The television show “CSI” is especially bad about this. I haven’t watched the show a lot, but it seems like in every episode they do some impossible thing like blow up a grainy security video until the small parking sticker on the back of a passing car can be read, or digitally remove a criminal’s wig and sunglasses to see what he looks like without a disguise. It makes me wonder if the rest of the forensic science on the show is so far removed from reality.
I was about half-way through Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel when I came across her loving, two-page description of all the most disgusting and repulsive Jewish stereotypes rolled into one slimy Jew character.
Now, I’m aware the book was written a long time ago, and pretty much everyone hated the Jews then. Jules Verne, for instance, is usually good about including some ethnic stereotyping liberally in his novels. But the sheer hate that came through in Baroness Orczy’s writing repelled me, and I closed the book and returned it to the library. I’ve tried to read it a couple of times since then, but I always get this bad taste in my mouth.
What the hell was Baroness Orczy’s problem, anyway? Did a Jew run over her cat or something?
.:Nichol:.
If it makes you feel any better, it may have been a conscious decision on someone’s part. Hellman’s is known as “Best Foods” out here in the West, but they go out of their way to let people know that they are the same product (e.g., same advertising jingle.")
However, I’ve given up on the series, too. It just isn’t going anywhere.
It was a conscious decision on the part of Grafton’s publishers/editors. They felt that Hellman’s was a better known brand name than “Best Foods” and changed the text over Grafton’s objections. She’s spoken about how this has happened on several occasions throughout the series, but she doesn’t fight it too hard because she’s contractually linked to her publisher through the letter Z, and doesn’t want to make the writer/editor relationship strained over nitpicky details – even when they end up being the kinds of things which just stick out like a sore thumb to the readers.
Btw, if you gave up after the dread that was “N is for Noose” do give “O is for Outlaw” a try. It’s a pretty interesting departure from the usual Kinsey story.
I couldn’t figure out whether it was bad fact checking or a conscious decision. Neither one speaks well of the writer or editor (to me).
Anyway, that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. The few books before hadn’t been good, I was sick of some of the other errors (that I’m guessing she let slip for her editor relationship), I was deathly sick of the friend of Kinsey’s who would have been a size 6 (given her height and weight) being referred to as “fat.” (That just drove me up the wall). The mayo error was just one too many things for me to accept.
I was reading Peter David’s Imzadi when I started noticing the names of the Sindereen terrorists:
[ul]
[li]Maror[/li][li]Chazeres[/li][li]Haroses[/li][li]Karpas[/li][li]Baytzah[/li][/ul]
These items are the names of the objects on a Passover seder plate. I still enjoyed the book, but the “inside joke” made it much harder for me to take it seriously.
Zev Steinhardt
John Ringo, A Hymn Before Battle.
In one important battle scene, the good guys are firing grav ‘rifles’ that accellerate projectiles to one-third the speed of light. The lead good guy (“Mighty Mite” Mike) fires repeated shots at an enemy leader about a mile away, each time missing by about 6 inches as the leader maneuvers his battle platform about in a constant shuffle. Sounds about right, hmmm…?
NO.
The bad guy is standing unsecured on a platform that has to shift at least six inches in the time that it takes a DU slug to travel one mile at a 62,000 miles per second. In other words, he has 1.61X10[sup]-5[/sup] seconds to travel half a foot. Or: 350+ miles per hour, in short, random patterns, within an area the size of half a football pitch, while standing unsecured on the platform, directing battle, holding conversations, analyzing intelligence, locating targets, and firing weapons. If the good guy is a proper shot and aiming for a solid hit (on a large target, not less), then it’s more like 700+ miles per hour. Trans-sonic, in other words.
Not buying it.
So do I have this correct? In the West, the mayonnaise jingle is, “Bring out the Best Foods and bring out the best” ?
On topic, the two books I have read by Robert R. McCammon, Boy’s Life and Swan Song are dotted with ridiculous errors that truly ruined him for me. People who love him are incredulous when I tell them I’m not bowled over by his “magical” books.
The first problems I encountered were in Swan’s Song, which is a post-apocolyptic story that’s, as far as I can determine, a complete rip-off of The Stand by Stephen King. Anyway, we have life in the these United States after a nuclear bomb. Besides the fact the whole books seems co-opted from popular culture’s opinion of what would happen if the Russians blew us up, I was annoyed by several inaccuracies or logical screw-ups. One example: toward the end, when the heroes are atop the mountain and the sun begins to break through the clouds, there is a description of leaves blowing overhead like black ravens. It’s a nice image – until you remember there’s been a nuclear winter for seven years. No leaves could be hanging around for that long!
Despite these annoyances, I read A Boy’s Life. Somewhere near the beginning there’s a mention of the next town over, the county seat. Then later there’s a big chase scene leading from the MAYOR’s office in the courthouse! Sheesh! Mayors don’t have offices in courthouses, most especially in towns that aren’t county seats … they don’t HAVE courthouses! Arrg!! I just couldn’t stand it.
Oh yeah, then there was this beaut:
I read 2001: A Space Oddysey by Clarke. In this book, the action takes place on Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. However, in the movie, the action takes place on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. There are some other differences between the two stories. I had not (and still have not) seen the movie.
So, when I started reading 2010: Whatever the subtitle to this second book was, imagine my surprise when reading that to recover the Discovery and find out what happened to Bowman, the crew is going to Europa! I was wondering “When the heck did they get to Europa?” It was only later that I found out that 2010 followed 2001 the movie, not the book.
Zev Steinhardt
zev, if you liked that one, wait till you get to 3001, which has Poole born in 1996 – yes, that’s right, five years before the 2001 mission.
Indeed it is. In fact, this Californian hadn’t even HEARD of Hellman’s until a few days ago. (“Hellman’s”…does that sound like a “front” company in a horror movie to anyone else?)
And if I may add my own novel experience…There was a Star Trek novel a couple of years ago (I can’t remember the title, unfortunately. But it’s one of the few that are published as a “Stand alone” that year, as Simon & Schulster prefering to publish contrived multi-part miniseries’ based on catchphrases these days) about the Enterprise-D rushing to try and save a planet who’s star was about to go supernova. (As I recall, the star in question was artificial) Anyway, they were fretting about the fact that the Enterprise could only evacuate “A couple of thousand” people from the doomed planet.
According to the official technical manual, the Enterprise-D could carry up to 15,000 people in a dedicated evacuation mission.
Geeky, yes. But it still ruined the book for me…though it wasn’t written very well, either.
Ranchoth
You know, I read 3001: Final Odyssey and that never occured to me. I remember the scene where they “bumped” his brithdate a thousand years, but I don’t remember them mentioning 1996. One would think Clarke would be more careful than that…
Zev Steinhardt
It was a different scene – one of those meandering narratives that mentioned (IIRC) the Voyager flyby of Jupiter and tied it to the year Poole was born.
Our bookshelves are a mess, else I’d dig up a cite for you.
(Just checked . . . could have sworn it was Voyager but looks like it would have been Galileo.)
Orson Scott Card - Homebody or something like it. The main character moves to Greensboro NC to fix up a decaying wreck of a house. Several times in the book, this character visits the realtor of the property, which is across town. Main character always ALWAYS makes it over to the realtor’s office in fifteen minutes.
This has never happened to me or anyone I know whose ever been through Greensboro. The name of that town translates into Huge Parking Lot.
I know you live in the University District, Card, but geez! Get out once in a while and try to get through the rest of the city!
Scarlett, and zev, indeed he did say that. On page 147.
It shouldn’t be attributed to sloppiness or senility on Clarke’s part though. In the introductions to 2010, and 2061, and the afterword to 3001, he explains how each book is not truly a literary sequel to the previous, but something of a variation on a theme. When he wrote 2010, he decided to follow the movie instead of the book, mostly because he was inspired to write it by the recent (1979) Jupiter encounters by the Voyager probes. In the valediction of 3001 he states that he “discarded many elements of it’s precursors, but developed others–and I hope more important ones–in much greater detail.”
The book 2001 was written at the same time as the film, but IIRC, the movie was originally supossed to follow the book where the Discovery goes to Saturn. They changed it because apparently the SFX guys couldn’t make a good Saturn (it looked “fakey” was what I heard).
For some reason, it didn’t bother me that the sequel was following the movie. Perhaps it was because of my relief that the book didn’t suck like the movie.
That he did, but I don’t think it made it better. Couple things that bugged me about 3001:
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He brings back a dead character.
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He doos so just so they can show him how horrible the 20th century was and how everything he believed was wrong, and how much better everything is in 3001. If clarke wants to do social commentary, could he not pretend it’s a sci-fi story?
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As smart as he is, the ending reveals there’s a lot Clarke doesn’t know about Computer Viruses.
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The Monolith can do almost anything, but doesn’t have a decent anti-virus program built in.
Yes, and it’s been one of the hardest things for me to get used to. It’s like those Warner Bros. cartoons where the Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny finds the rigged piano and plays the whole tune correctly except for that one note. It’s trivial but just wrong enough to be annoying, so I can see how it would bug somebody in a book.
And just so I’m not completely off-topic, here’s one that I borrowed from someone. (I hadn’t lived out here long enough to notice, at the time): most of Microserfs by Douglas Coupland takes place around the Silicon Valley, and it’s apparent that he did a lot of research. But all of the characters refer to the highway as “the 101,” which I’m told is a southern California thing. Around the Bay Area, it’s just “101” or “Highway 101.”
I think it’s also Microserfs in which Coupland referred to “I-520” rather than “SR-520”, which would have been correct. As MrWhatsit said, “Now I can’t trust anything he says! The whole book! Ruined! RUINED I TELL YOU!”
MrWhatsit has a flair for the overdramatic.
A while ago, I tried to read Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund. It’s an interesting premise–the book tells the story of the wife of Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. Sounded right up my history/literature dork alley. I got about a hundred pages into the book and gave up in disgust. The main character didn’t think like a 19th century woman; she thought and acted like a late 20th century feminist/environmentalist. The author tried to rationalize it by having the character spend her adolescence among free-thinking Transcendentalists. Nope, not buying it. I’m willing to grant authors some artistic liberty, but when your main character’s whole mindset is a historical anachronism, I have problems.