Decades ago I was reading a fantasy novel featuring a character who was a disembodied intelligent animated (but obviously non-speaking) hand. Fine, no problem. I have have a high tolerance for weirdness. But when the disembodied hand shrugged its shoulders I finally had to give up.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is a pretty carefully crafted novel. But
Lisbeth is described as a socially reclusive person who rarely in her life ever spoke to anybody, in any language. But, concealing her identity with a multi-millilon dollar transaction, she deceives a bank executive in Switzerland by speaking German with an English accent. How did she acquire that skill? And she also knew hot to apply makeup and assume the comportment of a wealthy, worldly woman. presumably possessing the gift of walking in heels instead of army boots.
I like to think of reading novels as somewhat educational. I should be able to believe the facts that frame the story. Occasionally, however, I get jolted out of stories that occur in places I’m familiar with (say, having lived there).
No, the people there don’t act that way or speak that way or dress that way or even think that way.
And there’s no landscape there that matches the author’s description.
As written, I don’t actually think that’s a mistake. Or rather, it’s not necessarily the author’s mistake. A guy on a business trip worries about the time-zone difference and gets it wrong? Yeah, that’s something that can happen. It’s only the author’s mistake if he calls home and the kids are in fact still in school.
As an aside, Larry Niven famously made the same mistake, or one very much like it, in the first edition of Ringworld. In the first chapter, a very wealthy character is celebrating his birthday, and to stretch the party out as long as possible, he’s traveling from city to city around the globe, as each city’s time zone hits midnight. The details of which city is which are completely irrelevant to the story, but Niven got the direction wrong.
Kim Harrison Dead Witch Walking. The heroine and sort-of-antagonist are turned into minks or weasels or something, and stay that way for a long time and the writer describes them as rodents and have them do rodent things. “She took the carrot in her rodent hands” and such things.
Nearly stopped me from finishing the book.
Steven King made bunches of mistakes with weapons across his multi-volume Dark Tower saga. When the series was still new, the gun boards were full of guys bitching about the Ruger .44 automatic and such. Even at the time, I just shrugged and chalked it all up to none of the worlds described are our world, so their guns may have trivial differences from ours.
Now where he did throw me out of a story was when he had a grouchy old man complain about kids “cruising the orange belt” in “Christine.” King seems to think that the various colored belts around Pittsburgh are like freeways or something. They are not. They are routes that are, literally, what you would get by drawing rings around a map of city in orange or purple marker by connecting existing streets and highways.
Point taken, and I do give as much leeway for intentional or inadvertent errors as possible, especially if the character is not that bright. So if Gummo the Goon says “Hey Lemmy, squash that toad–I fuckin’ hate reptiles,” I’ll let that go no problem. If there’s any uncertainty to the author’s intentions, I might circle it with a question.
However, in my time zone example the author (acting as omniscient narrator) was stating it as fact. She just goofed it.
Larry at least has a sense of humor about the mistake. When I got him to sign my First Edition he looked at it, shook his head and smiled before signing.
There’s a jarring little throwaway detail in Watchmen where the pride of the NYPD seems to forget that New York City is on the East Coast and not the West Coast. I’ve always wondered whether that was because the author, being from England, simply defaults to thinking “West Coast Equals Atlantic Ocean.”
Star Wars: A New Hope, novel adapted by Alan Dean Foster from George Lucas’ story.
One of them should have caught the really boneheaded astronomy error that occurs on the first page of the first chapter.
There was an entire website (I think it’s defunct now) devoted to Stephen King’s Bloops and Blunders. The one I remember was Wizard and Glass, where Susan sees lice hopping in Rhea’s hair.
Lice don’t hop.
If it’s an author I like, I’ll let it go (Diana Gabaldon had a boar change to a sow and back again over the course of three pages) but if it’s someone I haven’t read before I don’t have a lot of patience. I’m trying to get into the story, keep track of the characters and the plot. Don’t yank me out with a mistake easily caught and corrected.
But she’s Lisbeth Salander, she can do anything. 
I suppose you can hand wave it away that she’s got a photographic memory, can learn to do anything, and has access to all the world’s knowledge via the internet.
My actual first-ever job (phone) interview contained the dialog:
Interviewer:“Let’s talk today at 2:00 your time”
Me:“It’s 3:00 my time already”
Interviewer:“Uhm… let’s talk today at 6:00 your time”.
I haven’t read the book, so may be talking rubbish; but – from your telling of it as above – might the “cousin” thing not be a convention / mode of expression in that society: with people having borrowed the word from times when there were literal cousins, and now using it to mean, maybe, “close friend / member of peer-group”? If the author’s unconvincing explanation after the fact was something like this, I think I could quite happily buy the whole deal… entire communities can have strange speech habits !
In one of Lindsey Davis’ Flavia Albia detective novels, she uses the word ‘opaque’ at least twice to describe Albia’s gown in a particular scene. But based on other characters’ reaction to the gown, she clearly meant ‘transparent’ or close to it.
I’m thinking the bigger error that Andy was pointing out is the author saying this society would have a stable population. If every women has only one child, each generation is going to be half the size of the previous one.
However Ed McBain, who’s a native New Yorker, seems to have been similarly confused by geography. His 87th Precinct are set in the fictional city of Isola, which is described as being on the East Coast. But in some of the books, the rivers in the city are said to flow in a western direction.
That doesn’t work for the book (though that is the workaround that the author suggests in the sequel) - the viewpoint character refers to another character as “first cousin” and although he is attempting to seduce her, he is not worried about genetics because (as the omniscient narrator states), incest taboos have disappeared in this society.
Yep.
Jodi Taylor’s fun Chronicles of St Mary Series has a few. They go to Troy for the war. But Jdi actually thinks the siege went on for literally* years*- like 9. Impossible. 9 weeks would be stretching it.
She also makes the common mistake of blaming the Christians for the burning of the books in the Library of Alexandria. By the time Theophilus ordered the destruction of the Serapeum in AD 391, the Romans had pretty well burnt of looted all the books at least twice. The Serapeum had been turned into a Mithraeum, there’s no mention at all about any books still left there.
Her superwoman abilities were humanly credible up to that point. Multilingual skills are learned with repetitive practice. She rarely even practiced oral Swedish.