Well, Jim Butcher put a parking lot around Wrigley Field in Chicago in one of the Dresden novels, which is when I started to suspect he’d never actually been to Chicago. At least he’s admitted his mistake and has since visited the city.
Google maps, Mr. Butcher, Google maps… The satellite view is your friend.
(Well, OK, there’s a small parking lot on the NW corner of the block, presumably for employees and team buses, but it’s very clearly NOT what he had in mind, which was a parking lot surrounding the ballpark)
Stephen King has made a few trillion dollars without any help from me, but Steve… baby… would it KILL you to do just a TEENY bit of research? Maybe you’d only crank out 9 books a year instead of 10, but is that too much to ask?
Examples? In “Salem’s Lot” he has a Catholic priest explain that St. Paul was crucified upside down. Nope. That was St. Peter.
And in “The Stand,” which I haven’t looked at in 20 years, one line stood out: during the plague, he wrote of soldiers wearing “white Andromeda Strain suits.”
ANDROMEDA STRAIN SUITS??? How lazy can you get? It would’ve taken a minute or two to find out what epidemiologists call the suits they wear around contagious patients! There’s no excuse for that kind of silliness.
Mr. King may or may not have known what the suits were called, but if the POV was Stu Redman’s (I’m assuming it was) there’s nothing to say he knew what they were called. When you get description like that from a POV character, you shouldn’t necessarily attribute it to the author’s ignorance, but rather to just what sort of knowledge would be deemed in-character for the character to possess.
Speaking of King, he admitted to pulling a big boo-boo in the *Dark Tower *books when he put Alphabet City (where Eddie was from) in the Bronx (or was it Brooklyn? Either way, it was the wrong place.) He explained it later by saying in Eddie’s world, Alphabet City is in the Bronx (or Brooklyn) but he did say that was his goof.
I think it was one of my favorite authors, Diana Gabaldon, who said in one of her forwards that she didn’t know or care if on such and such a date high tide hit at such and such a time, so don’t bother writing her if she got it wrong.
Quite a few. As a freelance copyeditor, I am one of them. And sometimes even though we point out egregious errors, the author has the final say.
Historical romances are the worst IME. I had one in particular that was really bad. The author had the major facts and motives wrong for the Battle of Little Bighorn and the massacre at Wounded Knee. (She was not writing a revisionist history; it was just a minor side plot.) I pointed these out and suggested some fixes. When the book came out, the plot stayed as is. Hey, I tried!
more or less, she is looking at the decreasing level and self whining that once her last few spoonsfull are gone she will not be able to get any more…she brought the bottle with her from England … :rolleyes:
Nice, given that it was invented in 1831 and was in common use as an anasthetic, toothpaste and cough med at the time … in the 1890s.
Dodge City KS in 1890 had a population of 1763, and was proud of being very ‘eastern’ with stores, doctors and the whole shebang. As the woman in question was also traveling on the Mississippi, and specified heading to St Louis, lack of actual compounding pharmacies was not a problem. 1890 was actually VERY late, and much of the west was very easternized. When most people think wild west, they are stuck still in the 1850s and the original gold rush, and paint your wagon style boom towns. They are generally getting their impression of the west from hollywood :rolleyes:
I used to read a particular mystery writer quite frequently, partly because I liked her stories, and partly because the stories are set in Fort Worth. However, she moved out of Fort Worth, but kept setting her novels in my home city, and hasn’t bothered to check on any new developments. This was brought home to me when I opened up a new book, and found that her heroine was doing something at a structure that had been torn down some years ago, and that the story was set in current times. Yes, I did check the copyright page. The writer had been getting preachier and preachier about a certain religion, too, so I quit looking for her books.
This thread adds to my belief that people like Stephen King and Anne Martin are right: fake places are better to write about because people notice when you flub real places. I may know that Warsaw, NH and Killkenny, NH in my current unfinished stories are based on Portsmouth, NH and the town I live in respectively, but who else would?
Did you know there’s a real but uninhabited township in NH called Kilkenny (one L)? I only know that because it’s home to four or five of the hundred highest peaks in New England that I intend to climb eventually.
None of that is evidence that the heroine could easily have walked to a pharmacy whenever she wanted some chloroform.
*If she needed chloroform while she was in Dodge then a pharmacy in St. Louis (600 miles away!) wouldn’t do her much good. If the author really did claim that the character was traveling from Dodge City to St. Louis on the Mississippi then that *would *be a blatant sign of lack of research though, as the Mississippi River is likewise hundreds of miles east of Dodge.
*As I said, if the author underestimated how common pharmacies were in the specific time and place where she set her story then that does indicate a lack of research, but of a totally different kind than that described in your OP. The author couldn’t just “call the nearest university with a department of pharmacology” and ask for a period map of circa 1890 Dodge City with all the pharmacies circled. An author who was concerned about historic accuracy could find out this kind of thing with some effort, but it wouldn’t be as simple as establishing when chloroform became commercially available in the US.
My wife lived in White River Junction (Peyton Place!) when she went to Dartmouth. But that’s no excuse. I’m sure some Harvard and MIT profs live in Boston, but that doesn’t excuse saying those universities are in Boston (though MIT used to be.)
Eddie is from Co-op City, in real life it is in the Bronx, and in the books it starts off being in Brooklyn. I also suspect Stephen King didn’t have a great grasp on what Co-op City is like.
Do you not understand the difference between accepting fantasy elements in a novel and not accepting non-deliberate mistakes and discrepancies from the known world, or did you just have to move your bowels and didn’t have time to get out of the thread?