien while not making them read as a metaphor for negatively othering subsets of humanity remains one I am wrestling with.

That makes sense. I was musing on it, but didn't really have anything helpful to say.

FWIW, I don't think I replied to your email before the wedding, I'd enjoy looking at either or both of the first books in the series if you'd still like to show me (though I can't guarantee a level of crique).

Also, I am charmed with Umberto Eco's remark that Dan Brown is clearly a character who escaped from Foucault's Pendulum into the real world.

That's how I always thought of it. Many parodies are limp, insipid things taking on superficial characteristics of their host and exaggerating their badness. But the best take the weakest points and show how good a book could be if it did them well.

This is what I was conflicted about with Lev Grossman's magicians: the first half seemed to take Harry Potter and show what it would be like if it had been written with a much greater eye to consistency and detail; the second half seemed to take Narnia and show what it would be like if it had been written with much less of an eye to consistency and detail. So I loved the first half (apart from the annoyance of the main character) and was really disappointed in the second half. Not least because I always thought that Lewis did a good job of making the books hang together, even if you can't form accurate generalisations about the underlying world. (No-one knows "can you do X magic in Narnia". But I think people could predict "What might Aslan tell me to do in this situation", even if they think it's stupid.)

Maybe "parody" is a too insulting term for the good sort. I'm thinking of people who took the bad points of a good book and built something awesome out of them.

But anyway, Dan Brown seems to have done the unfortunate and written Da Vinci Code some years after Foucault's Pendulum, which was (a) much better and (b) incidentally all about why people are foolish to buy into the Da Vinci Code... :)