First Dave Eggers was accused of plagiarism, now he’s being taken to task for a lack of research in The Circle, his new novel satirizing tech companies.

In a book review for Slate, Jessica Winter takes a look at the book in light of the author’s admission that he did no research whatsoever, and finds that it “sometimes reads like a satire of NASCAR in which all the cars are played by freight trains.”

Winter’s critique gets deep into the guts of the book’s fictional tech company and the details of its totalitarian-sounding “Universal operating system,” about which she says:

This might all sound nitpicky. But when you’re reading a novel about the Internet by a writer who doesn’t seem clear on what an operating system is or who thinks that a unified ID-and-payment system could extinguish all trolls, everything starts looking like a nit to pick. Does the Circle have its own OS? Its own browsers? How much hardware does it make? If it’s constantly backing up every conceivable shred of its users’ data—if that’s its fundamental mission—where are its data centers? Why would the world’s other corporations agree to having the Circle’s cameras planted everywhere? Or have they been magically subsumed, too? And so on.

I’m sympathetic to Winter’s argument here—my first reaction on hearing Eggers’ admission that he had done no research was to think, why on earth would I waste my time reading your book, then? But the above paragraph had the opposite of its intended effect on me. Browsers? Hardware? Data centers? That does sound rather nitpicky. Is it now the job of artists to be concerned with such things?

Is it really important for a novelist to research the cultural phenomena they satirize?

Casting about for some examples of what other novelists have or haven’t done, I find that Jonathan Franzen—another anti-tech killjoy name-checked in Winter’s article—avoids research, Don DeLillo did a bunch of it for Libra, Margaret Atwood researches every one of her novels, and Thomas Pynchon…well, God only knows what Thomas Pynchon does.

Ultimately I landed on Dickens, whose Bleak House is one of the greatest novels of social critique and satire ever written. I don’t know if Dickens did any research on Chancery. (I don’t even know if “research” was a thing that writers consciously did back then.) His novel certainly isn’t bogged down with the nitpicky details of how the British court worked—in fact, those details seem deliberately discarded to give Chancery a symbolic resonance that transcends the specific details.

But Dickens, research or no, seems to be someone who knows whereof he speaks. The author’s rhetorical position as someone who’s authoritative about the culture he’s critiquing is important, whether the research is front-and-center or not.

I don’t need my novels to be bogged down with details of data centers, browser compatibility, or front-end and back-end code. But if Dave Eggers wants to convince me that his take on technology is relevant and worth my time, he should probably start by convincing me that he knows what he’s talking about.