I’m re-reading Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga again, and dammit, every damn time Miles has an unplanned seizure, a helpful person shoves something- a pen, a wallet, anything to hand- in his mouth, and that’s presented as the right thing to do. Gaaah. Even a basic first aid class teaches you Not To Do that.
Have you got a favourite book, or series, where there’s just one niggling little annoying line or concept that brings you out of it every time?
There is a series of books by Claire North about a mad scientist/special constable. The trouble is, much of what he does is really nuts. For example, at one point he requires the financial records of an orphanage. Instead of officially showing up with a couple of policemen and demanding the books, what he does in the novel is have his minions distract the manager with some bullshit while he burns through the door lock with acid(!!) (instead of using the perfectly good set of lockpicks he has on him and uses in a later scene), breaks into the desk, steals the evidence, and runs away.
Yup, Drake’s Belisarius series. Rough outline, General Belesarius is given a small gem called Aide who popped back from like 100 million years in the future to combat an enemy equivalent sent back to change history. Aide has effectively encyclopedia knowledge of history, but no real understanding of human nature because he is more or less a silicone intelligence.
So Belisarius needs to bootstrap the Byzantine Empire of Justinian to be able to fight the Malwa Empire, who is roughly Renaisance level [they have early guns, gunpowder and not well built rockets, think fireworks]
Sweet freaking god - I could bootstrap from treadle powered wood lathes to at least able to machine iron and base steel - Aide knows where to find the right minerals and ores to make more modern alloys, and a lot of the intermediate industrial processes, and he can project ‘memories’ like footage of Soviet Katyusha rocket trucks to give an idea of possible equipment …
Every time I end up reading the series I want to whack Drake with a brick and ask him why he never consulted an actual machinist as to what they would do to bootstrap to modern equipment [they have an issue with the idea of going from plain roughly cast bronze cannons to using a bastardized welded together collection of rods bound with rings as a cannon… when making a mill would NOT be that impossible when the inventor put in charge of coming up with the weaponry could be shown what was done in the future and how to bootstrap up to it.]