Science & Tech Quote by Laurell K. Hamilton

Hamilton isn’t just policing process; she’s defending a boundary that genre writers constantly watch get blurred: the line between invention and appropriation. Her bluntness reads like shop-floor union talk for novelists, the kind born from seeing the same lazy shortcuts circulate until they harden into “facts.” In horror, fantasy, and science fiction, a convincing world often depends on real-world texture - guns, forensics, mythology, biology, policing, trauma. When writers “research” by cribbing from other novels, they’re not gathering reality; they’re inheriting someone else’s guesses, stylizations, and, often, mistakes. The result is a photocopy of a photocopy: the vampire lore that keeps repeating because it’s familiar, the procedural detail that sounds right because it’s been said before, the cultural reference that becomes cliché through overuse.

The subtext is professional ethics as much as craft. Fiction-to-fiction research is a soft form of plagiarism, but it’s also a way of laundering responsibility: if the detail is wrong or harmful, the writer can shrug and say, “I read it somewhere.” Hamilton, writing in genres with fandoms that prize “canon” and internal consistency, is pushing back against the mistaken idea that repetition equals legitimacy. She’s also speaking from an era when writers could Google, yes, but still relied heavily on libraries, experts, and lived observation; her admonition carries the impatience of someone who did the work and is tired of watching shortcuts get rewarded.

Underneath the command - “Just don’t” - is a plea for freshness. Real research doesn’t just prevent errors; it disrupts inherited tropes and forces a writer to make stranger, sharper choices than the ones already packaged by somebody else’s imagination.