You’re Special pleading, and you know it.
Gunpowder as a fact of life didn’t exist for Europe until the 13th century, and even after early encounters, still didn’t affect things – like making castles lose their curtain walls until after that. Wikipedia calls “Middle Ages” from the 5th nto the 15th centuries. For the bulk of that Europe had not even the knowledge of gunpowder.
Sure. But we have two (count em, two!) dudes in Middle Earth who know about gunpowder. I showed you that there were two (count em, two!) dudes in Medieval Europe that also did.
No matter how good Roger Bacon was, he was no Istar.
Are you sure? Has anyone one seen Roger Bacon and Gandalf in the same room at the same time? 
aha!
As an aside: one interesting thing about GRRM’s Song of Ice and Fire is that Westeros’s native flora and fauna is clearly North American, and not the standard European. Which makes sense, actually.
I never noticed that, got a link or info?
It’s just from reading the books: off the top of my head, I remember corn, pumpkins, wild turkeys, mountain lions, buffalo and sasquatch (although the last two are debatable).
Buffalo aren’t North American.
You said the “B” word!!! :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Good point, but of course “corn” as a general term for grain is European.
Sure they are. :pThe European Bison is pretty rare. Unless you think they are talking about the Water Buffalo, which is doubtful. " also commonly known as the American buffalo".
But this website doesnt list either Bison or buffalo.
http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Beastiary
I never could with the idea that in the “real world” of the Matrix everybody forgot how to knit a decent sweater.
I’m always ripped right out of things by shitty historic costuming. I could NOT cope with The Tudors. No.
It’s just a theory of mine - I know aurochs is a primordial European species of cattle, but based on their description in the book, I suspect that what GRRM is actually referring to is the North American bison. He called mountain lions “shadowcats”, so why not call bison “aurochs”?
And I know about “corn” meaning grain, but you also had Lord Commander tossing his raven a “grain of corn”. To me, that means maize.
You have a point there, I mean a “grain of wheat” is a pretty darn small snack.
Outdated technology jerks me right out of a story. For example, in The Ship Who Sang, you have hideously deformed children who couldn’t survive on their own put into metal shells and trained to become intergalactic spaceships. Spaceships whose computers are still programmed with tapes.
Yeah, but not all of that can be blamed on the author. That book IS over 20 years old…the original short story is probably closer to 30 or 40 years.
puts on pedant hat Actually the book is almost 50, 55 for the original story.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The Ship Who Sang (1969) is a science fiction novel by Anne McCaffrey, a fix-up of five stories published 1961 to 1969.
[/QUOTE]
I guess it jars me so much because in her later stories, especially the Planet Pirates series, McCaffrey came up with encoding programs on ceramic bricks which are more sci-fi-y to my 21st-century sensibilities. When a sci-fi story is so firmly ensconced in the technology of the time it was written in, it ends up looking slightly silly decades later when technology has advanced past that point.
New York City has millions of high rise apartment buildings. Why is it that when Detective Danny Reagen or Police Officer Jaime Reagen go into an apartment building, it’s always built on the same plans as every other apartment building they have ever been in. NYC does not build its apartment buildings all with the same floor plan.
The actual un-dead kind, not the Raged-up still-living 28 Days Later variety.
Aren’t actually dead zombies a sort of self-correcting problem? I mean, tissue still rots and degenerates, yes? And wouldn’t being exposed to the elements (as opposed to being tucked away in a coffin six feet under) only accelerate this?
Aren’t there wild animal attracted to the scent of carion?
Sunday’s edition of the online comic Sinfest. Ignore the whole Devil world, Reality Zone, yadda yadda business and the heavy moralizing of the strip in general. I’m more bothered by the fact that a robot needs to visually look at a map display on her arm in order to know where she’s going.
Heck, in Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo and in George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral series you have space ships being guided by cam-controlled mechanical computers, much like the Norden Bombsight. Computer Tapes, and the Digital Computers that go with them, would be a step up in technology.
I still love and read the stories. It’s the attitude, not the scientific errors or the obsolete technology. I love the old tech in Jules Verne’s novels, and I simply ignore the errors.