SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Colin wrote: "In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larrson, there is a bad guy/enforcer/hit man type who has congenital indifference to pain."

I had the same issue with him, lol. The book series seemed so grounded until this comic book super villain was introduced. It didn't make me stop reading but certainly took me out of the story, especially since he plays such a major role. In my head, I fixed him by turning him into a supernatural mutant man instead.

"I think a lot depends on how obvious the miss is and how much it bothers a particular reader."

Yea, your mileage may vary. On one hand, the things (I think) I know get in the way of my enjoyment. On the other hand, it makes me see through sloppy research / bad writing and I appreciate it all the more when the author gets it right.

This is a real, albeit extremely rare, disease and people who have it accumulate multiple injuries starting in early childhood because their lack of pain leads to failure to protect themselves or get care when hurt. Such an individual would not be capable of doing what this character does.

Exactly! I have actually worked with one such individual. He was a young man in his early twenties. By then, he could still walk, however his knee x-rays were incredible to behold. I remember them vividly. That his knee was actually weight bearing seemed impossible given the configuration of what was left. Quite literally hanging on by a thread.

For human beings, the vast majority of pain is protective - to remind us not to push certain limits. (On occasion however, our pain system become overly sensitive, and produces pain when it's not required - and then we see things like CRPS.)

This is one of the coolest threads I've ever encountered on GR - amazed I've not found it before. I have a million contributions to make to the redirected sex thread but I am VERY surprised to have seen nothing - after reading the entire thread in an hour - that questions the reality of Faster Than Light (FTL) drive. It is absolutely everywhere in sci-fi and yet there are some profoundly difficult questions that would need to be resolved before FTL could happen.

Having said that, I do have some theories about how FTL could be possible,

I am new to this thread and haven't read it all. I am always freaked out by the inaccuracies in medicine and health. At present, I don't have any specific examples (but I will come up with some). Inaccuracies in video strike me more but there are tons in books as well. People that get horribly injured, (falls, gunshots, stabbings, etc) yet are so resilient they are back in action in a few days without any complications. Anyone have thoughts or examples on this? Also, in many novels, people carry on with their lives with no illness. The death rate from disease in medieval times was astronomically higher than the death rate from combat but you never read about that in fantasy novels!

Adrian wrote: "This is one of the coolest threads I've ever encountered on GR - amazed I've not found it before. I have a million contributions to make to the redirected sex thread but I am VERY surprised to have seen nothing - after reading the entire thread in an hour - that questions the reality of Faster Than Light (FTL) drive. It is absolutely everywhere in sci-fi and yet there are some profoundly difficult questions that would need to be resolved before FTL could happen."

True that. FTL seems to be a frequent plot device in SF so the story isn't bound to one world and avoids "five years of travel later". I'm just delving into SF but the few cases are usually some simple handwavium like some kind of stargate, wormholes, or the ship pretty much creating its own wormhole.

Likewise, fantasy may be on a similar page with magi able to teleport - but there may not always be a visible limit to that ability.

Well, I'll venture the thought that FTL is a different issue. When we talk of "books that get it wrong", I'm thinking (like the medical mistake earlier in the thread) of things like the mea culpa Sharon Kay Penman put in her author's note to Lionheart. She reported that (in The Reckoning) she had had Edward I say that crossbows were more difficult to master than longbows, while the opposite is true. She was pointing out a known fact.

FTL is beyond our current knowledge, but that's different than saying it is actually impossible or wrong. There's a fair amount of speculative - but serious - material written on this. See, for example, the chapter on "Faster-than-Light Approaches in General Relativity in Frontiers of Propulsion Science, edited by Millis and Davis, which discusses Alcubierre warp-drives as well as wormholes. Also. there is Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes by Woodward. So, for me, if the story makes up a means of interstellar travel and pays some respect to relativity and physics, even if there is a sprinkle of handwavium, I am happy to read it and play along. Now, whether we should ever call these "hard science fiction" can be another debate . . .

I've stopped reading a couple of "carefully researched" historical novels when a major, and totally unnecessary, anachronism showed up. In one, about the beginning of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), an alchemist had a jar neatly labelled "potassium cyanide" -- or maybe it was "hydrogen cyanide." The trouble is that, in either case, the nomenclature is nineteenth-century. A really good dictionary, with dates of first use in English, might have prevented this.

If an alchemist had made the compound, and had survived the experience, he (or she) would have called it something entirely different, and unintelligible to us. For the purposes of the story, a non-specific "poison" probably would have been sufficient.

Maybe the author felt that no one would notice, in the midst of all the other "authentic" facts, which I no longer trusted implicitly.

Dorothy Dunnett, a favorite of mine for two series of very long historical novels, assumed that works of medieval literature would have been familiar in Tudor England/Stuart Scotland, and sometimes the rest of Europe. Many such works exist only in unique manuscripts, then sitting forgotten on monastery shelves, or had not yet been published in the 1500s. So they are unlikely to have been known even to a polylingual protagonist. And certainly not to anyone he quotes them to. And she sometimes uses identifiable nineteenth-century translations.

On the other hand, she has some passages from period, but very obscure, sources, which she works into the story in a very plausible manner.

Winston Graham, another favorite for his long series of "Poldark" novels gets the dates of publication of eighteenth-century literature bewilderingly wrong on several occasions: he, understandably, uses still-familiar titles and authors, but, by calling them "new," puts them in the wrong part of the eighteenth century.

Sometimes urban legends show up in fiction. I am more tolerant of these, since some of them are given as "facts" in period sources and even works of serious history, and a writer can't be expected to have up-to-date sources on everything.

One of my favorite urban fantasies/mystery/horror novels, Barbara Hambly's gorgeously named Bride of the Rat God, is set in a lovingly reconstructed 1923 Los Angeles (especially silent-era Hollywood), full of sights and places my mother told me about from her childhood -- and a few of which I remember from mine, before they were "developed" out of existence.

Unfortunately, there is an unnecessary sequence concerning tunnels under Old Chinatown. This was a popular rumor of the period, but I happen to know the archeologist who conducted rescue excavations before construction obliterated part of it, and who found that they just didn't exist. (There were a surprising number of utilitarian imports from identifiable parts of China, however.)

Ironically, the author apologizes for making up an idea which turns out to have been in circulation well before she started writing the book: she may have forgotten where and when she had heard it. Or she might have made a connection on her own.

A peer of mine, J.L. Doty, actually started writing because he read Star wars and as a laser geek (Ph.D. Electrical Engineering, specialty laser physics) he said, "That's not how lasers work."

It feels like we're talking about three slightly different things:

1) Things the author just got wrong. The crossbow issue above or the medieval manuscript issue.

2) Things that might be possible but whose existence isn't known or is contraindicated by current knowledge, e.g. FTL.

3) Verisimilitude. The lack of illness or things like miscarriages in societies that are set in/based on medieval Europe or another society with that level of technology.

Of these, the latter doesnt bother me much. Take LotR. I assume that the Fellowship, when traveling, had to, ah, go to the bathroom and did. I do NOT need to read about it. Stories are inherently edited versions of the reality that they are set within so unless an elven miscarriage or the illness of the general population is important to the plot, there's no reason for an author to talk about them.

Speaking of favourite authors getting things wrong...

I adore Bernard Cornwell - one the great (historical) story tellers and a very thorough researcher - but he gets it wrong sometimes. For example, in several books he refers to the Moors as pagans.

Pagans are worshippers of multiple deities within a pantheon. Moors (as Moslems) were just as monotheist as Christians so he could have called them heathens, or infidels, or even heretics, but definitely not pagans.

That would depend upon what year his books are taking place. The Moors didn't convert to Islamic faith until they conquered Carthage around 7 century. So if his books are before that, they were likely pagans. Lots of Greek and Egyptian influences in north Africa.

If Cornwell has his *characters* refer to Moors as pagans, he is probably correct for all but recent times. E.g., in Middle English "Paynim" usually means Muslim: and I think that was a borrowing from Old French.

Many popular texts assumed that "Moors" worshiped a triad (or trinity) of idols, sometimes designated as Mahound, Tervagant, and Apollyon (with variants).

At some point scholars had learned better: there was a medieval Latin translation of the Koran, although I am not certain how widely it circulated. (Translations of it into vernaculars came as a shock to many European readers in the eighteenth century -- and maybe the seventeenth).

The Latin translations of the Arabic commentaries on Aristotle, which overturned higher learning in Europe starting in the twelfth century, amid much controversy, were clearly monotheistic, but they were the concern of only the most advanced scholars. (And when they were first available, there were several attempts to suppress the whole subject.)

The Cornwell books were set in the C14 so we're definitely talking about Islam.

I just read ANOTHER book with a super hacker extraordinaire (at age 21) who not only hacks everything within seconds, she would steal banking information while a woman who worked at the exact bank watched. The banker wasn't trying to sabotage her employers, so she kept making comments on improving security. Listen, if the hacker can break through your firewalls with just a few seconds of frantic typing, you can't stop her. Better to change your identity and find a new bank.

Colin wrote: "I am seeing this thread for the first time so, if these examples have already been cited, I will apologize in advance.

In Ringworld by Larry Niven, the ringworld, as described, would ..."

It's been a while since I read that series about the Girl Who (and I only read the ones by the original author--none penned by his family after they shafted his common-law wife so badly), but as I recall he was incredibly strong and that kind of strength really can happen. Often it is associated with health risks.

However, it is rare for children born without the ability to feel pain to reach adulthood, and the combination of him having both of those traits and surviving that long was unbelievable.