I hate authors who can't be arsed to research

Or maybe the author simply hadn’t yet mentioned the nuclear holocaust that vaporized the Olympic Peninsula, and Seattle really does look out over the Pacific now.

I’m with you there. :mad:

goes back to tv tropes

Yes, there is a huge difference. If you use something from real life, you are expected to actually know what you are talking about. This is common knowledge amongst fantasy officianados, something you likely are not.

For those who think that Puget Sound should also be called the Pacific Ocean, would one of Anne Rice’s characters on the bayous of Louisiana be looking at the Atlantic Ocean

In the original draft of Saving Private Ryan, that original shot against the sniper in the bell tower was at 4,000 yards.

Thank Frith they changed that.

Aww… that’s one of my favourite books and movies of his.

I’m getting really tired of reading about the 45cm colt pistol, the .22 mm pistol, 20cm cannons on aircraft, and the heat seaking TOW missile fired by James Bond in John Gardner’s Cold Fire.

And I’m really, really, **really **tired of reading about cop killer bullets. Last time was in Stephen King’s Cel, and I damn near stopped reading right then and there (on reflection I should have, but that’s a different rant).

I often wonder about this - when writers just call up some university department they’ve pulled out of the phonebook because they need to do some research, are the university staff helpfull? How many professors are willing to sit down and discuss technical issues with a novice bookwriter?

If you’re curious, here are a few different New Orleans accents, from a documentary about language, dialect, and accent in New Orleans, including uptown white, black, and yat:

Worse than that is when an author uses a conversation for exposition between two people who shouldn’t really need it.

Once tried to read a book by Robin Cook where the main character was a female high level competitive ice skater. It was obvious that he knew absolutely nothing about the organization of that sport, and had not spent so much as five minutes researching it. That was my last Robin Cook book.

And as resident of the Pacific Northwest for some 45 years, I have never heard anyone refer to Puget Sound as the Pacific Ocean. NEVER! NOT ONCE!!

Yes, yes, we all know and agree that it’s not refered to as that. This point has been made several times already. I even said that hardly ever does anyone refer to ANY nearest coastal body of water as “xxxx ocean”, they nearly always use the sea/bay/sound/coast name. But in this case, it wasn’t a line of dialog.

Just read a book that featured a .09mm Glock. What’s it shoot? Dust? Revolvers that eject shells seem to be a common theme as well.

So the character wasn’t wrong, the author was.

Could we say, " Y’all jodiendo puta" and be correct? :smiley:

I read exactly half of one Danielle Steele novel. I think it was called Palamino.

The heroine has some paralyzing injuring and cannot walk anymore. From the accident to her recovery it is like oooh, four pages. Too bad Christopher Reeves didn’t have those four pages to recover from his injuries.

And she is good enough to go horseback riding ( with her legs strapped down to the stirrups and whatnot, no less) alone, unsupervised. AND the HERO of the story never farking suspects her of being paralyzed.
I threw the book across the room.

Now that I have a paralyzed FIL and understand ALOT more about such injuries, I am pretty sure had I read the book a few years ago, (instead of the mid 80’s when it came out.) I would have taken a hostage over the sheer stupidity of writing.

Oh, Danielle Steel. She’s just awful. (I’ll admit to having read her stuff when I was a teen. Then I grew up.)

There was one I read that involved a car crash which devastates two familes. It starts out with two teen couples going to the prom in Dad’s borrowed Mercedes sedan. They’re t-boned by a small compact car driven by a drunk driver. She specifically mentions the make of each car.
The Mercedes is completely destroyed by the smaller car, with two of the kids dying and the other two terribly injured. The driver of the smaller car walks away with nary a scratch, and maybe a crumpled bumper. I can remember thinking, “She must have mixed up the cars, because there’s no way in Hell that would ever happen.”
That may have been the last one of hers that I read.

Neal Stephenson usually does his research (and a lot of it), but he made an annoying screwup in The System of the World.

Towards the end of the book, a character shows up who we’re supposed to suspect is actually the biblical King Solomon, made immortal by virtue of his alchemical wisdom. Problem is, he goes by the name of “Solomon Kohen”.

Now Stephenson may think that “Kohen” is just a common Jewish name, but like all Jewish names, it has an actual meaning - it indicates that its bearer is descended from the priestly caste of the tribe of Levi. King Solomon, son of David of the tribe of Judah, would never, ever call himself a Cohen. The character should have gone by “Solomon Ben-David”, at most; I’d recommend something even more subtle, like “Solomon Gaon” or “Solomon Shalit”.

It’s not a big mistake, but it just stood out in the middle of a generally excellent story.

Well, if so, he always then decides that paying attention to the research and getting things correct would screw up his story too much, so the research needs to get ignored.
At least with almost anything physics, chemistry, math, or linguistics related. I don’t know enough history to tell when he was screwing up in the Baroque novels (which is why I couldn’t enjoy them).

For instance, Zodiac [Spoiler!]…

…revolves around bacteria engineered to break down PCBs and similar compounds. But when accidentally released into the wild the bacteria at some point decide to go backwards and start creating PCBs. Which is roughly similar to a winery finding that their yeast have decided to start turning alcohol back into sugar, or finding a breed of mouse that eats mouse poop and craps out wheat grains.

I was annoyed for a similar reason in Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road, about an Irish woman and an American woman who switch houses for a summer. The book switches back and forth between the action in Ireland and the action in the States, but every single character regardless of their location speaks like her typical Irish characters (talking about “ringing people up” instead of calling them is one example I can remember).