Word: mcmahon
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...They support each other in a strange sort of way: One goes through the same stages--you get an idea, and you use your education or your experience to test it," he notes. Both good science and good writing demand imagination, McMahon says, but "the ideas come for nothing, or as a gift." The work comes in testing the ideas: "The ideas themselves aren't worth anything, until they are proved true or false. Just as experiments or theories test scientific ideas, a fictional idea can be proved workable or useless by trying...
Methods aside, McMahon draws on a more direct connection between his work as a professor and his writing. Gordon McKay, protagonist of McKay's Bees, is a familiar name in Harvard science departments. About 50 scientists, including almost the whole faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department, owe their livelihood to his very large endowment. McMahon, one of the flock, pays tribute with his novel--"90 per cent of the book is lies about Gordon McKay," he says, though the last chapter, in which McKay returns to Cambridge, makes a fortune in shoe manufacturing, and befriends several Harvard faculty members...
McKay is not the only half-truth in the novel; Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor in the 1850s and the national biologist in a golden age of zoology, plays a small but acidulous part in the book. "I have been accused of character assassination," McMahon says, "but in fact his character is a lot worse than I said. He was famous for exploitation of the young people in the museum, for signing his name to their work. The accusations came so credibly and so often, that even his biographer concluded there is a lot of truth to them...
...McMahon includes a fair amount of genuine historical detail and character, he traces the fictional ideas to his own experience: "Fiction is only half fictional all the time...
...Although McMahon's novels have both been well-received and a third is on the way, he insists that his true profession remains science. "One can only really have one profession, one thing that one is known for. But that doesn't prevent one from having a powerful distraction," he says...