Talk:The Sheep Look Up

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[edit] Fame?

"Among other things this book is famous for its depiction of the American government. Many readers seem to find a similarity between Brunner's puppet president 'Prexy's' style of orration and the 43rd President of the USA,George W. Bush"

I have removed this quote for now. Googling for the novel name and Bush doesn't get that many hits, and few of them are relevant to this claim. "Many readers seem" is not terribly encyclopaedic. We need a quote or cite to a credible source or numbers. At the moment, all I can really find is a few comments on Amazon and (more usefully) an afterword in the republished edition.

I would have thought the book was much more famous for being about ecology; for being dystopian in the extreme; and for using the multi-character, multi-strand multi-narrative approach which he uses in (particularly) Stand On Zanzibar. Oh, and for being out of print for years :) --Telsa 07:30, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate your references to other of Brunner's novel's (I've only read The Sheep Look up and I am just starting the Shockwave rider), but I don't think I you should have removed the reference to Bush. If anything Brunner used Prexy and Co as a warning of what a corpoarte controlled government would like. Prexy and Dubya has a lot in common. Both talk bullshit and use typical pro-war rhetoric witht hings like "You are with us or against us." Why don't wikipedia readers have the right to know about this? --MvD 08:11, 2005 August 6 (UTC)

I just finished reading the book for the first time. I, too, was struck by the similarities between Bush and Prexy (and I am not a liberal or a Democrat of any stripe). It isn't a question of whether Wikipedia readers have a right to know about this; of course they do! But the way we work here is not to tell them about it until there is some general agreement in the world that we can point to. Some people call this "referring to reliable sources", which I think is a bit of an over-the-top way to express it, but the point is sound. If someone (you perhaps!) was to write a paper or an article somewhere about the similarities between the 43rd President of the United States and the fictional character Prexy, then we could talk about that in this article. Until we have something to point to out there, we shouldn't be talking about it here in the article. Vadder 14:24, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

...and I reread the article and see that the point is there and is sourced. Nevermind. Vadder 14:28, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

You were at liberty to restore it! As a compromise, how about the addition I have just made? It's a direct quote from a named source with some background about context. Granted, it doesn't say "many readers", but does that cover the ground well enough? Telsa 11:08, 16 August 2005 (UTC)