Took me right out of the story--

Cafe Society
1

Mrs. R got me a gift the other day–an audiobook of “It’s Superman”. Cool, eh?

So I plugged the first disk into the car CD player this morning. The narrator sets the scene, in 1935 Indiana or wherever, and then launches into a description of the county sheriff’s appearance:

“…a maroon polo shirt…”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat???

A polo shirt? In 1935?

Oh, sure, maybe on an actual polo player, but polo players were a tad sparse on the ground in 1935 Indiana. Polo shirts didn’t get popular until the late Sixties.

So, four sentences into the audiobook, and already we’ve got a massive anachronism. Sigh…

2

Not an anachronism at all:

Note that the color mentioned in the second example is essentially the same as on the tape.

3

Well, all right, then; I stand corrected. Thanks for the info!

4

Well, maybe it’s not an anachronism, but it seemed implausible enough to make you take notice and spoil your enjoyment somewhat. Same thing happens to me when I watch “Ghost Whisperer” and they have Jennifer Love Hewitt tarted up with those ridiculous eye lashes and hair extensions. Aside from being incredibly ugly in and of themselves, they just don’t seem like something someone with the taste in clothes her character supposedly has would choose. (wow, what the hell kind of convuluted sentence was that?)

5

“The King of Elfland’s Daughter,” by Lord Dunsany.

The young prince Alveric persuades a witch to make him a magic sword, so that he can fight the armies of Elfland and win the hand of the aforementioned daughter. The witch forges the sword out of seventeen “thunderbolts” dug from her garden; these are clearly intended to be meteorites, but Dunsany never actually comes out and says this, presumably because meteorites are a latter-day concept and therefore would seem anachronistic in such a setting.

So instead he describes the “thunderbolts” in a very roundabout way, as “cousins of Earth that had visited us from their etherial home,” “stormy wanderers,” “metals not sprung from Earth,” which floated on “paths of Space” until Earth captured them, etc., etc. They’re meteorites, get it? Meteorites!

Having established this, Dunsany goes on to describe the forging process. The witch blasts the metal with arcane runes of power, the fire leaps up “wild and green; and down in the embers the seventeen, whose paths had once crossed Earth’s when they wandered free, knew heat again as great as they had known, even on that desperate ride that brought them here.” Because they’re meteorites, see.

At last the metal is hot enough, and the magical fire vanishes in an instant, “leaving only a circle that sullenly glowed on the ground, like the evil pool that glares where thermite has burst.”

*WHAAA–??? Thermite?! * Dunsany, you cock! I got fricking whiplash from that! You craft a fantastic, eloquent scene full of magic and wonder and otherworldly beauty, and then shoot it to hell like that?! What was all that dancing around the concept of meteorites a minute ago, if you’re just going to blow the mood to bits anyway by mentioning goddamn *thermite? *

Ass.

6

Some book by Andrea Kane. I don’t recall the title, and I’m too lazy to look it up. It was her newest contemporary romantic suspense novel (may still be, it’s only been a year or so ago).

Half way through, there was this piece of dialogue. I don’t recall it well enough to recreate it here. But it struck me as being incredibly contrived.

I shut the book in irritation, then looked at it to see who had written the book.

And then I realized, I’d seen that very contrived structure of conversation before–in a different book by Andrea Kane.

I mostly like her books, especially the historical ones. But some of her dialogue is clever but contrived.

7

:confused: This exact thing is a key element of Dunsany’s style in a huge number of his books and stories. He deliberately mixes the poetic with the mundane, along with making mild jests about social mores. For example, the witch who forged the sword was holding “the thigh bone of a materialist.” And remember that he and his audience were fresh out of World War I, so by using the “thermite” comparison he was tying the image back to that experience.

8

In one of Robert Ludlum’s books (I can’t remember which. I was in the hospital, read a bunch of them back to back, and they all started to blur together), the protagonist must get somewhere very quickly, so is ferried in an F-102 jet. Wait - I thought the F-102 was a single-seat fighter? OK, maybe there’s a training variant with a back seat. I can buy that.

And then the hero gets coffee service from a flight attendant who walks down the aisle.

WHAT!? I had gotten used to Ludlum silencing revolvers, and other not-really-plausible plot devices, but this one just yanked me completely out of the story. I don’t mind an author who doesn’t 100% get it right, but most can at least get in the ball park. I promptly put the book down, and not only did I never return to it, I never read another of Ludlum’s books again. Just couldn’t do it.

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Well, I suppose Ludlum could have been thinking of the Fokker F100–

…but it’s still darned sloppy.

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I was reading Crown of Slaves last night, by David Webber. It’s part of his Honor Harrington setting, basically Horatio Hornblower in space. Giant faster-than-light spaceships blasting each other into bits using fancy energy weapons. That sort of thing. One of the characters is watching a talking-heads news program on his fancy space-television (a three dimensional hologram type thingy) and is suspicious about one of the panelists. But he tuned into the show halfway through, and missed his introduction at the shows beginning, so he has no idea what the guy’s name is.

I read that and thought, “Wait a minute. They’ve got hyperdrives and grav lances and anti-aging drugs that let people live for centuries… but they don’t have Tivo?”

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In other words, it’s more or less like a modern fantasy author making direct reference to VX gas, suitcase nukes, or the Bush administration. I wouldn’t know whether it’s a key element of Dunsany’s style or not; the point is that it pulled me violently out of the story, particularly coming right on the heels of that whole page-and-a-half digression to include meteorites without actually mentioning the word “meteorite.”

If Dunsany’s style is to establish a vibrant, compelling fantasy landscape with great poetry and skill, and then proceed to destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief with pointless anachronisms, then I suddenly don’t feel particularly bad about not reading more of his works. “The King of Elfland’s Daughter” was (to my recollection) the first novel of his I’d read, and the thermite reference may be why I’ve never felt the need to check others out. I actually quite liked most of the book, when he wasn’t trying to kick my legs out from under me with cutting-edge 1920’s British pop culture references. But if he’s going to sneak up and attack me whenever I make the mistake of immersing myself in his work, then screw him.

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The greatest fantasy author in my opinion, certainly one of the greatest in many others opinions.
He indeed mixes terms and behaviors. He’s worth it; keep reading.

One of his fantastic heroes in old age realizes that his wife considers him as she does their children, and not the most intelligent one of them, at that. :slight_smile:

The Sword of Welleran is a great short story.

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Eh, you say “tomato”, I say “precursor to the magic-realism movement”.

IMNSHO, he’s the best fantasy writer ever, but obviously tastes differ.

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You might like his short stories better. There are many collections available.

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For some reason, I keep noticing fantasy authors using variations on the phrase “A pearl of great price” somewhere in the story. If the story is set somewhere that’s there’s very surely no King James bibles hanging around, then it bothers me. It was used both in a Lynn Flewelling novel, and I think in Kushiel’s Dart. I’ve re-read both in the last week, and the same phrase pissed me off both times.

Flewelling also uses ‘pipe dream’, which seems anachronistic and bothers me. I don’t think her world has tobacco, opium, or anything like it.

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At The Edge of the World. is an outstanding short story collection.

And check this out.

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Actually, the best collection currently available is probably Time and the Gods, in the Fantasy Masterworks collection.

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When The Wind Blows and The Lake House are terrible books anyway, but there was one scene that pulled me out of the book completely - because it was so unintentionally funny.

Main Character, Main Character’s girlfriend, and 6 kids between the ages of 4 and 12 - kids with wings, ftr - pile into his Jeep Wrangler. Then, as they’re fleeing, one of the bad guys shoots out the back window and no one is hurt by the bullets or glass.

If you could even get eight people and a dozen huge wings (even the 4-year-olds had a six foot wingspan) into a Jeep Wrangler, and if it was a hardtop which would explain why it even had a glass back window that could be shot out that way, there’s no way someone wouldn’t have gotten hurt given it would have been so damn crowded. It’s not like these were little kids, either, he went out of his way to describe them as very big for their ages.

It’s sad that the version of this story meant for teens (Maximum Ride series) makes a whole lot more sense than the ones orginially written for adults.

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There is always Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin.

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Man, I wish like hell I wasn’t so nit-picky. It ruins both historical books and movies. I noticed the thing that** Lissla Lissar** mentioned: Bible quotes used in times before the KJV was published or in places you wouldn’t expect the populace to be reading it. Shakespeare has popped up in the 14th century a time or two, as well. I’ve also seen instances of writers who apparently don’t know the definitions of words they’re using, such as the author who apparently thought a garderobe was a closet.

Since I started writing my own historical novel, I find myself even less forgiving of such things. It’s just sloppy work. Yeah, I know how much effort you have to put in to making sure every single word of the dialogue was in use in the period and having to cross check dozens of cookbooks written in nearly indesiphrable Old English when you want to write a dinner scene, but that’s what a author should do. Otherwise, they should have the grace to insert a disclaimer in the dedication page: “I know jack-shit about [time period]. I’m just setting it there because I want my character to have an affair with [famous historical figure] and I like [steroetypical image of time period.]”

Don’t even get me started on the nonsense that authors get up to when putting characters with modern sensibilities in historical time periods.