I recently reread all eight of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. While she is an acknowledged wonderful writer, I caught two goofs:
In Beezus and Ramona, Aunt Bea and mother Dorothy Quimbly’s original last name was Haswell. In Ramona Forever, their father was “Grandfather Day.”
In Ramona the Pet, Mrs. Kemp mentions Howie’s “older sister,” who apparently ran away with Chuck Cunningham or something, because in later stories the only children mentioned are Howie and Willa Jean.
There are huge differences between the Discworld of Equal Rites and the one we see in later books. Unseen University is literally ‘unseen,’ Granny Weatherwax is not that great a witch, and, well, I’m sure other people can add more. It’s hand-waved away as being on a different time stream, something to do with the History Monks.
I don’t think those really qualify as mistakes. They’re just inconsistencies in continuity, which is inevitable (I remember when John Varley returned to his “Eight Worlds” series after years and wrote in an afterwards, “I didn’t want to have to read everything else all over again, so if there are continuity mistakes, tough.”).
A real mistake is something like the first edition of Ringworld, which had the Earth turning in the wrong direction, or The Tomorrow People by Judith Merrill (no relation to the British TV series) which had a helicopter flying on the moon.
I think internal inconsistencies are the type that the OP meant; perhaps some inconsistencies are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean none of the changes matter.
It’s the geographical mistakes that jar me the most. Writers love to set books in San Francisco, and they do a little research, but not enough. Nothing takes you out of a book faster than when the author screws up something about a location that you know well. (For the curious, here’s a post of mine with more details from a previous thread similar to the OP).
IIRC from reading threads here that this was a big complaint with the Dresden Files books, but I haven’t read them, nor do I know enough about Chicago to comment.
Those are very annoying. There’s a novel called Brick Lane, set on Brick Lane; I’ve only read the start but it refers to a tower block; there are none on Brick Lane. Sounds minor, but it’s not when the geography of the area is so important to the book.
As far as inconsistencies go, in the Horatio Hornblower novels of C.S. Forester, Mr. Bush is his almost perpetual second-in-command, and in the extended series he first meets Hornblower when they’re both Lieutenants in Lieutenant Hornblower. But in the first book to be written, titled Beat to Quarters in the US, Hornblower is a captain who has apparently just met his First Mate Bush.
Tom Clancy makes tons of errors. He’s written about an F15E flying supersonic from Eglin AFB, FL to somewhere in South America, with minimal refueling. Not gonna happen.
He placed the “bomb release” button on the throttle, when it is actually on the stick.
He’s had super-secret agent hitmen relying on blank pardons signed by a former POTUS. Considering that POTUS can’t pardon events that haven’t happened yet, those documents are worthless.
Yep. There’s a mystery writer, Lee Martin, who used to live in Fort Worth. However, she moved to another state some years ago…but still uses Fort Worth for her book settings. This can be pretty amusing when I read a book that’s supposed to be set in current times, and yet the shops or whatever have been gone for years or decades.
Laurel Hamilton is well-known for continuity mistakes.