The other night at dinner, I was discussing books and culture with ❦bobhowe and several other people, when Jared Diamond came up. I put in that was thought Diamond seemed pretty sharp on a lot of points, but that I didn't care for remarks he had made about what seemed to me to be the relative merits of fiction and non-fiction in describing the world. Here, copied from a recent Salon interview, is the exchange to which I was referring:

Have you heard of Michael Crichton's new book, "State of Fear," and its premise that a bunch of environmentalists are upset that their cause isn't getting the attention it deserves so they go around staging environmental disasters? Crichton has said publicly, as well as in his heavily footnoted book, that global warming is bunk -- which would be laughable were not the print run of his book one and a half million copies.

Everything you say is true. There are a couple of things to be added to it. One is that my previous book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," has sold more copies than Michael Crichton's one and a half million, so I think my new book will get to more readers. And the other thing is that Michael Crichton is a very skilled writer of fiction. And fiction is, by definition, the telling of stories that are untrue. He's very good at that. And I'm a writer of nonfiction, which aims to be the telling of stories that are true.  [full interview]

It seems to me that, regardless of the merits of Crichton's work, all fiction is being tarred here, and disdained as a form that cannot allow for the transmission of anything true. I was so bothered by this idea, in fact, that I wrote a letter to Salon about it.