Cryptonomicon gets a lot of love from geeks, but Stephenson’s brutal ignorance about the basic principles of economics made it a tough read for me. One of the most glaring errors was a character opining that the Asian Crisis happened because the countries involved didn’t back their currencies with gold. This isn’t just one character’s opinion; one of the main plot threads in the book is a company’s efforts to create an independent currency backed by gold. Even more hilariously bad happens later on. The company finds a huge cache of Nazi gold, but for various reasons actually recovering it would be impossible. No problem, says the company’s founder, we’ll just leave it in the ground. It wouldn’t be any different from it being in a bank vault.
Apparently Stephenson didn’t understand that when you back currency with gold, that means that you exchange that currency for gold on demand. Kinda hard to do when your gold is in an impenetrable vault in the middle of the jungle.
I read Naval Fiction- Hornblower, O’Brien, etc. Now, it’s OK if you get the name of a piece of rigging wrong. But two major things:
Impressment- only sailors could be impressed. Not landsmen.
Flogging: Officers, including Warrant officers- could not be flogged (at least by simple order of the Captain).
In two cases I read a book (or started to) where these were major plot points- and they were not explained away by a Press Gang making a mistake* or a Captain exceeding his authority.
(* No doubt some Press gangs got carried away, but then the book needs to explain this as something unusual and illegal)
Pepper Mill has a favorite one – a historical romance in which someone talks anbout being in Cornwall and looking acrosss the border into Scotland…
(If you don’t know why that’s annoying, go get a map of the British Isles. Maybe they had REALLY good vision.)
My personal annoyance is Michael Crichton’s Congo. Normally Mr. Crichton did so much research that he lists his references at the end of the book, but for Congo he pretty clearly didn’t research his Africa, and it shows.
That’s too good. I would be very grateful if Pepper Mill could name the guilty wrtech who penned that one - it sounds like somethng I could give a special place to in my collection of treasures.
I already thought Martin Amis was a fairly bad writer, whose father was much better at creating believable characters, when this happened. I think that if you’re setting a novel in a particular city then the book will be shaped by the characteristics of that city. So if you’ve never actually been to the city then the your writing is going to be very superficial. I don’t know what the context of the “one of the darkest places imaginable” line is but it’s worth pointing out that in Aberdeen the sun sets at about 10pm in the summer .
In case you’re wondering why Paul Theroux didn’t like Aberdeen, one of the reasons was that he was refused entry to a nightclub because he was wearing jeans, something which could have happened in any smart European city.
I once stopped reading a romance novel where the heroine looked out of the window in her Seattle office to view the Pacific. (And no, it wasn’t the kind of drek where it would later be revealed that she had super powers).
Well, I haven’t read any of the “Dark Tower” books, but I get the feeling Stephen King thought it was some kind of horrible, crime-infested ghetto housing project. Am I misreading that?
In any case, Co-Op City is a privately built apartment complex in Baychester, in the North Bronx. It’s RELATIVELY new, and was built in the late Sixties/early Seventies on the site of what used to be a huge amusement park called Freedomland (I have only the vaguest recollections of Freedomland, but my parents took me there a few times when I was a toddler). When it was first built, the residents were mostly middle-class Jews, and a large percentage of them were retirees.
Over time, the demographics have changed, and I’m pretty sure most of Co-Op City’s residents are either black or Puerto Rican today. But its residents are still largely middle-class or lower middle-class. The Bronx has become synonymous with crime and urban decay, in many parts of the country. Co-Op City is one of the most famus apartment complexes in the Bronx, so Stephen King may simply have used it as shorthand for “some horrible, impoverished hellhole in the ghetto.”
Co-Op City isn’t Paradise, but it’s a decent place to live if you’re a black civil servant or a Puerto Rican nurse.
I once read a Clive Cussler novel set in 1906 where, more than once, one character told another, “It’s all good.” I’m relatively certain that particular slang phrase was not used in 1906.
There was also a 2 or 3 page period where one of the character’s names switched from Carter to Curtis and back again, another instance where a character previously named Stuart is now Murray, a map that places Montreal where Calgary would be (4000km/2500mi. away), and numerous other smaller mistakes.
The worst error, however, was when the characters were trying to beat the arrival of the weather system known as a “Chinook”, because when the winds hit, the temperature could be lowered by 30 degrees Celsius in just a few hours. In actuality, the temperature would be raised 30 degrees. I understand that not everyone knows that another name for a Chinook is a ‘snoweater’, but, if you’re going to make it a plot point, shouldn’t you have some idea what the heck it does?
According to Butcher, his most egregious errors were written at a time when Google Maps wasn’t available. I know, it seems like such a time could never have existed. Google Maps came online in February 2005 (with satellite imagery in April), and even then it wasn’t the supremely awesome tool it is now. By that time Butcher had already written the first six books in the series (book 6 came out in August 2004, while book 7 didn’t come out until May 2006). Before then, satellite imagery was hard to come by easily online, though it was available in some places IIRC.
Jean Auel (yeah, I know, but *Clan of the Cave Bear *is a decent read, and I enjoyed Valley of the Horses) did this in Shelters of Stone. She changes the spelling of Jondalar’s stepfather from Willomar to Willamar. No reason given, I just think she’s gotten such a swelled head that she thought she could get away with murder. But it’s fricking made up prehistoric character, so who even knows if that was their naming convention? So why change it?
I do hope she’s in for a rude awakening when (and if) EarthChildren Ayla Invents Nuclear Fission ever comes out and sales are dismal. I might read it, but I’ll borrow it from the library first to see if it’s worth buying. :rolleyes:
It’s been a while since my last reading of the DT series, so this is my general impression … but I feel like Stephen King intended Eddie to be a little more of a street kid. Co-op City is fairly self-contained, walking around doesn’t look or feel like a typical New York City or Brooklyn street. There are high-rise buildings, but they are separated by vast areas of empty space. It would be a long, unlikely walk for a kid living in Co-op City to get anywhere that looks more urban.
No it’s not. It’s connected to the Pacific ocean, but it’s an estuary. And I’ve never lived in Seattle, but I doubt its residents ever refer to the sound as the Pacific ocean.
Google Maps came online in February 2005 (with satellite imagery in April), and even then it wasn’t the supremely awesome tool it is now. By that time Butcher had already written the first six books in the series (book 6 came out in August 2004, while book 7 didn’t come out until May 2006). Before then, satellite imagery was hard to come by easily online, though it was available in some places IIRC.