Martin Gardner wrote an article titled “Literary Science Blunders” in the Jan/Feb 1995 issue of Skeptical Inquirer. It’s reprinted in his collection “Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic”.
He mentions another error in Julius Caesar that Isaac Asimov pointed out. Caesar says, “But I am constant as the northern star”. In Caesar’s time, Polaris was farther from the north celestial pole because of precession of the Earth’s axis and wasn’t described like this.
In Lord of the Flies, Golding describes a thin crescent Moon that rises just after sunset. Only a nearly full moon can rise then. Also, because Piggy was nearsighted, his glasses would spread out the sun’s rays, not concentrate them, and thus couldn’t be used to start a fire by themselves. However, one of Gardner’s correspondents pointed out that if you fill the concave side of such a lens with a little water, it can then be used as a focusing lens.
There are numerous errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In “The Speckled Band”, a snake is trained by a whistle and drinks milk. Snakes are deaf and don’t drink milk. Asimov wrote a short article about some of Doyle’s errors in the area of chemistry.
Talking of Shakespeare, the scene where Hamlet meets the ghost of his father starts at midnight, there’s a few minutes of dialog, and ends as dawn is breaking.
Kipling’s Kim has the Lama speaking Chinese prayers. Tibetan buddhist monks and lama’s don’t learn Buddhist texts and scriptures in Chinese, they learn them in sanskrit or tibetan translations. I love the book and it always makes me cringe when Kipling makes this mistake…
Anne Rice is the Queen of shitty history but she takes the cake in Queen of the Damned. When Maharet tells her story about the beginning of vampirism she has it start at a time before the 1rst dynasty in Egypt. But when she goes home in the story, before becoming immortal, she visits NINEVAH! But Ninevah was a flowering city in the Assyrian period roughly 700BC… some almost 2000 years after the founding of dynastic Egypt.
Well if Ivahoe counts as a classic (:dubious:), then there is the fact that one of the characters rises from the dead with no explanation. You’d think after they had his funeral, someone would have been a little surprised to see him 100 pages later, but they aren’t.*
And I think that Moby Dick has someone coming back from the dead as well, but I refuse to read it, so I can’t say for sure.
*It has been a while since I read this, so I may have a detail wrong. Please don’t yell.
I don’t have a copy of Crime and Punishment at hand so I may mangle the details, but there was a timeline hiccup during a scene in which Raskolnikov visits the police station. IIRC, the book says he spent a few hours there, but when he leaves it’s much later in the day than it should be. Or much earlier. Actually, I only noticed at all because there was a footnote in the edition I was reading pointing out Dostoevsky’s mistake.
I don’t know that I’d consider this a mistake, since one of the central conceits of Dracula is that it’s made up of the collected letters, diaries, and recordings of the main characters. I always found it implausible that the other characters would bother writing down Van Helsing’s accent at all (or, in Dr. Seward’s case, imitating it), but it would be even less plausible if they all consistently rendered Van Helsing’s every line in dialect.
So the other day I was in the shower thinking about Hamlet’s soliloque…as one does …and I got the part about “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns”, and thought…er…didn’t someone do just that in the first act :dubious:
Kind of undermines the whole thrust of the speech, dunnit ?
Ok heretic, liste carefully, **Ivanhoe is a classic. **, no explanation needed, it’s an article of faith.
That character, Athelstane, had received a terrible blow in hsi head. He was left unconscious and, considering it was the dark ages, his companions thought he couldn’t have survived it. The priest who were in charge of his burial realized he was alive but as they would profit from his death they decide to finish the work.
Incidentally Athelstane resurrection is so funny that it’s worth the price of the book.
I thought that because it was enjoyable it might not be a classic. Glad to know I was wrong. And my HS English teacher reccomended it just for the resurrection of Athelstane (and thank you for the character’s name. Knew it started with an A, but I couldn’t remember anything else).
In Lord of the Flies**, the kids steal Piggy’s glasses and use them to start the fire.
Well, Piggy was nearsighted. That would mean that his glasses would be concave in shape, and would scatter the incident sunlight. You need a convex lens (like a magnifying glass) in order to concentrate the sun’s rays in order to start a fire. They really to have brought along a middle-aged guy with reading glasses to make this work…
Since Robinson Crusoe was stripping to swim, I assume it was so his clothes wouldn’t get wet. It would have been kind of pointless to leave some on, I think. I’m still leaning towards mistake.
But, I wonder if this Victorian “sort-of” nakedness is actually why he made the mistake. In DeFoe’s head, nakedness didn’t necessarily preclude pockets.
First – He wasn’t working, he was left at boarding school. But his beloved sister came to take him home.
You left out the time in between when they all had such a great time at Fezziwigs.
Then, the woman he loved did not run out on him. He had become corrupted by money and greed, and broke up with her.
Then, they show the Cratchetts having a loving Christmas despite their poverty. Ditto with the nephew and friends.
However: It has been suggested that the Cratchetts were really not all that bad off, for the times. They had several healthy children and only one who was sickly. Not a bad ratio then. Most of all, Mr. C was able to support them all, allowing Mrs. C to be a stay-at-home mom.
…and I got the part about “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns”, and thought…er…didn’t someone do just that in the first act :dubious:
?