Something I apparently need to declare in public today:
I have a strong negative reaction to people plucking actual persons from history and writing fictional stories about them. I can enjoy it if the person lived long ago and the story could plausibly fit in their actual history (so most of Doctor Who doesn't count), but the recently dead or (cringe) still living? No.
@eyrea@bookstodon I generally agree. The only exception I can think of that I actually like isn't a book but the TV show For All Mankind, alternate history about the US space program (and one of the best TV shows ever IMO). Most of the characters in it are fictional, but Deke Slayton is included and he was a Mercury astronaut. Since it's alternate history it works.
@eyrea@bookstodon I would think that having a negative reaction to that type of book is fine, and even declaring it to the public is fine, but (effectively) telling people they shouldn't be writing those books goes too far. I mean, you can just not read them if you don't like them, but there's nothing inherently inappropriate about them that means they should be denied to people who do like them.
i'm just the opposite, i love this genre esp. all the different takes different authors may have seeing people from their unique POVs
Libra by Don DeLillo (about Lee Harvey Oswald) is one of my favorite books, a character so colorful he should have been fiction & DeLillo has so much empathy for all the characters...