Traumatic Tuckerizations

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Tuckerization means using a person’s real name in a story.

Martin Morse Wooster and I recently compared notes and agreed it was far from tragic that two characters we’d inspired fell short of true Tuckerizations.

Fallen Angels’ “Mike Glider,” while riding with a load of fans in the back of a van, grabs a femmefan’s ass – something that I never did in my life (for all my many failings), nor did I consider riding in the back of a van as license for that kind of thing with anyone.

In Vampire Junction [PDF file] S.P. Somtow has “Morty Rooster” fart himself to death.

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14 thoughts on “Traumatic Tuckerizations”

  1. I was tuckerized once by Sandra Miesel (not by Tucker himself) as Langley Samuels, ace forecaster. Such is fame.

  2. Larry Niven and I Tuckerized Beth Marble, a fan, as a lead character in BOWL OF HEAVEN & its sequel, SHIPSTAR, due out in April. She has a rough time of it but emerges triumphant.

    Gregory

  3. If “true Tuckerization” is defined as how Bob Tucker himself did it, then Mike Glider and Morty Rooster don’t meet the standard since he used fans’ actual names rather than such distortions. But he tended not to reproduce actual personalities. Ken Slater in Wild Talent is a bad guy who works for the deeply evil, Ireland-based international mastermind Willis. I don’t remember either Ken or Walt complaining.

  5. Hands up, everyone who thinks we should all start referring to Mike Walsh as “Mike the Greek”.

  6. Is there an emoticon for that?

    And I see from his bio that Walsh has an aversion to using the transporters. Doesn’t that date back to his experience trying to ride the Sheraton’s elevators during the 1983 Worldcon? After lifting overstuffed carloads of fans to parties on the top floors, by Sunday morning the elevator cables had stretched — when the doors opened fans found themselves about one foot below the threshhold.

  7. Tucker often did use the real names of his tuckerization targets, e.g., Bobby Bloch in “The Lincoln Hunters” and–I forget the title of the book–a Rev. Robert Coulson.

  8. I’m a little puzzled by Dave’s comment. It reads like a disagreement. But it repeats the same information I wrote in the first line of the post. So maybe that just serves to introduce Dave’s other point. I feel confident in speaking for Martin as well as myself in saying that we would not object to being portrayed as deeply evil international masterminds. On the other hand, I’m just as certain Willis would have grumbled about a namesake who farted himself to death.

  9. For the record, my OTHER Tuckerization is in Tim Sullivan’s V: THE FLORIDA PROJECT, where I am heroic Indian Chief Martin Wooster, who kills many aliens until the character is killed off on page 91.

  10. Hey, just recalled I used Keith Kato–then my grad student–in the opening line of HEART OF THE COMET: “Kato died first.”
    He dies from a microwave digger; his thesis was on high power microwave emissions from plasma turbulence. Today he runs a division of an R&D company, Raytheon.

  11. Recollected a Tuckerisation but cannot recollect the book, but just the circumstance. It was a retaliation for a negative review, so the novelist tucked the name of the critic into his next book as a real ignorant slimeball.

    Could have been one of many.

  12. Robert: There are many ways to respond to a negative review or the like. Write a poem:

    “The book of my enemy has been remaindered
    And I am pleased.
    In vast quantities it has been remaindered
    Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
    And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
    My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
    In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.”

    And it continues:
    http://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html

  13. Bob Vardeman once put a character named Marvin Arthurs in a short story. The character was an artist who ended up setting off a nuclear bomb as part of performance art. For the record, I have only occasionally mused about doing that sort of thing.

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