I was thinking about this because Hank Green recently mentioned that Jurassic Park was the first novel he read "that didn't have pictures", and I commented "Jurassic Park famously does have pictures."
Famously was perhaps an exaggeration, but thinking back I remember such a great, unique feeling every time one of these diagrams would come up in his books. It was subtle, and it was a little break in the reading. And I remember trying to figure out what it meant in the context or where it was heading or what, if anything, this was trying to tell me.
I imagine he included these to make the work feel more academic, and he probably came up with the idea because of his own medical school background and having to read a lot of academic papers. He'd even caption many of them with something like: fig. 1
Other books I've come across have a few pictures sometime, but they're usually a world map or maybe a specific illustration of a scene. I liked how these were not really items from the story usually, though maybe at times you could see them probably coming from that world somehow. It was like having an appendix except it would jump out at you at random moments.
He later pulled some similar, though weird, shit with State of Fear where he had scientific footnotes but was pretty obvious climate denial nonsense.
Anyway, what did you think when you encountered these?
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