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Bimbos of the Death Sun: Difference between revisions
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Award-winning 1988 Whodunit by Sharyn McCrumb which combines a serious murder mystery with the scariest world of all - fandom.
James Owen Mega is just an ordinary guy, a professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Tech. What very few people realize is that he is also Jay Omega, one-time science fiction author - and that's exactly how Jay wants it. His novel was a serious, hard SF story, but by the time the second-rate publishing house got through with it, it was saddled with a Frank Frazetta-esque cover and the title ''Bimbos of the Death Sun''. Though he attempts to bury his [[Old Shame]], his girlfriend Marion Farley, the college's assistant professor of English, books him as a guest at Rubicon, a local SF convention. There, they meet the onerous Appin Dungannon, author of a [[Conan the Barbarian|Conan]]-like series of novels and owner of an [[Hair
Five years later, McCrumb wrote a sequel, ''Zombies of the Gene Pool''. It has Jay and Marion learn that one of their fellow professors is a member of the Lanthanides, a group of SF fans who fancied themselves up-and-coming legends and buried a time capsule before parting ways in the late [[The Fifties|1950s]]. They accompany him to the reunion/opening of the capsule, where the Lanthanides' prodigal son, embittered former fan Pat Malone, has apparently come [[Back From the Dead]] and threatens to expose devastating secrets about his former friends. Malone is murdered that night, and once again Jay and Marion attempt to investigate.
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* [[Mistaken for Racist|Mistaken for Sexist]]: Jay is afraid this will happen if anyone learns about his novel; Marion (who is actually feminist) made absolutely certain that it wasn't demeaning<ref>Jay chose to have women be affected simply because some diseases are linked to sex</ref>, but that's little reassurance for the man who wrote a book called "Bimbos of the Death Sun" with a [[Frank Frazetta]]-wannabe cover.
* [[Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness]]: The eponymous ''Bimbos'' is hard SF based on real-world phenomenae, despite what the lurid title and cover would have you believe.
* [[Money, Dear Boy]]: Appin Dungannon's reason for still writing Runewind novels long after he got sick of the character.
* [[Most Writers Are Male]]: In ''Bimbos'', Marion offers to review the entries in the convention's creative writing contest. She ends up setting aside a pile of stories whose authors she wants to personally hunt down and beat senseless, mostly for writing trashy sex scenes or otherwise treating women as objects.
* [[Motive Rant]]: Done in both novels; considerably more sympathetic in ''Zombies'' than ''Bimbos''.
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* [[Plagiarism in Fiction]]: Plays a major role in the end of ''Zombies'': {{spoiler|Marion points out the similarities between various stories written by the Lanthanides; Reuben Mistral brushes it off by saying they lived out of each others' pockets in those days and were bound to have hung onto a few ideas from the old times. But then Marion reveals the real point, namely that Erik Giles' writing style is nothing like his supposed [[Pen Name]] C.A. Stormcock's, but Stormcock's ''is'' very similar to the late Peter Deddingfield's writing...}}
* [[Saw It in A Movie Once]]: In the closing chapter of ''Bimbos'', the police discuss the killer hiding the murder weapon in a toilet tank and say this is probably the case; a con-goer who overhears the conversation thinks to himself that it was ''[[The Godfather (Film)|The Godfather]]''.
* [[Small Name, Big Ego]]: Appin Dungannon acts like one in ''Bimbos''. Partly a subversion, since Dungannon himself harbors no illusions about himself and his books; he just enjoys being a pain in the butt.
* [[Straw Feminist]]: Averted; Marion is feminist, but is portrayed in a very positive light. She gripes about the horrible treatment of women in sci-fi, but she blames the individual writers for not understanding women instead of condemning the entire male gender.
* [[The Summation]]
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