Speaking of coming so far only to make a mistake…
Your subscript is perfect, but you used a zero instead of an O. I suppose it’s better than trying to convince me that water is twenty hydrogen atoms flying in loose formation, but it sticks out surprisingly well.
Anyway, what makes that worse is that the author of The Martian did actual research with NASA and did, in fact, give a shit, but errors still crept in. If someone like him could make a howler, what chance does a literary author have?
Well, you could put something in a geosynchronous (but not geostationary) polar orbit, though I’m not sure why you would. And the Shuttle can reach a polar orbit, if it’s got a light payload. But there’s no way, no how, that the Shuttle could reach geostationary height.
Then again, this is Dan Brown we’re talking about. We should just be happy that he spelled “Shuttle” right.
Now that I have time to respond more fully: “Dune” has the stillsuits which cool the wearers with evaporation, yet retain the water, and also cool the wearer using energy drawn from the wearer’s motion. I don’t think either part of that works thermodynamically. In “Red Mars” the heroes heat Mars using energy collected with windmills - which is not going to work on any but (maybe) the shortest timeframe (see this essay which discusses the matter Windmills in Red Mars – Lee A. Weinstein – Blog)
A few months ago I read “Angelmass” by Tim Zahn - at one point, a baby is mentioned, the son of unnamed researchers at a government research facility; a few hundred pages later, the baby is mentioned again, but this time, she’s a girl named Angelica. But worse than that occurs in Greg Bear’s “Legacy” in which a character, A, is described as being present at the death of a character B, but a few pages later, B is described as outliving A.
Hunh. I liked the book, but I wouldn’t call it “for-fans-by-fans,” or SF. It’s a straight mystery taking place at an SF con, and a lot of fans I know consider it to be a mean-spirited attack on fandom, with no merit whatsoever.
I LOVED Bimbos of the Death Sun. I’m very fond of McCrumb’s work in general. Of course, this one is a bit of a departure for her in terms of setting.
I don’t generally read science fiction or fantasy, so perhaps I’m not the best judge, but to describe the book as “mean-spirited” seems to me to miss the mark. I thought it was more affectionate than not, overall. I remember thinking that I’d kind of enjoy meeting some of those people. (Though not enough to go to a fan conference, I suppose.)
I did loan it to a friend who is much more affiliated with that culture than I am. He handed it back a couple of weeks later and said “It’s a terrific book, and what’s really alarming about it is how accurate it is!” So…not just me, I guess.
Regarding cover art: at one point in my life I wrote a bunch of kids’ series fiction (think Hardy Boys, but it wasn’t the Hardy Boys). I would be given an outline and would construct the book based on that. The process of designing the cover, for a reason that I never completely understood, took place in a parallel universe or something, because I never had it while I was writing and the artist never had my book while he or she was artisting. As often as not I would submit the book, only to be told “Oh, we just got the cover art for this, and it shows a scene where Character A has just pulled Character B out of the ocean after Character B slipped and got caught by a wave–so you’ll need to revise to include a scene like that, okay?” Well no, not really okay, but sure, whatever. A very strange system.
It was right enough, considering that the point was that he needed 250 liters, and from his point of view the difference between 50 liters and 64 liters was purely academic.
That’s one of the hardest things to explain to fresh engineers out of college. Once you’ve established that a given solution won’t work, it’s time to stop calculating. You only need precise calculations if it’s close. I’m assuming that if the answer had been 225 liters he’d have looked a little harder at the math.
I had understood stillsuits to work by transferring the heat from the wearer’s skin to the surface of the suit via evaporation, but then using radiation/convection to dump it from the surface to the environment. The evaporative process also served to purify the water for drinking. Energy was drawn from the wearer’s motion to drive this, but that’s fine, because the wearer is ultimately getting their energy from food they’re eating back in the caves.
Now, I will grant that the oxygen cycle of Arrakis doesn’t make any sense. But single-organism (or few-organism) ecosystems are dreadfully common in science fiction, so Herbert doesn’t really deserve any special opprobium for that.
As I said, I liked it too - but it provoked a lot of dislike (I know a couple of people that I don’t dare mention it in front of).
Safeties on revolvers, magazines or “clips” in revolvers, one crime author whose husband also writes crime novels had chambers on an automatic.
A guy I know wrote a book his publisher insisted in titling Steel Wings. It would never get off the ground.
It’s been a while since I read Red Mars, but my memory is that the windmills weren’t intended to supply any long-term warming. They were dropped on areas with solid CO2, and the goal was to heat the CO2 into a gas, at which point it would jumpstart the greenhouse effect and trap more solar energy.
Long-term, that’s how any terraforming has to go, right? The only heat input is the sun, so the only way to heat things up longterm is to trap more of it in the atmosphere.
Maybe I’ve been too hard on the stillsuits then.
Hal Clement wondered about the oxygen on Arrakis as I recall.
P.S. I don’t remember where I saw it, but I think I recall a story with energy obtained from little windmills on a hot air balloon, which wouldn’t work very well, since a hot air balloon moves with the wind (though I suppose a big enough balloon might get a bit of differential wind between the center of buoyancy and the location of the windmill).
It happens to the best of them. A few samples:
In Federick Forsyth’s Icon, the protagonist and his colleague wait for the light to change before they cross Tverskaya Street across from Red Square.
Not possible. The only way you can cross Tverskaya is through pedestrian tunnels.
In The Odessa File, the hero disguises himself as a middle-aged man and parks his Jaguar around the corner from the house of the Nazi he’s hunting. When the teenaged babysitter opens the door, she’s turned on by the sight of a young man and his cool automobile parked in front of the house. The Nazi’s wife is out shopping and sees him get out of his car around the corner, but again she sees a young man.
In Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, Mr Clark is customizing his .45 and a Woodsman rifle suddenly appears out of thin air.
About a third of the way through The Sum of All Fears, I actually found a sentence so long and convoluted it made no sense whatsoever.
Whoever was advising Clancy about Russia and the Russian language was not very good at it. Having lived in Russia from 1992 to 2008, I cringe at some of the things he wrote, like Russians Russifying English names (which they never do) and drinking “paper-flavored vodka” (it’s flavored with red peppers, not paper).
Spell-Check should be thrown out the window. If you can’t be bothered to look up a word in the dictionary, you shouldn’t be writing. Every time I see things like “combing” instead of “coaming” and “assent” instead of “ascent,” I want to toss the damned book into the trash.
Bad editors and proof readers just compound the problem.
Safeties on revolvers are not unknown, though they were more of a European thing than American. When we did them here, it was as grip safeties.
Book errors are a dime a dozen (and they’ve always been with us), and I wouldn;t say that most of them “take me out of the story”–they’re more along the lines of a momentary “oops,” sometimes with a grin attached, and then I keep reading. A few examples:
–In Catcher in the Rye, Ackley’s roommate is once referred to as Herb Gale and once as “ol’ Eli.”
–In one of Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight novels, there is a full moon one night, a crescent moon descending the next, and a full moon again the night after that. If that’s standard for the Upper Peninsula, where the books are set, I never noticed–and need to go visit again.
–Stuart Kaminsky’s Abe Lieberman novels were forever changing the names of minor characters, getting geographical details wrong, etc.; sorry, no longer can think of any examples.
–I think it was Robinson Crusoe, something like that, where the main character strips naked to swim to a shipwreck, whereupon he fills his pockets with good stuff and swims back.
–A Duane Decker baseball novel where the cleanup hitter breaks up a perfect game with two out in the eighth, or something equally impossible.
–A collection of Roald Dahl short stories where there was a reference to “the primr.oses along the walk” (you can figure out what happened here, especially if I tell you where the volume I was reading was published).
To truly “take me out of the story” the error has to be much more central to the action or the characters. One example would be The Giver, mentioned above. I don;t recall the details any more, but I do remember that the way the society is structured is just completely impossible. This is not the sort of thing I usually notice about the fantasy books I read, so it must have been pretty egregious. When I keep saying “But that doesn’t WORK, that doesn’t make any SENSE” we’re not talking about speed bumps any more; I’m gone.
Another example: a Robert Barnard mystery novel, forget which one, in which there is an American writer who talks…just like the British people who populate the rest of the book and most of the other ones by Barnard (who is himself British). I thought at first, “Aha! She SAYS she’s American, but she clearly ISN’T–must be a clue that she’s really somebody else,” but as time went on and nothing was done about that (and as it became clear that nobody in the novel seemed to think this was strange) I began to realize that the British way of speaking had nothing to do with anything except sloppy writing on Mr. Barnard’s part. After a while, every time she opened her mouth (which was frequent) I was reminded about the issue, and that also took me out of the story.
Obviously, YMMV.
If he was going to estimate, he could have just estimated. That’s my point. He did dive into academic level of detail to prove it would be exactly 50 liters, and got it wrong.
I thought Webley was the only manufacturer with revolver safeties.
I just read a book, and I wish I could tell you the name but it’s on my stupid Kindle fire which needs to be charged (only like every half hour or so). But anyway, it’s one of the novels where a 30-something goes back home, for some reason, and discovers mysteries and intrigue and probably love. In the early going she buys an old beater to drive, and on the drive she finds a pack of cigarettes in the glove compartment and heads south (it’s always south), smoking all the way.
About a hundred pages later, events drive her to purchase a pack of ciggies. She hasn’t had one since college and is astounded that she’s doing this. Guess she forgot about the trip.
This wasn’t the only thing that took me out of the story. But it was one of the things.
By the way, I also loved Bimbos of the Death Sun and my copy, which fortunately is on actual paper and thus available, is most assuredly not Friz Quadrata. The titles are. This was published by my publisher and I can’t believe they would do a thing like that. It’s also not for-fans-by-fans; it’s a mystery. An Edgar-award-winning mystery.
Not necessarily factual errors, but…
I just got around to reading Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. (spoilery) One of the biggest howlers that made me set down the book for a while was when the Housekeeper’s wife passed away unexpectedly in the night. Half an hour later, he’s basically apologizing to the houseguests for breakfast being a bit simple and late since his wife wasn’t around to help. Stiff upper lip and all that, but…really?!
Also, there’s the small matter of deceased people merrily decomposing in the guest bedrooms in the middle of summer for several days, but nobody is particularly discomfited by this.
I think there were a few more, but I trudged on blindly just so I could finish the book.
Yes, really. Plus remember that the Housekeeper was himself a murderous asshole who abused his wife horribly; he wasn’t likely to grieve for her.
Three nights only, and by the second night the survivors are a teensy bit preoccupied with not getting murdered.
I’d disagree, unless your definition of “recent” is different from mine.
There was definitely a trend to make the covers closely match the contents of science fiction novels by the 1970s.
In the 1950s you frequently had covers that were either “one size fits all” (Like Richard Powers abstract art)
or blatantly inappropriate art, like the original cover for Larry Niven’s The World of Ptaava:
(Thrints – the alien in that book, are one-eyed):
But by the 1970s most new science fiction paperback art seemed to be trying to be appropriate to the contents:
Yep. Fortunately I’m not smart enough to catch other types of errors. Plus, I am Constant Reader…all I care about is the story.