[Reply to Little Nemo ]
Ah, right – AndyL, I glossed over your first sentence at top, and homed in on the “cousins” issue. Re genetics / incest taboos, it is of course nonsense: figures of speech aside, a society with no siblings will be one with no cousins.
Not for nothing, but I’ve heard people say “very varied” on more than one occasion.
I think I’ve mentioned in the past that the editing quality of W. E. B. Griffin’s books (and, especially, those written with/by his son, William E. Butterworth) has seriously declined.
I remember one where one of his protagonists, Charlie Castillo (who is a proud Texican) compares a certain situation to the time that Daniel Boone fought at the Alamo. Umm, no. That would be Davy Crockett; Daniel Boone didn’t make it to the Alamo, he was too busy settling Missouri.
The reason it was so jarring is because the protagonist is so Texan. There’s no way someone so Texan would have made that mistake.
Another thing that takes me out of a book is when the cover art doesn’t match the description of the protagonist in the book. The covers for Alistair MacLean’s paperback books back in the 1970s were famous for showing either the hero or the damsel in distress with lovely golden hair, only to find out in the second chapter that he or she had dark hair.
However, the one that really took me out of the story was a book about a submarine. Fortunately, I cannot recall the name of the book; I thought it had “Poseidon” or “Trident” in the name, but the ones that are showing up in my searches are not one which I describe.
On the cover of this POS was a submarine with smoke coming out of its conning tower, limping its way back to base. The number on the conning tower was clearly visible. Let’s just say that it was #456.
In the book, a humongous deal is made out of the protagonist seeing the submarine while it was way out to sea, coming back in, with smoke pouring from its conning tower. He knows its the ship about which he is concerned, because he can clearly make out the number on the conning tower: #579.
This was not the only mistake in this book. There was one section that, instead of riveting narration for a crucial plot point that takes place over a few pages, instead we get treated to about 10 paragraphs of telling, not showing.
Before I moved last year, I kept the book in my library as inspiration. Surely, I thought (yeah, I know, don’t call me “Shirley”), if this jackwad can get a book deal, then there is hope for me!
Any time an author uses the word cement when they really mean concrete. It is NOT a cement sidewalk! I know the general populace does not know the difference between cement and concrete but as a civil engineer and general grammar/usage nitpicker it really irks me when authors get it wrong.
I agree. I think it’s Stephan King’s kid who, for some reason, thinks that a .410 shotgun is some sort of super shooter. He keeps talking about people being blown off their feet, or somebody using one for an ambush and killing them from 30 feet away. :rolleyes:
It’s tough to be annoyed about cover illustrations not matching the story, when so many cover illustrations bear no relationship whatsoever to the story, beyond possibly genre: A science fiction book, for instance, is likely to have spaceships on the cover, even if the story within has no space travel whatsoever. It’s only fairly recently that it’s become common for the cover to illustrate the actual story, and it’s still far from universal.
In an alternate universe where vampires are a real thing, Dracula might have been a rather more prominent figure. Especially to vampires.
What timeframe does it take place in? Does she have a computer ( or cassette player) at home? Because with computer programs (and before with tapes), and a good ear for music/ speech, I can believe that somebody can learn to speak a language with a certain accent. If the story takes place with Internet existing, the problem of the gap between the language course being made, and meaning of words changing * is almost closed.
As for comportment, if she watches TV and practices at home, and has a talent for acting (along with a talent for listening to speech/ an ear for music), then it’s not impossible for me, just “really useful for the plot, but well, heros have the talents the plot needs”.
I ignore that, because I know - just like translations of titles that are way off - it’s often the publisher, and not the author, who decides on that. Many novels from the 60s and 70s seem to have had a “generic cover art lying around in stock” slapped on them that has nothing to do with the content.
And the rather succesful current fantasy detective series by Jim Butcher about Harry Dresden always shows the titular character with a hat, no matter how often the text makes it clear he doesn’t wear one. (Another character in the first book wears one). Maybe it just looks more badass as art, or everybody figures that everybody has gotten used to it by now.
I book I read recently, I want to say Denis Lehane? A couple of Gangsters in World War 2 have a conversation about him getting away that went like this:
“I can take you to Belize or Kingston.”
“I’ll take Kingston - they speak English there and I’m sick of speaking Spanish.”
That’s about 30 years early for the word “Belize,” plus they all would have spoken English in British Honduras back then anyway.
In The Martian, the narrator figured that if he had 50 liters of oxygen and 50 liters of hydrogen, he could combine them and come up with 100 liters of water. That’s not remotely how it works.
I don’t need scrupulously correct scientific detail in my sci-fi, but if you’re going into that level of detail, what’s the point in making shit up? He could have run it past a high school chemistry student.
Real quick, since it’s H[sub]2[/sub]0, he’d have 25 liters of water? Did I do the math right?
Excessive profanity turns me off too. I’m okay with the occasional fuck or shit, but find a better way of describing a wet runway than comparing it to the head cheerleader on prom night, mmmkay Richard Marcinko?
Is this quote from chapter 3 what you’re talking about?
The 2:1 ratio is part of it, and that’s what caught my eye. Given 50 liters of each, you already know 25L of oxygen can’t be used.
But to correctly compute the stoichiometry, you can’t use units of volumes, you have to use moles. So instead of saying we have 50 liters of each, we have 2.232 moles of each, since a mole of gas is 22.4L at standard temperature and pressure.
Now you can use the 2:1 ratio to figure that this will produce 1.116 moles of water, leaving the same amount of oxygen unused.
Since a mole of water is 18.01528 grams, and a gram of water is 1 mL, the grand total of water ends up being 20.1 mL of water, not even enough to fill a shot glass.
Yeah, that’s the quote. OK - so he’s still wrong, but not with the rookie stoichiometry error I described. The difference is that he’s talking about tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
But… he still didn’t factor in how water and liquid oxygen have different densities and molecular weights. So his calculations are still going to be wrong, but not as wrong as I thought. I’ll work it out when I have more time.
I’ve been reading the Scotland Street series from the library, and in one of the books someone had underlined and noted in the margins that a character was described as taking his shoes off before wading into the water, then several pages later (after a wave knocks him down and he gets caught in a rip tide), is described as wearing one shoe but having lost the other.
In general I feel that life is too short to worry about this sort of thing, and in this particular case I’d say that WRITING IN A LIBRARY BOOK is the far greater offense. Since the Scotland Street series was originally published as a newspaper serial I’m also willing to cut author Alexander McCall Smith some extra slack when it comes to minor discrepancies.
That said, I am finding it a bit distracting that the volume I’m currently reading (Bertie Plays the Blues) completely ignores some things that happened in the previous book (The Importance of Being Seven). For instance, in The Importance of Being Seven, gallery owner Matthew hires his former assistant Pat to come back and work for him. Pat doesn’t like the gallery’s only other employee, Kirsty, so Matthew fires Kirsty. Actually, his pregnant wife does the firing. Kirsty doesn’t take this well and makes a memorable scene.
In Bertie Plays the Blues, Matthew’s wife has recently given birth and he needs someone to work in the gallery so he can take paternity leave. He finds Pat’s number and calls her up to see if she’d like to come back and work for him…again. There’s no acknowledgement that this is the second time he’s re-hired Pat within a period of just a few months and no explanation as to why Pat stopped working there between the two books. This seems especially odd to me since it’s only because Pat refused to work with Kirsty that Matthew was left without any help at the gallery when Pat mysteriously left.
I’ve heard that even if the cover art is created especially for the book, the artist normally has to do it before the book is finished and is typically only given a paragraph or so to work from. If that paragraph doesn’t mention hair color, etc., the artist just has to guess. There are presumably also cases where the author changes things in a late stage revision.
When we were growing up my younger sister would often complain that the cover of the book she was reading had some incorrect detail, and would say that authors should do the cover art themselves so it would be “right”. Then she happened to find a book where the author actually HAD done the cover art (unfortunately I don’t remember who it was), but complained that the two characters had been depicted with basically the same face when they were described as not resembling each other. I pointed out that most *writers *are probably much better at *writing *than they are at drawing, and that she was the one who was always saying authors should do their own cover art rather than trusting this to professional artists.
Okay, let me try … I think you’re right, that’s a pretty big error. Assuming Google is correct that liquid O[sub]2[/sub] has a density of 1.141 grams per cm[sup]3[/sup], I get 50 liters of O[sub]2[/sub] converting to about 64 liters of water. I’ll spoiler-tag the calculations just to keep this post from taking up too much screen space.
[spoiler]50 liters of O[sub]2[/sub] = 50000 cm[sup]3[/sup]
50000 cm[sup]3[/sup] * 1.141 grams per cm[sup]3[/sup] = 57050g liquid O[sub]2[/sub]
(Assuming O[sub]2[/sub] has a molar mass of 32)
(57050 grams) / (32 grams per mole of O[sub]2[/sub]) = 1782.8125 moles of O[sub]2[/sub]
(1782.8125 moles of O[sub]2[/sub] molecules) * (2 oxygen atoms per molecule) = 3565.625 moles of oxygen atoms
(Assuming oxygen atoms are the limiting factor here, thanks to the heaps of H[sub]2[/sub] molecules he has available from the hydrazine)
3565.625 moles of oxygen atoms => 3565.625 moles of H[sub]2[/sub]O atoms
(Assuming water has a molar mass of 18)
(3565.625 moles of oxygen atoms) * (18 grams per mole of water) = 64181.25 grams of water
64181.25 grams of water = about 64 liters of water
[/spoiler]
ETA: Please let me know if I messed that calculation up.
I recently read The Nix by Nathan Hill and loved, loved, loved it. With one exception - there are repeated references to “moving to Jakarta” to work as a teacher in an international school, where (so the character says) you’ll get a big fat salary and a car and driver.
Teachers at prestigious international schools here make a decent salary, but they are hardly raking it in hand over fist. And they do NOT get cars and drivers as part of their benefits. (Most people have them, but that’s because they buy their own car, just like you would in the US.)
I suppose it isn’t technically an error, since we might assume that the character who described life as a teacher in Jakarta was simply wrong, and the author was writing him that way. But most readers would take the description at face value. It detracted from my enjoyment of the book every time it was mentioned.
I always assumed that Jakarta talk was just like the subplot in Malcolm in the Middle where the oldest brother Francis dropped out of high school to go work as a logger in Alaska because his friend kept talking about how much money you could make doing that, and they both ended up essentially working for free at a store.
Nitpick: the capital / chief city of the country now named Belize, has in fact been called Belize Town / Belize City / just Belize, since the 17th century: so with the guys talking in terms of cities, the name would not have been anachronistic in the 1940s. The “speaking Spanish” bit is for sure a howler, though.