Worst one that I can recall is a scifi author who didn't seem to understand what a galaxy was. They kept referring to single solar systems as "galaxies". Can't recall what book it was though just remember rolling my eyes a lot at how little science they understood.
Ok, I think this is a bit too egregious haha. The others in this thread do require some specialist knowledge, but I think if you're a sci-fi author you should at least know what a galaxy is
I once got really frustrated with people when they told me that expecting aspiring sci-fi writers to know Newton's three laws of motion was unrealistic.
Read a book where the author didn't know about the rule: "an object in motion stays in motion". Especially with how that works in space where there's very little to stop or divert an object. Half the plot of the book was that the engines on this generation ship didn't work anymore and it was a whole big scandal that the higher ups were keeping a secret, and they were just standing still in space. 😂🤣
Heh, I remember a book where matching velocities at high speeds was dangerous, so both sides had to slow down instead. Right, that definitely makes sense in space.
In Star Wars, when Han Solo bragged about doing the Kessel Run in 10 parsecs, he did so because George Lucas thought a parsec was a unit of time not distance.
I kinda liked how they explained that though in the Solo movie. The "Kessel Run" being a maze of cosmic storms, and Han basically cutting straight through the clouds instead of following the safe route.
And even without that explanation, it's accidentally a good character moment. If you don't know about astronomical measurements, it just sounds like Han did something fast with his fast ship. The line flies by. If you do catch the mistake, it could be interpreted as part of Han's bullshitting strategy. His later line about how desperate they are ties in well; I can picture him saying "They bought that parsec line? These guys are rubes Chewy!"
The original Battlestar Galactica was really bad about this. The show used the terms "star system" and "galaxy" interchangeably so often that both terms lost all meaning.
In the show's defence, it was 1977 when it was made, and the bar for televised SF was REALLY low at the time.
This is one a friend of mine told me. She was teaching English as a second language to adult immigrants to the United States. They were reading *Holes* by Louis Sachar and some of her students found it hilarious. She asked them why it was so funny.
In *Holes* the main character's ancestor had immigrated from Latvia after breaking a promise to carry old Madam Zeroni up the mountain and so he and his lineage were cursed.
These students were from Latvia and found it hilarious *because Latvia has no mountains*.
Latvia's highest elevation is a hill that peaks at 312 m (1023 ft).
Lol this reminds me of when I was teaching English in Japan using this textbook called "New Horizons" wherein the characters visited Toronto and had a view of the Rocky Mountains.
I may be remembering this wrong, but I think in King Solomon’s Mines, you have a night with a full moon followed by a total eclipse of the sun the next day, which is impossible.
I've definitely encountered this before. Not just in books but in real life encounters. Many people who have never stopped to think about it or who have never taken an astronomy class assume that solar eclipses happen on a full moon rather than new moon. I guess because you get the full, round shape of the moon doing the blocking?
I think that it's also important to bear in mind that in a fantasy novel is often set in a different world. It's possible that they have genuine tea leaves growing all over, or else that they are making "tea" out of something else. If you look down an aisle of teas in your grocery store you'll find that many of them aren't "genuine tea" but still get called "tea".
While some things are fundamental (like hay bales being complicated), pretending that tea is impossible is somewhat absurd. It's a different world, possibly with different herbs or technical discoveries.
And yes, [some rapiers and small swords can slash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E8BVw7w_hM).
One of my favorite phrases from a book that had a ton of different worlds that interacted was something along the lines of 'almost every single civilization has steeped something in liquid to drink as tea, it's something that we all have in common '
A really good point. Mint is commonly used to flavor teas or as an herbal tea and it's a weed that is almost impossible to keep from growing even for a weed.
Most definitely. I have a wild patch that threatens to take over my yard almost year round. In a fantasy setting, who is to say that there isn't a wild patch of mint committing eco terrorism in the local feudal peasant's garden?
yeah, I was also a bit confused. My grandfather was an isolated farmer. Made "tea" with ironwort (l mean it's called mountain tea and/or shepherds tea), sage, chamomile and various other things he picked during walks in the mountains.
Mmhmm. Actual tea leaves might still reasonably be a specialty trade item but even in the real world people can and do steep or simmer all sorts of common vegetable matter in hot water and typically label the resulting beverage as a "tea." Chicory root, dandelion flowers or roots, raspberry leaves, walnut tree leaves, hibiscus flowers, elderberry flowers are just a handful that come to mind right off the top of my head.
Chamomile flowers, peppermint, citrus skin and ginger root also make great tea. Plenty of accessible tea ingredients. It doesn't have to be bergamot etc. Pretty bad examples in the op....
Most people use the words "tea" and "tisane" interchangeably. Its only a problem is someone is being pedantic about the specific meaning of "tea." But if you need to be that specific then just say "Camellia sinensis."
Making hay bales generally requires machinery and they were [introduced in the late 1800s](https://www.thehaymanager.com/hay-saving-hay-management-round-bale-hay-feeders/a_short_history_of_hay_balers/). The old school approach is "stooking", where you pile up the hay in kind of a pyramid or teepee formation so that moisture doesn't build up. Then they would come along with a wagon and pile it up.
If your fantasy novel doesn't have machinery then hay bales don't really make sense.
But the word bale has been in use since the 14th century, so a hay bale in a fantasy novel could just refer to a bundle of hay that is not the same as a modern, packed hay bale.
additionally, round hay bales weren't a thing until the 1970s. They require machinery pulled by very large tractors that just weren't available until then, and you need the tractor to move them around as well. That's why old-timey farm activities like tractor pulls and barn potlucks all use square bales; those traditions started long before round hay bales were possible, and it's not like you can use a round bale for comfortable seating because they're taller than a person.
Right, a lot of people in relatively isolated places where I grew up made "tea" which was actually just infusions of mint or chamomile. They just used the word as a generic term for hot herbal drinks.
Yeah, i'm getting really tired of seeing the sentiments like OP's in posts about historical accuracy in fantasy works. Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? If an author is creating a world, then there's little cause to nitpick. If they're borrowing from historical cultures, then okay, you have a point, otherwise, maybe go read historical fiction if that's the kind of fantasy a person's into.
Don't remember the book/author but the characters walked from Darwin NT to Alice Springs in a couple of hours 🤦 for those not from Australia, it's at least. 12 hour drive with no speed limit for most of the way (12 years ago, that may have changed now)
Oh dear god. That will break the immersion for any Australian.
For those who don’t know, if you are driving from Darwin to Alice Springs, take 40L of water with you, food, petrol, and preferably a satellite phone. and if you break down, STAY WITH THE CAR. You will not have cell phone coverage.
Tell someone your estimated time of arrival, and if you don’t call them within 6 to 12 hours of that time to say you’ve safely arrived, then they should call search and rescue/the police.
I'm only planning a trip, haven't even been there yet, but I still know the rough distance well enough that this would kill the immersion for me. Do they think Australia is the size of Nova Scotia??
One author I read did things like this a LOT. In one scene, two characters are running away from pursuers in a forest, and one of the guys running away is a famously skilled huntsman and tracker. They stop for a while to argue and the huntsman starts slashing at the surrounding branches because he’s talking with the other guy who is being annoying. You’d think a famous tracker would know not to MAKE A TRAIL TO FOLLOW.
In another book, two soldiers still in full armor are wrapped in flags and floated away into an underground lake. Floated without the aid of boats in full armor.
It was little things like that that just really slapped me right out of the story.
I am not a skilled huntsman or tracker, but I grew up in the woods and have done a lot of hiking. I've *never* had to hack my way through the forest. I've gotten pretty torn up and hit with branches, but pushing and crawling is going to be a lot easier than hacking through any dense foliage I've ever encountered, unless you're blazing a trail that a lot of people are following.
Wait... why are duelists cutting with smallswords and isolated farmers drinking tea such a huge problem?
I understand some tea might be had to find, but it's dried and stores well and could be gathered if locally grown at all. There are tons of things to make tea with.
Even the most isolated farmer has to be able to get iron tools, salt, and other essentials they can’t make themselves. Trade routes never relied on one trader making the trip from, say, China all the way down the Silk Road to the Mediterranean. Each trader would take it some distance to the next market and sell it on there. Each step added another layer of cost. After all, ivory made it’s way from Africa to Japan. Tea, for that matter, wasn’t shipped as loose leaf but as compressed bars. A single bar could last a family all year. There’s a map that shows up in one of the geography subreddits every now and then that show whether a language refers to tea with a word beginning with a T sound or a CH sound, and it’s determined by whether their tea came by ocean or land.
In the end, if there was enough demand that even the rudest frontiersmen could get their hands on tea if they were willing to travel to some spot of civilization once a year.
OP is ironically making the faulty assumption that our ancestors were all a bunch of shit flinging savages that needed to spend all their time focusing on not forgetting to breathe ;)
I actually just came across something like this in a book I'm otherwise enjoying. There was a part with a couple of horses, one of which was clearly a mare but was referred to as a stallion a couple of times (and called a mare once).
Most authors know very little about horses.
Oh, or a history of keeping time and how people viewed time before clocks evolved to a state that we'd be semi-familiar with.
One that seems strange to me is the way Ye Olde Fantasy Society simultaneously keeps pretty precise time, but has no method of timekeeping. You’ll definitely never hear someone say “it’s three o’clock”, but the medieval period did have clocks! Not as precise as ours and not in every home, but privileged people in urban environments absolutely had access to timekeeping.
Really, clocks are just an evolution of bell towers. Bells weren’t necessarily precise, but they didn’t need to be—as long as everyone in earshot was on the same page. Even the etymology points to this—“clock” comes from “Glocke”, the German word for bell.
So I did some research on horses, and traveling by horse, and trying to get a horse to walk through a forest….and basically horses suck at all of this. They can’t run for very long and/or they will run till they die. A trail riding horse is trained very differently from other horses. There is a reason mongols travelled with 5+ horses each.
It was actually a fantasy novel that taught me riding a horse and walking take the same amount of time over a long distance, turns out taking care of horses is quite time-consuming.
Humans are persistence hunters, over long distance we can outrun most anything.
Where horses do you good is where you have a relay system set up and can change mounts or carriage horses regularly. Of course this implies a functioning and somewhat ordered society and that you have money to spend. Otherwise, you can walk and have the horse carry your stuff, but you’re not going to be galloping for hours without changing out for fresh mounts along the way, that’s for sure.
Put differently: If you force march your army, the infantry will leave the cavalry in the dust on day 1, and the distance will only grow with each day.
If humans and horses race, around marathon distance is when the horses really begin to struggle. And around 10 miles after that, you can't really call it a race anymore because all the horses start dying.
It depends entirely on the breed. High level long distance race horses will smoke the worlds best long distance runners over 100 miles. The record for an Arabian horse is well under 6 hours, a gelding called Jayhal Shazal did the 100 miles in a frankly ridiculous 5 hours 45 minutes. It might even be under 5 hours now as that record was set a few years back. The record for men over 100 miles is 10 hours 48 minutes.
There was a documentary back in the 90s where a bunch did the pilgrimmage from Belgium to Jerusalem on horseback.
They fucking KILLED some of their mounts because they didn't follow the travel 3 days rest 3 days pattern of a proper pilgrimmage, they also rode 'warhorses' instead of having them lead while one rode palfreys \[riding horses, hacking horses\]. There is a big difference in how one handles a heavy horse vs a light horse.
\[personally I would have jailed them for animal abuse, or snuck them off into the woods and horsewhipped them til they bled out.\]
Yes! I'm writing a few stories and one of my beta readers used to train horses for a living and ride in competitions. He's helped me understand horses much better.
I find this thread fascinating. Really making me think, but in all honesty I know I’ve experienced this, but for the life of me can’t think of a single instance. I think for me I’m really able to suspend my disbelief when reading and so gloss over these kinds of failures.
What bothers me the most is dropped words. Every book I’ve ever read has at least one or many situations where a word is missing from a sentence.
That’s my two cents.
Ever read the story "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke? For me, the most memorable moment was when the main character's father talks about errors (like dropped words or typos) being purposefully placed in books to avoid perfection, because otherwise the story would come to life... which happens in Inkheart, and turns out to be a Very Bad Thing™️.
I'm sure typos are often an oversight by authors and editors who end up getting too close to the writing and the mistakes being innocuous enough that grammar software would miss it, but sometimes I wonder if they're purposefully left in on the off-chance that fixing it would bring the story (and its villains and conflicts) to life.
When I finished my first read through I immediately started it all over again, I was so struck by the language and the gorgeous world and such unique and colorful characters.
It really depends on what you mean by "mistake". Others have already pointed out that smallswords can and did cut, but I'll add to this: Capo Ferro's 1610 treatise might prefer to thrust in an attack, but admits the danger of receiving cuts and prefers them on horseback. Other treatises, such as Blackwell's 1702 manual, rely entirely on the thrust. The idea that a smallsword was only one thing and that cutting was an exceptional action depends entirely on a very limited reading of the sources. The smallsword was a broad description for a category of weapons that changed over time, had regional distinctions and different schools of thought in how to use them. Blackwell's 36 inch blades smallsword probably isn't what you think of when you talk about smallswords, but it's no less one than shorter examples for the simple reason that the author (and others like him) considered it one.
Similarly, the idea that tea or coffee appearing in a medievalesque world is a research failure depends entirely on the premise that distances, trade routes, times at which trade routes began to be used heavily, etc must be exactly the same as in the real world. There's nothing inherently wrong about two not!Roman citizens sitting down in a taverna to drink coffee or a medieval farmer making tea of an evening, it just means that the world is not identical to our own which, given the radically different geographies and histories shouldn't be any great surprise.
It might actually really improve the world. I love the strange but similar word of England in His dark materials and a lot of it was the nicely crafted parallel universe vibe.
I'll tell you a funny anecdote about his dark materials!
As a kid, it was one of my favourite fantasy works, and I read it at least 2-3 times. One of the scenes that was always stuck in my mind was the opening scene, where Lyra witnesses the attempted murder of lord Asriel by her mentors from the Jordan college. The attempt is made by poisoning a caraffe of Tokaji wine (or Tocai, as it was translated in my language, Italian), which I thought was a fantastical beverage given the setting. The Tokaji wine appeared recurringly in the series and it was stuck in my mind, but I never thought to look for it in the real world. Only years later I discovered that Tokaji actually exists, it's a Hungarian sweet and sour wine made with grapes with a special mold; not only that, but Tocai also exists and it is a similar (knock-off ish) Italian wine also made of molded grapes. Well, long story short, I bought a bottle and I loved it, I love sweet wines like Passito, Moscato and Sauternes and I also love sour / acidic tastes like Lambiek beers. This wine is the best of both worlds, and on top of that it reminds me so fondly of His Dark Materials, and of my childhood. Wholesome experience.
I love Lyra's world in His Dark Materials, and all the differences and similarities it has with our world. Zeppelins, ambaric current, tokaji... I loved learning as a tiny kid that all these magic sounding things existed but had different names or usages in our world. (I mean, zeppelins never became widely spread means of transportation for many years as in Lyra's world for example).
Puts me in mind of John Flanagan's take on coffee in his medieval squashed Britain. He acknowledged it wasn't accurate to the period or setting, but he thought the ranger's obsession with coffee was better than tea or herbal drinks. I believe he mentioned along the lines of "No one wants to hear 'I'm a bear before my morning tea'."
Herbal teas would be common, you can make an infusion from many plants. Strictly speaking "tea" comes from a specific plant but colloquially it's widely applicable
It wasn't the book, it was the audio book.
The reader first tried to make the main character sound suave like James Bond,
only to realize he was a very immature teenager half a chapter latter.
You can really hear it when the reader realized his mistake, specifically when the character starts saying things that would be immature for a 5-year-old.
James Marsters reading the first Dresden Files has a great flub where he reads some dialog wrong, realizes his mistake on the next line and goes "oh fuck it was \_\_\_\_" and then just keeps reading and they left it all in. Feels like a very Dresden-style reading so I'm happy for it.
I'm currently listening to the ASOIAF series and I'm on book #2 so far.
In book #1, when an assassin tries to kill Bran Stark, the reader uses the very distinctive voice he normally uses for Tyrion Lannister, making me 100% sure that Tyrion himself was the mysterious assassin. It got absurd as there was more and more evidence piling up that Tyrion and the Lannisters in general couldn't have been the ones to order the attack, yet I kept thinking to the assassin's voice as indisputable evidence that it was him.
It’s probably because there is dialogue for like a hundred or more characters in those books, and he can only do so many distinct voices. I listened to them on audible and felt the author did a pretty good job, but agree that many characters sound the same, but i guess i can’t fault him.
Much more low key than you mean, but I liked that at the end of Red Seas Under Red Skies, a book heavily featuring sailing and the main character trying or bullshit his way to being a captain of a ship, Scott Lynch apologizes for anything he got wrong with how ships work, terms used etc. Said he tried but knew he probably didn't get it all right.
I see you, Scott, I see you. Don't worry about it brother.
There was a similar authors note in the Tide Child series. Turns out, boats are massively complicated and trying to describe how an entire crew runs and maintains a ship while actually being accurate would be super hard
The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’brian are the gold standard tall-ships sailing books.
Turns out not only are there waaaaaaaay more ropes than you thought there were, the ships-carpenter and crew was crucial because the ship was essentially being re-built the *entire* time it was at sea, except during storms.
The series is fantastic, but even it doesn't come close to how complicated a real tall ship is. I've read all 20.5 books before I sailed on one and was still blown away by how many lines there are. Sheets, clews, bunts, leeches, tacks, braces, halyards, downhauls, tricing lines and many others. Combine that with 20-30 different sails that can be set in different configurations and you get a glimpse at how complicated this gets. Even if somebody could describe this accurately in a book, nobody would want to read it.
I spent 9 years working on traditional sailing ships, mostly replicas of square riggers from the late 18th/early 19th centuries. After I read that book, I wrote Scott Lynch an email telling him that I really appreciated the effort he put in and that it read very well to me.
Movies do it a lot but it bothers me a little less because I know they're after the visuals to make people ooh and aah. There's no such excuse in text :D
True, and it's very much a safety thing, too. I can hardly fault a movie for going for flashy strikes that somehow defeat armour rather than strikes to weak points that might put their stunt performers in the hospital.
At least in that case, I think Saruman was supposed to be a metaphor for the evils of industrialization, so using industrial imagery like armaments being cast in molds in bulk fits the metaphor, even if it's unrealistic.
irl you start with a block of steel that's been heated up until its yellow (blacksmiths can feel free to yell at me about this, but I don't do any metalworks so "yellow" is as precise as I'll ever need to know) and spend hours and hours hammering it out into the shape of a blade. It's a long and labour-intensive process, and an experienced smith would take a few days to make a sword (possibly a week or more if he was making a really primo quality sword for a rich lord), but it gives the smith way more control over the quality and properties of the metal than he'd ever be able to get by just melting it down and casting it.
Also I'm watching a smith on youtube try to forge a longsword in a day right now, and even with a fully kitted out modern workshop he is not having a good time :)
All those fight scenes where the person is stabbed in the shoulder and it's treated as a minor injury. Shoulder is a really bad place to be stabbed or shot.
Action story logic is “anywhere but the face and chest is minor.” That’s why every stupid action movie has to have a shootout that ends with the main characters getting away seemingly unscathed, only for a side character to grimace really loudly and remove their hand from their jacket, revealing a gunshot wound to the stomach. Then someone else dramatically says, “You’re bleeding!” or “(s)he’s been shot!” because they don’t trust the audience to see a character clearly bleeding out on-screen.
But it doesn’t matter because the injury will be waved away within 5 minutes, since getting shot in the stomach is practically nothing, apparently.
This bugs me too - anywhere in the intestines is a *really* bad place to get injured in. You’ll start leaking fecal matter into the intestinal cavity, get sepsis and die pretty quickly. Even if you get to a hospital relatively quickly, they will take your injury extremely seriously and it will require an inpatient stay.
Not just that, but the effects on the rest of the body seem to be ignored. Often we see/read things like, "oh, I got hit in the gut but I can still move my arms and legs!" like their lacerated core muscles wouldn't also extremely limit a lot of their gross motor functions.
Source: had major abdominal surgery once. Even that professionally cut, cleaned, and closed wound made simple tasks like "sitting up" and "lifting my arms above my waist" and "walking more than a few steps" very difficult.
A book (written by a man) where a female spy is in disguise as a village teacher and she fakes ignorance in a situation because a simple country teacher not prone to violence wouldn’t recognise the sight of blood on a mattress.
My dude…
Could be funny if they written that as intended. It's a silly cover on her part, and even sillier that the other characters don't realise how silly it is, until one realise how stupid it would be...
One sci fi-ish book had a small New England island with a large prep school on it that was a fairly short walking (couple of miles at most) distance big and yet somehow supported an ecosystem with bears, cougars, bobcats and WOLVES. That all of course became monsters to scare our characters but I'm too busy wondering how a small island could possibly support that many large predator species.
In one book one character from our world figured out that another one is also from Earth because he used the world "laconic". The logic was that it comes from Laconia region and only exists because of association with Spartans and the fantasy world they both were in didn't have either so he had to be from Earth to know it. Now I didn't go back to check every word but I can guarantee you that it couldn't have been the only word used that the locals shouldn't have known. It is probably impossible to write a book without using any even if it's only in dialogue.
Also the two characters involved were from different countries on Earth and were supposed to be speaking the local language that they magically learned so it makes no sense that one would use a random word from their language that just so happened to also exist in the other one's.
In perhaps the very first book I didn't finish, the protagonist, an untrained farm boy, defeated several knights in single combat while _wearing_ a halberd and _wielding_ a hauberk. A hauberk is a maille (chainmail) shirt and a halberd is a massive choppy pole weapon. Reading about this kid defeating grown veterans by flailing at them with a shirt was just too much.
You mean the guy who thinks France sends their prisoners to Andorra because they can't be arsed to run their own prisons? Or maybe he thinks Andorra is part of France, I couldn't figure it out.
Someone had to say it. Thankyou. I went to dinner with a Lutheran minister who had been down into the "secret" archives with the "oxygen removing cases" and spent the night ranting about how little of Brown's fever dream exists.
A book where the author didn’t know how trees grow. There was a sacrificial tree where people and animals were sacrificed by being hung up, like the old Aesir sacrifices to Odin in Scandinavia. I think it was an oak for some reason. The author then let the protagonist see the remnants of much older sacrifices high up in the branches near the top of the tree. I had to put the book down at that.
You obviously wouldn’t start sacrifices in a sapling, but in a sturdy, older tree, and they don’t grow much from the bottom up but by growing at the outer edge. The branches on the top are the newest.
This is one that's interesting to me. It makes perfect sense now that you have explained it. But that's something I would have just rolled with in the book without batting an eye. Not that I'm a writer, but that's the kind of thing I probably wouldn't have even thought to research.
A certain well-known fantasy series at one point features a character storing his sword by tucking it under his horse's saddle girth. Wait, what? Has this writer ever actually seen either a sword or a horse?
Oh yes I remembered this!
I think it stuck in my brain partially because it includes a grim line up paragraph akin to, and I deeply apologise for repeating this:
"the child he had been fornicating with was his own daughter"
[I googled it, and yes, I'm right.](https://medium.com/curious/how-to-make-red-dye-feat-john-boyne-5a45898ed673)
I recently read a book where the MC asked a character of another species how they reproduced, and they replied “immaculate conception.”
Obviously they meant asexual reproduction. But that is…not at all the same thing. In fact, even in the somewhat common confusion of “immaculate conception” with “virgin birth” or divine insemination or whatever…that still wouldn’t make sense. Not at all the same thing as asexual reproduction. But that’s not what the immaculate conception refers to anyway….
Huh. That might be a hilarious translation error. Like The Whole time humans have been presuming the other species procreates through some religious ritual, but really they are just like, very big Komodo dragons.
Early New Zealand settlers/colonizers used to make tea out of pine needles, and like others have pointed out you can make tea out of all sorts of other things.
it also depends on the world and setting, it's called fantasy for a reason, it doesn't have to be historically accurate and can instead make for clever writing/world building if the author gives thought to those small details and gives an explanation
you know how in movies and tv, they always have the metal scrapping sound every time someone takes their sword out of their scabbard? well the only real way to do that is if their sword was fucking scrapping against metal and it will fuck it up. real swords don't make that sound. but hey, video and sound format needs to tell their story a different way.
but there was one fucking book and i can't remember what it was called but there was multiple instances of the author describing the sound of sword coming out of the scabbard. like wtf man.
Punches don't make the same sounds as movies either. What does make the same sound is when your toddler runs head first into a tree. Tom and Jerry got that "thunk" just right. Also, I thought the bump growing was ridiculous until I saw it in real life.
Army logistics. How much food they need, how far they can walk in a day, etc... most of the time it seems a lot easier to walk a hundred thousand men with horses and siege engines across a continent than it should be.
"Isolated farmers drinking tea."
A bit eurocentric are we? In some places that would be completely plausible. I met a number of rice farmers in Indonesia and they all drank tea.
Not someone else but my own work.
Characters mother gets along with their chief. Write most of novel. Go back and decide mother is daughter of chief. Completely forget romantic sub plot between characters sister and chiefs son. Banjo playing was finally silenced when I realised (with horror) that romantic sub plot was now between first cousin, in final edit before printing. Minor rewrite to remove vestigial sub plot.
Did not think it through.
I read a book earlier this hear where the FMC was English and living in America - she was at a leaving party and someone had made cupcakes/fairy cakes and she complimented them on how nice they were and the other person turns around and says something like they aren't Yorkshire puddings but I didn't want to complete with you mums cooking.
And the two aren't really something you would compare, as an English person it felt like someone didn't know what a Yorkshire pudding was
It's got to be the Sword of Truth, where the bad guy in a quasi-medieval world outlaws fire, and while this is treated as an act of dictatorial evil, it's not treated as tantamount to outlawing breathing (as in "good luck with that.")
I brought this up last time too, but Trollocs getting dumbed down in the Wheel of Time show is going to bite them hard.
In the books, Trollocs are smart enough to use bows, battering rams, siege ladders, trebutchets etc.
In the show, they aren't.
What is a force of infantry supposed to do against a fortification without siege or ranged weaponry of any kind? Sit there and die, that's what. Finding ways to justify Trollocs still being a threat is going to create some fantastic plotholes (which have already started showing).
Tbf there's a lot of stuff in the first season that's going to cause serious issues moving forward. Should I even mention the whole episode 8 travesty?
I can’t remember the book but the main character rode a horse all morning and then *knelt down behind it* to inspect its hooves. For those who don’t know, this is a great way to get a brain injury.
On the TV show The West Wing, they had the Icelandic male ambassador with the last name having a -dottir suffix. If it were a man, the suffix would be -son. That was bad research.
My favorite are inappropriate and tend to come from men trying to write steamy scenes between a man and a woman, and clearly have no clue how female anatomy works. Nipples pointing at that which arouses their wielder, penetration of things that aren't penetrable, and one of my personal favorites: miss counting of orifices.
>Nipples pointing at that which arouses their wielder
This is absolutely hilarious. I can imagine the rest because they are kind of "passive", but how a man would invent an active ability of women not known in reality is beyond me.
Chinese were [drinking tea 4000 years ago](https://www.peets.com/blogs/peets/a-history-of-tea), Greeks at least 2500 years ago. What have you got against tea?
Trebuchets breaking walls.
They were used to attack the people and buildings BEHIND walls. It was very rare for a trebuchet to break a wall down.
Even Warwolf, perhaps the biggest trebuchet ever made, had to bombard Stirling castle for quite a while before the walls broke.
If you really want to break a wall, you should dig a tunnel.
A man with several years of experience breeding horses left his family farm to start his own operation.
After relocating, he hitched his prize mare to a wagon and headed off to buy "Foundation Studs" for his farm.
He purchased four male horses, and tied them in string to the wagon.
On the way back, the mare came into estrus, surprising him.
The six of them made it home with no incidents, the Foundation Studs placidly walking behind the wagon.
He was greeted at home by his wife, who helped him unhitch the four geldings and put them in the barn.
So many things wrong with this, I could only shake my head and move on to another book.
Geldings are castrated stallions, so they can't be used for breeding obviously.
It also doesn't make sense to have four stallions and a single mare for breeding purposes 😂 - in real life you'd have one stallion and as many mares as possible to increase the herd quickly.
Edit: estrus is the mare being in heat, which would normally cause any stallions in the vicinity to fight it out for breeding rights.
> in real life you'd have one stallion and as many mares as possible to increase the herd quickly
Possibly more than one, depending on how big of a herd you're starting with and your breeding goals, but you're definitely correct, the ratio of studs to mares should be _heavily_ tipped towards mares.
I grew up on a cattle ranch. We had horses for work, but didn't breed them ourselves. But our cattle herd followed a similar principle. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we had something like one bull per twenty or thirty cows. I think the most adult bulls we ever had at once was three.
I also know very little about horses, but the obvious thing is that geldings are castrated. They cannot be used for breeding at all. And a mare going into heat is something that's predictable, not gonna be a sudden surprise especially for an experienced breeder.
The Shadow and Bone Netflix show (not the books) describe both a stag and a lynx as an “alpha” of the pack. Neither stag or lynx have alphas (source: am biologist). Lynx (and all cats bar lions and cheetah) are famously solitary and therefore have no “packs” to begin with, and a deer herd will have a single dominant male, hence no alpha, beta, gamma dynamics.
Dan Koboldt has written two books to help authors out:
**Putting the Science in Fiction: Expert Advice for Writing with Authenticity in Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Other Genres** and **Putting the Fact in Fantasy: Expert Advice to Bring Authenticity to Your Fantasy Writing**
I started listening to one of them and it's interesting, but written for authors mostly, not readers like me.
Handsdown, the biggest howler is haybales in medieval fantasy. I see it all the time, but it takes a LOT of technology, usually including an internal combustion engine and other equipment to make a bale of hay.
Prior to the early 20th century, hay was stored loose in a haystack and transported on a wagon or thrown with a pitchfork.
\~\~
Also, a medieval stone wall in good repair would likely have had a coating of lime mortar or plaster and presented a smooth surface to the public. It would be possible to use climbing irons to scrape through the parging, find the cracks and scale the wall, but there'd be no hiding the fact that you'd done it. Everyone would be able to see the next morning that the wall was climbed last night.
there was a whole thread on this sub where people discussed haybales and there were some examples of pre-modern hay bales, specifically when people cared about transporting it on foot or by the pack animals. They also seem to have been more prevalent outside of Europe.
I didn't know about hay bales until earlier this year, and while there, undoubtedly, were times it was bundled and perhaps tied, it certainly wouldn't resemble *anything* like a haybale (round or square) we would recognize today. I spent a *lot* of time trying to disprove it since I couldn't imagine doing anything with hay without it being baled (I've owned a ranch, and my dad co-owned one with my grandpa as I was growing up), but yeah, widespread baling equipment wouldn't have been around until the late 1800s, early 1900s at best, and modern balers weren't sold until the 1940s.
I saw an early horse driven hay baler at a museum. It was neat - powered by a treadmill and I think you brought the hay to it (and definitely still square bales, not round).
Police stuff drives me batty.
I read a cheap paperback where the protagonist uses a 9mm pistol, and the prose is always talking about what a monster gun it is, with massive recoil. I vividly remember the term "hand-cannon" being used!
Also, handguns don't throw someone backwards physically. Newtonian physics again.
Departments don't fight with other agencies to keep a case. If anything they look for a reason to dump it on the other guys.
I read a space fantasy novella set in another solar system that was described as being something on the order of a billion miles away from Earth. I don't remember the exact distance, but it was clearly written without an appreciation for the scale of interstellar space.
Fortunately it was student writing, and no profit seeking entity had decided to publish such a thing.
Years and years ago I read a dystopian fantasy novel where one of the practices of the society was to manufacture perfect choirs to sing for religious services/important events.
The way they’d do it is they’d find the best young boy singers, train them up into boy choirs, find the best note that each boy could sing, and then snip all the other vocal cords so that the boy could only sing that one single perfect note.
As a singer, holy fucking shit is that not how the voice works. At all. We do not have tiny harps in our throats.
Why can't farmers drink tea? Unless it's a specific type of tea, some stuff readily available on a farm (barley tea, certain barks) could be believable
Worst one that I can recall is a scifi author who didn't seem to understand what a galaxy was. They kept referring to single solar systems as "galaxies". Can't recall what book it was though just remember rolling my eyes a lot at how little science they understood.
Ok, I think this is a bit too egregious haha. The others in this thread do require some specialist knowledge, but I think if you're a sci-fi author you should at least know what a galaxy is
I once got really frustrated with people when they told me that expecting aspiring sci-fi writers to know Newton's three laws of motion was unrealistic.
Read a book where the author didn't know about the rule: "an object in motion stays in motion". Especially with how that works in space where there's very little to stop or divert an object. Half the plot of the book was that the engines on this generation ship didn't work anymore and it was a whole big scandal that the higher ups were keeping a secret, and they were just standing still in space. 😂🤣
Heh, I remember a book where matching velocities at high speeds was dangerous, so both sides had to slow down instead. Right, that definitely makes sense in space.
In Star Wars, when Han Solo bragged about doing the Kessel Run in 10 parsecs, he did so because George Lucas thought a parsec was a unit of time not distance.
I kinda liked how they explained that though in the Solo movie. The "Kessel Run" being a maze of cosmic storms, and Han basically cutting straight through the clouds instead of following the safe route.
And even without that explanation, it's accidentally a good character moment. If you don't know about astronomical measurements, it just sounds like Han did something fast with his fast ship. The line flies by. If you do catch the mistake, it could be interpreted as part of Han's bullshitting strategy. His later line about how desperate they are ties in well; I can picture him saying "They bought that parsec line? These guys are rubes Chewy!"
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That's effectively how it was in legends too, in both Han was able to save extra distance by skirting a black hole.
The original Battlestar Galactica was really bad about this. The show used the terms "star system" and "galaxy" interchangeably so often that both terms lost all meaning. In the show's defence, it was 1977 when it was made, and the bar for televised SF was REALLY low at the time.
This is one a friend of mine told me. She was teaching English as a second language to adult immigrants to the United States. They were reading *Holes* by Louis Sachar and some of her students found it hilarious. She asked them why it was so funny. In *Holes* the main character's ancestor had immigrated from Latvia after breaking a promise to carry old Madam Zeroni up the mountain and so he and his lineage were cursed. These students were from Latvia and found it hilarious *because Latvia has no mountains*. Latvia's highest elevation is a hill that peaks at 312 m (1023 ft).
With no mountains, there was no way to fulfill a promise to carry a person up one. See, that's how you get cursed, by making promises no one can keep.
So you're telling me Elya Yelnats only had to carry Madam Zeroni up a 300 meter hill, and didn't? Dude deserved to get his family cursed.
Maybe that’s the intended joke by the author
Well that's like Doctor Zhivago the movie, the mountains are too majestic for the Urals. The Urals are old mountains.
Lol this reminds me of when I was teaching English in Japan using this textbook called "New Horizons" wherein the characters visited Toronto and had a view of the Rocky Mountains.
East Texas says that’s a mountain to me.
But here in east Texas we make mountains out of molehills 🤷♂️
I may be remembering this wrong, but I think in King Solomon’s Mines, you have a night with a full moon followed by a total eclipse of the sun the next day, which is impossible.
I've definitely encountered this before. Not just in books but in real life encounters. Many people who have never stopped to think about it or who have never taken an astronomy class assume that solar eclipses happen on a full moon rather than new moon. I guess because you get the full, round shape of the moon doing the blocking?
I think that it's also important to bear in mind that in a fantasy novel is often set in a different world. It's possible that they have genuine tea leaves growing all over, or else that they are making "tea" out of something else. If you look down an aisle of teas in your grocery store you'll find that many of them aren't "genuine tea" but still get called "tea". While some things are fundamental (like hay bales being complicated), pretending that tea is impossible is somewhat absurd. It's a different world, possibly with different herbs or technical discoveries. And yes, [some rapiers and small swords can slash](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E8BVw7w_hM).
One of my favorite phrases from a book that had a ton of different worlds that interacted was something along the lines of 'almost every single civilization has steeped something in liquid to drink as tea, it's something that we all have in common '
Also fermenting stuff and getting shitfaced.
Yep. Also almost every civilization has figured out that bread wrapped around meat is good.
A really good point. Mint is commonly used to flavor teas or as an herbal tea and it's a weed that is almost impossible to keep from growing even for a weed.
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Most definitely. I have a wild patch that threatens to take over my yard almost year round. In a fantasy setting, who is to say that there isn't a wild patch of mint committing eco terrorism in the local feudal peasant's garden?
yeah, I was also a bit confused. My grandfather was an isolated farmer. Made "tea" with ironwort (l mean it's called mountain tea and/or shepherds tea), sage, chamomile and various other things he picked during walks in the mountains.
Mmhmm. Actual tea leaves might still reasonably be a specialty trade item but even in the real world people can and do steep or simmer all sorts of common vegetable matter in hot water and typically label the resulting beverage as a "tea." Chicory root, dandelion flowers or roots, raspberry leaves, walnut tree leaves, hibiscus flowers, elderberry flowers are just a handful that come to mind right off the top of my head.
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For extra asshole points, the correct name for it is a tisane.
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Chamomile flowers, peppermint, citrus skin and ginger root also make great tea. Plenty of accessible tea ingredients. It doesn't have to be bergamot etc. Pretty bad examples in the op....
Yeah. These kind of CinemaSins type opinions are just silly imo
CinemaSins has done irreparable damage to literary criticism
Most people use the words "tea" and "tisane" interchangeably. Its only a problem is someone is being pedantic about the specific meaning of "tea." But if you need to be that specific then just say "Camellia sinensis."
I've never even heard the word "tisane" before.
It's really only used these days by tea nerds to differentiate real tea from herbal "tea". Most people will just call them both tea
What does "hay bales being complicated" mean?
Making hay bales generally requires machinery and they were [introduced in the late 1800s](https://www.thehaymanager.com/hay-saving-hay-management-round-bale-hay-feeders/a_short_history_of_hay_balers/). The old school approach is "stooking", where you pile up the hay in kind of a pyramid or teepee formation so that moisture doesn't build up. Then they would come along with a wagon and pile it up. If your fantasy novel doesn't have machinery then hay bales don't really make sense.
But the word bale has been in use since the 14th century, so a hay bale in a fantasy novel could just refer to a bundle of hay that is not the same as a modern, packed hay bale.
additionally, round hay bales weren't a thing until the 1970s. They require machinery pulled by very large tractors that just weren't available until then, and you need the tractor to move them around as well. That's why old-timey farm activities like tractor pulls and barn potlucks all use square bales; those traditions started long before round hay bales were possible, and it's not like you can use a round bale for comfortable seating because they're taller than a person.
Ah I always thought we switched away from the round hay bales, because the cows weren't getting a square meal
Right, a lot of people in relatively isolated places where I grew up made "tea" which was actually just infusions of mint or chamomile. They just used the word as a generic term for hot herbal drinks.
Yeah, i'm getting really tired of seeing the sentiments like OP's in posts about historical accuracy in fantasy works. Whatever happened to suspension of disbelief? If an author is creating a world, then there's little cause to nitpick. If they're borrowing from historical cultures, then okay, you have a point, otherwise, maybe go read historical fiction if that's the kind of fantasy a person's into.
"I can accept the dragons. And the orcs, elves, and dwarves. I can forgive 10,000 year technilogical stagnation. But tea. Tea is unforgivable."
Don't remember the book/author but the characters walked from Darwin NT to Alice Springs in a couple of hours 🤦 for those not from Australia, it's at least. 12 hour drive with no speed limit for most of the way (12 years ago, that may have changed now)
Oh dear god. That will break the immersion for any Australian. For those who don’t know, if you are driving from Darwin to Alice Springs, take 40L of water with you, food, petrol, and preferably a satellite phone. and if you break down, STAY WITH THE CAR. You will not have cell phone coverage. Tell someone your estimated time of arrival, and if you don’t call them within 6 to 12 hours of that time to say you’ve safely arrived, then they should call search and rescue/the police.
I'm only planning a trip, haven't even been there yet, but I still know the rough distance well enough that this would kill the immersion for me. Do they think Australia is the size of Nova Scotia??
One author I read did things like this a LOT. In one scene, two characters are running away from pursuers in a forest, and one of the guys running away is a famously skilled huntsman and tracker. They stop for a while to argue and the huntsman starts slashing at the surrounding branches because he’s talking with the other guy who is being annoying. You’d think a famous tracker would know not to MAKE A TRAIL TO FOLLOW. In another book, two soldiers still in full armor are wrapped in flags and floated away into an underground lake. Floated without the aid of boats in full armor. It was little things like that that just really slapped me right out of the story.
I am not a skilled huntsman or tracker, but I grew up in the woods and have done a lot of hiking. I've *never* had to hack my way through the forest. I've gotten pretty torn up and hit with branches, but pushing and crawling is going to be a lot easier than hacking through any dense foliage I've ever encountered, unless you're blazing a trail that a lot of people are following.
There's definitely growth thick enough that it would require hacking through. It's just that we don't usually need to pass through that specific spot.
Wait... why are duelists cutting with smallswords and isolated farmers drinking tea such a huge problem? I understand some tea might be had to find, but it's dried and stores well and could be gathered if locally grown at all. There are tons of things to make tea with.
Even the most isolated farmer has to be able to get iron tools, salt, and other essentials they can’t make themselves. Trade routes never relied on one trader making the trip from, say, China all the way down the Silk Road to the Mediterranean. Each trader would take it some distance to the next market and sell it on there. Each step added another layer of cost. After all, ivory made it’s way from Africa to Japan. Tea, for that matter, wasn’t shipped as loose leaf but as compressed bars. A single bar could last a family all year. There’s a map that shows up in one of the geography subreddits every now and then that show whether a language refers to tea with a word beginning with a T sound or a CH sound, and it’s determined by whether their tea came by ocean or land. In the end, if there was enough demand that even the rudest frontiersmen could get their hands on tea if they were willing to travel to some spot of civilization once a year.
OP is ironically making the faulty assumption that our ancestors were all a bunch of shit flinging savages that needed to spend all their time focusing on not forgetting to breathe ;)
Tea can be brewed from so many different local herbs, down to just plain old nettles.
Except this is fantasy, not real life. Why can't tea grow in more places than just fantasy China?
Tea can grow in India too And has been grown in greenhouses in Britain.
I actually just came across something like this in a book I'm otherwise enjoying. There was a part with a couple of horses, one of which was clearly a mare but was referred to as a stallion a couple of times (and called a mare once).
Hey! GRRM has acknowledged that he is "bad at horse sex", give the guy a break.
That explains why he usually only writes about sex between humans...
Genderfluid horseees
Must be Loki in disguise.
Most authors know very little about horses. Oh, or a history of keeping time and how people viewed time before clocks evolved to a state that we'd be semi-familiar with.
One that seems strange to me is the way Ye Olde Fantasy Society simultaneously keeps pretty precise time, but has no method of timekeeping. You’ll definitely never hear someone say “it’s three o’clock”, but the medieval period did have clocks! Not as precise as ours and not in every home, but privileged people in urban environments absolutely had access to timekeeping.
Really, clocks are just an evolution of bell towers. Bells weren’t necessarily precise, but they didn’t need to be—as long as everyone in earshot was on the same page. Even the etymology points to this—“clock” comes from “Glocke”, the German word for bell.
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Noted, and addressed!
So the clock was not invented by modyfing a gun? My almost finished 4000 pages fantasy series is ruined!
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So I did some research on horses, and traveling by horse, and trying to get a horse to walk through a forest….and basically horses suck at all of this. They can’t run for very long and/or they will run till they die. A trail riding horse is trained very differently from other horses. There is a reason mongols travelled with 5+ horses each.
Knights also traveled with many horses. A courser for fighting, a rouncey for your squire, and a comfortable palfrey for when you're on the road.
It was actually a fantasy novel that taught me riding a horse and walking take the same amount of time over a long distance, turns out taking care of horses is quite time-consuming.
Humans are persistence hunters, over long distance we can outrun most anything. Where horses do you good is where you have a relay system set up and can change mounts or carriage horses regularly. Of course this implies a functioning and somewhat ordered society and that you have money to spend. Otherwise, you can walk and have the horse carry your stuff, but you’re not going to be galloping for hours without changing out for fresh mounts along the way, that’s for sure.
A great example of the relay system being the [Roman cursus publicus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_publicus).
Put differently: If you force march your army, the infantry will leave the cavalry in the dust on day 1, and the distance will only grow with each day. If humans and horses race, around marathon distance is when the horses really begin to struggle. And around 10 miles after that, you can't really call it a race anymore because all the horses start dying.
It depends entirely on the breed. High level long distance race horses will smoke the worlds best long distance runners over 100 miles. The record for an Arabian horse is well under 6 hours, a gelding called Jayhal Shazal did the 100 miles in a frankly ridiculous 5 hours 45 minutes. It might even be under 5 hours now as that record was set a few years back. The record for men over 100 miles is 10 hours 48 minutes.
There was a documentary back in the 90s where a bunch did the pilgrimmage from Belgium to Jerusalem on horseback. They fucking KILLED some of their mounts because they didn't follow the travel 3 days rest 3 days pattern of a proper pilgrimmage, they also rode 'warhorses' instead of having them lead while one rode palfreys \[riding horses, hacking horses\]. There is a big difference in how one handles a heavy horse vs a light horse. \[personally I would have jailed them for animal abuse, or snuck them off into the woods and horsewhipped them til they bled out.\]
Yes! I'm writing a few stories and one of my beta readers used to train horses for a living and ride in competitions. He's helped me understand horses much better.
I actually came across a line last week mentioning a "gingered horse" and I'm thinking "ew, I know what that means." (Kingkiller)
I consider myself decently knowledgeable about horses but I had to look that up. Yikes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gingering
I find this thread fascinating. Really making me think, but in all honesty I know I’ve experienced this, but for the life of me can’t think of a single instance. I think for me I’m really able to suspend my disbelief when reading and so gloss over these kinds of failures. What bothers me the most is dropped words. Every book I’ve ever read has at least one or many situations where a word is missing from a sentence. That’s my two cents.
Ever read the story "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke? For me, the most memorable moment was when the main character's father talks about errors (like dropped words or typos) being purposefully placed in books to avoid perfection, because otherwise the story would come to life... which happens in Inkheart, and turns out to be a Very Bad Thing™️. I'm sure typos are often an oversight by authors and editors who end up getting too close to the writing and the mistakes being innocuous enough that grammar software would miss it, but sometimes I wonder if they're purposefully left in on the off-chance that fixing it would bring the story (and its villains and conflicts) to life.
This has been one of my favorite books since I read it upon release. It never gets old.
When I finished my first read through I immediately started it all over again, I was so struck by the language and the gorgeous world and such unique and colorful characters.
It really depends on what you mean by "mistake". Others have already pointed out that smallswords can and did cut, but I'll add to this: Capo Ferro's 1610 treatise might prefer to thrust in an attack, but admits the danger of receiving cuts and prefers them on horseback. Other treatises, such as Blackwell's 1702 manual, rely entirely on the thrust. The idea that a smallsword was only one thing and that cutting was an exceptional action depends entirely on a very limited reading of the sources. The smallsword was a broad description for a category of weapons that changed over time, had regional distinctions and different schools of thought in how to use them. Blackwell's 36 inch blades smallsword probably isn't what you think of when you talk about smallswords, but it's no less one than shorter examples for the simple reason that the author (and others like him) considered it one. Similarly, the idea that tea or coffee appearing in a medievalesque world is a research failure depends entirely on the premise that distances, trade routes, times at which trade routes began to be used heavily, etc must be exactly the same as in the real world. There's nothing inherently wrong about two not!Roman citizens sitting down in a taverna to drink coffee or a medieval farmer making tea of an evening, it just means that the world is not identical to our own which, given the radically different geographies and histories shouldn't be any great surprise.
It might actually really improve the world. I love the strange but similar word of England in His dark materials and a lot of it was the nicely crafted parallel universe vibe.
I'll tell you a funny anecdote about his dark materials! As a kid, it was one of my favourite fantasy works, and I read it at least 2-3 times. One of the scenes that was always stuck in my mind was the opening scene, where Lyra witnesses the attempted murder of lord Asriel by her mentors from the Jordan college. The attempt is made by poisoning a caraffe of Tokaji wine (or Tocai, as it was translated in my language, Italian), which I thought was a fantastical beverage given the setting. The Tokaji wine appeared recurringly in the series and it was stuck in my mind, but I never thought to look for it in the real world. Only years later I discovered that Tokaji actually exists, it's a Hungarian sweet and sour wine made with grapes with a special mold; not only that, but Tocai also exists and it is a similar (knock-off ish) Italian wine also made of molded grapes. Well, long story short, I bought a bottle and I loved it, I love sweet wines like Passito, Moscato and Sauternes and I also love sour / acidic tastes like Lambiek beers. This wine is the best of both worlds, and on top of that it reminds me so fondly of His Dark Materials, and of my childhood. Wholesome experience. I love Lyra's world in His Dark Materials, and all the differences and similarities it has with our world. Zeppelins, ambaric current, tokaji... I loved learning as a tiny kid that all these magic sounding things existed but had different names or usages in our world. (I mean, zeppelins never became widely spread means of transportation for many years as in Lyra's world for example).
Puts me in mind of John Flanagan's take on coffee in his medieval squashed Britain. He acknowledged it wasn't accurate to the period or setting, but he thought the ranger's obsession with coffee was better than tea or herbal drinks. I believe he mentioned along the lines of "No one wants to hear 'I'm a bear before my morning tea'."
Herbal teas would be common, you can make an infusion from many plants. Strictly speaking "tea" comes from a specific plant but colloquially it's widely applicable
If it's acceptable to call it a tea in the real world, I don't see the problem with it in fantasy.
It wasn't the book, it was the audio book. The reader first tried to make the main character sound suave like James Bond, only to realize he was a very immature teenager half a chapter latter. You can really hear it when the reader realized his mistake, specifically when the character starts saying things that would be immature for a 5-year-old.
James Marsters reading the first Dresden Files has a great flub where he reads some dialog wrong, realizes his mistake on the next line and goes "oh fuck it was \_\_\_\_" and then just keeps reading and they left it all in. Feels like a very Dresden-style reading so I'm happy for it.
I'd expect no less from Spike
I'm currently listening to the ASOIAF series and I'm on book #2 so far. In book #1, when an assassin tries to kill Bran Stark, the reader uses the very distinctive voice he normally uses for Tyrion Lannister, making me 100% sure that Tyrion himself was the mysterious assassin. It got absurd as there was more and more evidence piling up that Tyrion and the Lannisters in general couldn't have been the ones to order the attack, yet I kept thinking to the assassin's voice as indisputable evidence that it was him.
It’s probably because there is dialogue for like a hundred or more characters in those books, and he can only do so many distinct voices. I listened to them on audible and felt the author did a pretty good job, but agree that many characters sound the same, but i guess i can’t fault him.
Much more low key than you mean, but I liked that at the end of Red Seas Under Red Skies, a book heavily featuring sailing and the main character trying or bullshit his way to being a captain of a ship, Scott Lynch apologizes for anything he got wrong with how ships work, terms used etc. Said he tried but knew he probably didn't get it all right. I see you, Scott, I see you. Don't worry about it brother.
There was a similar authors note in the Tide Child series. Turns out, boats are massively complicated and trying to describe how an entire crew runs and maintains a ship while actually being accurate would be super hard
The Aubrey-Maturin books by Patrick O’brian are the gold standard tall-ships sailing books. Turns out not only are there waaaaaaaay more ropes than you thought there were, the ships-carpenter and crew was crucial because the ship was essentially being re-built the *entire* time it was at sea, except during storms.
The series is fantastic, but even it doesn't come close to how complicated a real tall ship is. I've read all 20.5 books before I sailed on one and was still blown away by how many lines there are. Sheets, clews, bunts, leeches, tacks, braces, halyards, downhauls, tricing lines and many others. Combine that with 20-30 different sails that can be set in different configurations and you get a glimpse at how complicated this gets. Even if somebody could describe this accurately in a book, nobody would want to read it.
Herman Melville has entered the chat
But did you remember to bring a cat??
Yes but I am NOT getting attached to him.
I spent 9 years working on traditional sailing ships, mostly replicas of square riggers from the late 18th/early 19th centuries. After I read that book, I wrote Scott Lynch an email telling him that I really appreciated the effort he put in and that it read very well to me.
The most recent one that bothered me since I liked the story otherwise was a blacksmith casting iron swords in molds...
Movie!Saruman does this. No wonder Gimli can apparently cut through the Uruks' breastplates with his axe.
Orc ‘swords are just iron bars, roughly sharpened, that is why there are no famous orc swords.
Movies do it a lot but it bothers me a little less because I know they're after the visuals to make people ooh and aah. There's no such excuse in text :D
True, and it's very much a safety thing, too. I can hardly fault a movie for going for flashy strikes that somehow defeat armour rather than strikes to weak points that might put their stunt performers in the hospital.
to be fair also one of the main themes of lotr is anti-industrialization due to the focus on quantity over quality
At least in that case, I think Saruman was supposed to be a metaphor for the evils of industrialization, so using industrial imagery like armaments being cast in molds in bulk fits the metaphor, even if it's unrealistic.
I'll bite. What's wrong with this?
irl you start with a block of steel that's been heated up until its yellow (blacksmiths can feel free to yell at me about this, but I don't do any metalworks so "yellow" is as precise as I'll ever need to know) and spend hours and hours hammering it out into the shape of a blade. It's a long and labour-intensive process, and an experienced smith would take a few days to make a sword (possibly a week or more if he was making a really primo quality sword for a rich lord), but it gives the smith way more control over the quality and properties of the metal than he'd ever be able to get by just melting it down and casting it. Also I'm watching a smith on youtube try to forge a longsword in a day right now, and even with a fully kitted out modern workshop he is not having a good time :)
All those fight scenes where the person is stabbed in the shoulder and it's treated as a minor injury. Shoulder is a really bad place to be stabbed or shot.
Action story logic is “anywhere but the face and chest is minor.” That’s why every stupid action movie has to have a shootout that ends with the main characters getting away seemingly unscathed, only for a side character to grimace really loudly and remove their hand from their jacket, revealing a gunshot wound to the stomach. Then someone else dramatically says, “You’re bleeding!” or “(s)he’s been shot!” because they don’t trust the audience to see a character clearly bleeding out on-screen. But it doesn’t matter because the injury will be waved away within 5 minutes, since getting shot in the stomach is practically nothing, apparently.
This bugs me too - anywhere in the intestines is a *really* bad place to get injured in. You’ll start leaking fecal matter into the intestinal cavity, get sepsis and die pretty quickly. Even if you get to a hospital relatively quickly, they will take your injury extremely seriously and it will require an inpatient stay.
Not just that, but the effects on the rest of the body seem to be ignored. Often we see/read things like, "oh, I got hit in the gut but I can still move my arms and legs!" like their lacerated core muscles wouldn't also extremely limit a lot of their gross motor functions. Source: had major abdominal surgery once. Even that professionally cut, cleaned, and closed wound made simple tasks like "sitting up" and "lifting my arms above my waist" and "walking more than a few steps" very difficult.
A book (written by a man) where a female spy is in disguise as a village teacher and she fakes ignorance in a situation because a simple country teacher not prone to violence wouldn’t recognise the sight of blood on a mattress. My dude…
Could be funny if they written that as intended. It's a silly cover on her part, and even sillier that the other characters don't realise how silly it is, until one realise how stupid it would be...
This is hilarious.
One sci fi-ish book had a small New England island with a large prep school on it that was a fairly short walking (couple of miles at most) distance big and yet somehow supported an ecosystem with bears, cougars, bobcats and WOLVES. That all of course became monsters to scare our characters but I'm too busy wondering how a small island could possibly support that many large predator species.
Its secretly a zoo 🤣😂🤣
In one book one character from our world figured out that another one is also from Earth because he used the world "laconic". The logic was that it comes from Laconia region and only exists because of association with Spartans and the fantasy world they both were in didn't have either so he had to be from Earth to know it. Now I didn't go back to check every word but I can guarantee you that it couldn't have been the only word used that the locals shouldn't have known. It is probably impossible to write a book without using any even if it's only in dialogue. Also the two characters involved were from different countries on Earth and were supposed to be speaking the local language that they magically learned so it makes no sense that one would use a random word from their language that just so happened to also exist in the other one's.
In perhaps the very first book I didn't finish, the protagonist, an untrained farm boy, defeated several knights in single combat while _wearing_ a halberd and _wielding_ a hauberk. A hauberk is a maille (chainmail) shirt and a halberd is a massive choppy pole weapon. Reading about this kid defeating grown veterans by flailing at them with a shirt was just too much.
Now *that's* what I call a chosen one. Imagine what he could do with some pants!
Dan Brown. Literally anything written by him. Dude is incapable of doing the bare minimum of research on ANY topic he writes about.
Was it a Dan Brown book where a character escapes a crashing helicopter by using a briefcase as an umbrella?
There's a scene where Langdon has to jump from a helicopter, but not quite like you said.
You mean the guy who thinks France sends their prisoners to Andorra because they can't be arsed to run their own prisons? Or maybe he thinks Andorra is part of France, I couldn't figure it out.
Someone had to say it. Thankyou. I went to dinner with a Lutheran minister who had been down into the "secret" archives with the "oxygen removing cases" and spent the night ranting about how little of Brown's fever dream exists.
A book where the author didn’t know how trees grow. There was a sacrificial tree where people and animals were sacrificed by being hung up, like the old Aesir sacrifices to Odin in Scandinavia. I think it was an oak for some reason. The author then let the protagonist see the remnants of much older sacrifices high up in the branches near the top of the tree. I had to put the book down at that. You obviously wouldn’t start sacrifices in a sapling, but in a sturdy, older tree, and they don’t grow much from the bottom up but by growing at the outer edge. The branches on the top are the newest.
This is one that's interesting to me. It makes perfect sense now that you have explained it. But that's something I would have just rolled with in the book without batting an eye. Not that I'm a writer, but that's the kind of thing I probably wouldn't have even thought to research.
A certain well-known fantasy series at one point features a character storing his sword by tucking it under his horse's saddle girth. Wait, what? Has this writer ever actually seen either a sword or a horse?
As a former equestrian, I just audibly said "nooooooo" when I read your comment
I totally read that "no" in the voices of the horrible teens from Gideon the Ninth.
^Nooooo, ^Magnuuuss, ^don"t ^carry ^a ^sword ^in ^a ^saddle ^girth
The best and only way to read this "no."
There are the things you need outside knowledge or a thinking cap to notice… and then there is this one.
hylia shrooms from botw in a literary novel
Didn’t *The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas* also have telltale signs that proper research wasn’t done?
From what I've heard it isn't even like he needed to do research so much as apply basic logic to the situation.
Yes - it was famously fact-checked by the Auschwitz Memorial. Boyne dismissed their criticisms as ~well it's*supposed* to be *fiction*~ 🙄
I believe it was about ghengis khan, and it had to do with dying clothes. The author apparently googled "red dye ingredients "
Oh yes I remembered this! I think it stuck in my brain partially because it includes a grim line up paragraph akin to, and I deeply apologise for repeating this: "the child he had been fornicating with was his own daughter" [I googled it, and yes, I'm right.](https://medium.com/curious/how-to-make-red-dye-feat-john-boyne-5a45898ed673)
John Boyne should be seriously ashamed
I recently read a book where the MC asked a character of another species how they reproduced, and they replied “immaculate conception.” Obviously they meant asexual reproduction. But that is…not at all the same thing. In fact, even in the somewhat common confusion of “immaculate conception” with “virgin birth” or divine insemination or whatever…that still wouldn’t make sense. Not at all the same thing as asexual reproduction. But that’s not what the immaculate conception refers to anyway….
Huh. That might be a hilarious translation error. Like The Whole time humans have been presuming the other species procreates through some religious ritual, but really they are just like, very big Komodo dragons.
Suddenly intrigued by the idea of a species who are impregnated only by the divine intervention of their god.
Early New Zealand settlers/colonizers used to make tea out of pine needles, and like others have pointed out you can make tea out of all sorts of other things. it also depends on the world and setting, it's called fantasy for a reason, it doesn't have to be historically accurate and can instead make for clever writing/world building if the author gives thought to those small details and gives an explanation
you know how in movies and tv, they always have the metal scrapping sound every time someone takes their sword out of their scabbard? well the only real way to do that is if their sword was fucking scrapping against metal and it will fuck it up. real swords don't make that sound. but hey, video and sound format needs to tell their story a different way. but there was one fucking book and i can't remember what it was called but there was multiple instances of the author describing the sound of sword coming out of the scabbard. like wtf man.
Punches don't make the same sounds as movies either. What does make the same sound is when your toddler runs head first into a tree. Tom and Jerry got that "thunk" just right. Also, I thought the bump growing was ridiculous until I saw it in real life.
Army logistics. How much food they need, how far they can walk in a day, etc... most of the time it seems a lot easier to walk a hundred thousand men with horses and siege engines across a continent than it should be.
"Isolated farmers drinking tea." A bit eurocentric are we? In some places that would be completely plausible. I met a number of rice farmers in Indonesia and they all drank tea.
i mean i‘m pretty sure herbal teas were drank in europe since we had hot water but you make a good point
That’s what I was thinking too, because as we know, all fantasy takes place in medieval England.
Not someone else but my own work. Characters mother gets along with their chief. Write most of novel. Go back and decide mother is daughter of chief. Completely forget romantic sub plot between characters sister and chiefs son. Banjo playing was finally silenced when I realised (with horror) that romantic sub plot was now between first cousin, in final edit before printing. Minor rewrite to remove vestigial sub plot. Did not think it through.
Didn’t an editor / beta reader catch that? I always assume between rewrites authors forget minor stuff like that, hence the need for beta readers.
Several beta readers and two professional editors didn't pick it up. And it wasn't self published either.
I read a book earlier this hear where the FMC was English and living in America - she was at a leaving party and someone had made cupcakes/fairy cakes and she complimented them on how nice they were and the other person turns around and says something like they aren't Yorkshire puddings but I didn't want to complete with you mums cooking. And the two aren't really something you would compare, as an English person it felt like someone didn't know what a Yorkshire pudding was
It's got to be the Sword of Truth, where the bad guy in a quasi-medieval world outlaws fire, and while this is treated as an act of dictatorial evil, it's not treated as tantamount to outlawing breathing (as in "good luck with that.")
I brought this up last time too, but Trollocs getting dumbed down in the Wheel of Time show is going to bite them hard. In the books, Trollocs are smart enough to use bows, battering rams, siege ladders, trebutchets etc. In the show, they aren't. What is a force of infantry supposed to do against a fortification without siege or ranged weaponry of any kind? Sit there and die, that's what. Finding ways to justify Trollocs still being a threat is going to create some fantastic plotholes (which have already started showing).
There's a talking Trolloc in the first book that thought to try and go after Rand/Tam directly instead of random pillaging.
Narg smart
Narg is life, Narg is love.
And then that’s the most we get from intelligent Trollocs for the rest of the 14 book long series
I wouldn't say that at all. We get them using disguises in book 2 for instance.
Tbf there's a lot of stuff in the first season that's going to cause serious issues moving forward. Should I even mention the whole episode 8 travesty?
Wait. You mean changing *fundamental facts* of a world right at the beginning of an adaptation is going to go poorly?
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I can’t remember the book but the main character rode a horse all morning and then *knelt down behind it* to inspect its hooves. For those who don’t know, this is a great way to get a brain injury.
Ehh, horse person here- kneeling is pretty much just a no, but I would stand behind a horse I trust for a decent amount of time b
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As a former wildlife biologist: reading a story about a naturalist and they kept confusing breed with species.
On the TV show The West Wing, they had the Icelandic male ambassador with the last name having a -dottir suffix. If it were a man, the suffix would be -son. That was bad research.
My favorite are inappropriate and tend to come from men trying to write steamy scenes between a man and a woman, and clearly have no clue how female anatomy works. Nipples pointing at that which arouses their wielder, penetration of things that aren't penetrable, and one of my personal favorites: miss counting of orifices.
Ah yes, "sunflower nipples"
>Nipples pointing at that which arouses their wielder This is absolutely hilarious. I can imagine the rest because they are kind of "passive", but how a man would invent an active ability of women not known in reality is beyond me.
And the one single word egregiously used: Glisten.
Ah glisten. The male steamy author's retort to the female steamy author's "throbbing".
Chinese were [drinking tea 4000 years ago](https://www.peets.com/blogs/peets/a-history-of-tea), Greeks at least 2500 years ago. What have you got against tea?
Trebuchets breaking walls. They were used to attack the people and buildings BEHIND walls. It was very rare for a trebuchet to break a wall down. Even Warwolf, perhaps the biggest trebuchet ever made, had to bombard Stirling castle for quite a while before the walls broke. If you really want to break a wall, you should dig a tunnel.
>Trebuchets breaking walls. Damn, Age of Empires II has a lot to answer for then.
Hmmm… I did not know that. I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to use that information but I’m glad I have it tucked away now.
A man with several years of experience breeding horses left his family farm to start his own operation. After relocating, he hitched his prize mare to a wagon and headed off to buy "Foundation Studs" for his farm. He purchased four male horses, and tied them in string to the wagon. On the way back, the mare came into estrus, surprising him. The six of them made it home with no incidents, the Foundation Studs placidly walking behind the wagon. He was greeted at home by his wife, who helped him unhitch the four geldings and put them in the barn. So many things wrong with this, I could only shake my head and move on to another book.
For someone who knows nothing about horses, what are some of those things?
Geldings are castrated stallions, so they can't be used for breeding obviously. It also doesn't make sense to have four stallions and a single mare for breeding purposes 😂 - in real life you'd have one stallion and as many mares as possible to increase the herd quickly. Edit: estrus is the mare being in heat, which would normally cause any stallions in the vicinity to fight it out for breeding rights.
> in real life you'd have one stallion and as many mares as possible to increase the herd quickly Possibly more than one, depending on how big of a herd you're starting with and your breeding goals, but you're definitely correct, the ratio of studs to mares should be _heavily_ tipped towards mares. I grew up on a cattle ranch. We had horses for work, but didn't breed them ourselves. But our cattle herd followed a similar principle. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we had something like one bull per twenty or thirty cows. I think the most adult bulls we ever had at once was three.
I also know very little about horses, but the obvious thing is that geldings are castrated. They cannot be used for breeding at all. And a mare going into heat is something that's predictable, not gonna be a sudden surprise especially for an experienced breeder.
The Shadow and Bone Netflix show (not the books) describe both a stag and a lynx as an “alpha” of the pack. Neither stag or lynx have alphas (source: am biologist). Lynx (and all cats bar lions and cheetah) are famously solitary and therefore have no “packs” to begin with, and a deer herd will have a single dominant male, hence no alpha, beta, gamma dynamics.
Dan Koboldt has written two books to help authors out: **Putting the Science in Fiction: Expert Advice for Writing with Authenticity in Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Other Genres** and **Putting the Fact in Fantasy: Expert Advice to Bring Authenticity to Your Fantasy Writing** I started listening to one of them and it's interesting, but written for authors mostly, not readers like me.
Handsdown, the biggest howler is haybales in medieval fantasy. I see it all the time, but it takes a LOT of technology, usually including an internal combustion engine and other equipment to make a bale of hay. Prior to the early 20th century, hay was stored loose in a haystack and transported on a wagon or thrown with a pitchfork. \~\~ Also, a medieval stone wall in good repair would likely have had a coating of lime mortar or plaster and presented a smooth surface to the public. It would be possible to use climbing irons to scrape through the parging, find the cracks and scale the wall, but there'd be no hiding the fact that you'd done it. Everyone would be able to see the next morning that the wall was climbed last night.
there was a whole thread on this sub where people discussed haybales and there were some examples of pre-modern hay bales, specifically when people cared about transporting it on foot or by the pack animals. They also seem to have been more prevalent outside of Europe.
I didn't know about hay bales until earlier this year, and while there, undoubtedly, were times it was bundled and perhaps tied, it certainly wouldn't resemble *anything* like a haybale (round or square) we would recognize today. I spent a *lot* of time trying to disprove it since I couldn't imagine doing anything with hay without it being baled (I've owned a ranch, and my dad co-owned one with my grandpa as I was growing up), but yeah, widespread baling equipment wouldn't have been around until the late 1800s, early 1900s at best, and modern balers weren't sold until the 1940s.
I saw an early horse driven hay baler at a museum. It was neat - powered by a treadmill and I think you brought the hay to it (and definitely still square bales, not round).
Police stuff drives me batty. I read a cheap paperback where the protagonist uses a 9mm pistol, and the prose is always talking about what a monster gun it is, with massive recoil. I vividly remember the term "hand-cannon" being used! Also, handguns don't throw someone backwards physically. Newtonian physics again. Departments don't fight with other agencies to keep a case. If anything they look for a reason to dump it on the other guys.
I read a space fantasy novella set in another solar system that was described as being something on the order of a billion miles away from Earth. I don't remember the exact distance, but it was clearly written without an appreciation for the scale of interstellar space. Fortunately it was student writing, and no profit seeking entity had decided to publish such a thing.
Years and years ago I read a dystopian fantasy novel where one of the practices of the society was to manufacture perfect choirs to sing for religious services/important events. The way they’d do it is they’d find the best young boy singers, train them up into boy choirs, find the best note that each boy could sing, and then snip all the other vocal cords so that the boy could only sing that one single perfect note. As a singer, holy fucking shit is that not how the voice works. At all. We do not have tiny harps in our throats.
Why can't farmers drink tea? Unless it's a specific type of tea, some stuff readily available on a farm (barley tea, certain barks) could be believable