Here be rabid fan-beasties...be on yer guard

Anilee just covered the irritating habits of a peculiar critter called the Inheritance fan, and I had to add one observation: When faced with an attacking critic, one of the hardcore fan's last resorts is to sputter, "Chris was only fifteen when he wrote Eragon! Give him a break!" (Or, even worse, "I'd like to see you write a book that good as a fifteen-year-old!" Ad hominem, anyone?)

First of all, it is simply untrue that Christopher Paolini wrote Eragon at age fifteen. The back jacket flap of any copy of the book will tell you as much. He began writing Eragon when he was fifteen, and Eragon was not self-published by Paolini's family until Christopher was eighteen, in 2002. And the version that's on the market now? That is the product of another round of editing, and didn't come out until he was closer to twenty.

Does it really matter, though? Well, I would like to see the rabid fans get their facts right, but no, in the end his age doesn't matter to me.

Because I don't think that someone who has taken his novel into mainstream publishing, and through all the editing that entails, should be allowed to use his age as a shield from legitimate criticism of his book. You publish the book, it goes out onto shelves, people read it, and they judge it based on its merits as a book. Not its merits as the product of a homeschooler or a teenager or a resident of Montana. If a reader is more impressed by the author's perseverance knowing that he wrote the novel as a teenager, fine, but that doesn't make the book any better, and this isn't high school, where the grading scale is weighted for those who take classes beyond the secondary level early. A book is a book, and the notion of tailoring one's standards for it based on the author's bio is ridiculous.