Factual errors in novels

[caerau]

I read Jurassic Park in the early 90s before the film came out.


As a PhD student in biological chemistry at the time I was rather horrified to read that DNA was made up of four amino acids     (hint amino acids are what makes proteins Michael, nucleotides make DNA)


Considering the whole thing is based around DNA technology, this still gets to me.  Yeah I know it's just a shit book, but hey.

[Kim]

It was also a bit optimistic about the ability of the Cray X-MP to manipulate multiple genomes, while simultaneously pattern-matching arbitrary dinosaurs out of live video feeds in its spare time.

(Changed to multiple CM-5s in the film, which was clearly chosen on the basis of blinkenlights rather than architecture.)


Crichton's books are full of this sort of stuff though, interspersed with entertaining ideas, and occasional ironic engineering cockups that don't seem entirely fictional.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

You work out the direction of travel by looking at the shape of the front tyre track relative to the rear. The front tyre takes a longer path than the rear and the shape of the loops are asymmetric along the direction of travel.

EDIT http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~ebender/87/bicycle.pdf

That's true but it doesn't matter which way the bicycle is going, the tracks would be the same since the rear wheel always crosses on top of the front whatever the direction of travel. Perhaps if a wheel had slipped in the mud the direction of slide would be an indicator but that's not part of Holmes' reasoning any more than mathematics is. 

Thus if you cycle North the track will show the rear wheel going over the front and if you cycle South the track will also show the rear will going over the front.  The only indicator might be the pattern of the tread if the tyre was the sort that had to be fitted according to the tread.  Even if it was, it's a dangerous assumption that the tyre had been correctly fitted !

The maths is not relevant altho' it contains enough truth to make it deceptively authoritative and is probably meant to deceive.   

[LittleWheelsandBig]

I've not been clear. The thin end of the loop/ wobble is where the bike went to, the fat end is where the bike came from.

Holmes was wrong in the book and that article says so.

[ian]

Yeah, in Jurassic Park they got Crays, whereas I inherited a gel-based sequencer from Hell and a computer that ran Windows 3.1. You had to climb a step-ladder to load the beast. No, no, no. No one is going to clone a dinosaur like that. The US DoE wouldn't give me Cray (you want justification?), but I got me an ABI-somesuch automated parallel electrophoresis genetic analyzer. If you whispered enough sweet nothings in that sweet baby's ears, she'd deliver 1 kbase per reaction. In just one day. I could have cloned a dinosaur but look what happened. Anyway, Escherichia coli never killed anyone.

I should have just built a time machine. Could have popped to the future and grabbed a next-gen massively parallel machine.

[SteveC]

The one which always annoyed me was the use of Piggy's glasses in 'Lord of the Flies' to light fires. (OK they made more of it the film)
Piggy is obviously short-sighted which is why he needs the glasses. I was MOST disappointed when they found out I was short-sighted and couldn't use my glasses to set fire to things... 

[Kim]

Lord of the Flies was basically a less interesting version of Jurassic Park for them to inflict on us in English Literature, thobut.

[alexb]

Chevette Washington's mate talks about braised aluminium bicycle frames in Virtual Light - shame on you William Gibson!!!

First off it's brazed, secondly, although it is possible to braze aluminium, it's almost unheard of. You weld aluminium!

Other than that, it's a cracking read.

[Efrogwr]

This is based on The YACF Bumper Book of Plot Holes, and dedicated to Michael Robotham*.

In The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer, one of the leading characters is a bit miffed at having to drive on the left after crossing the border from Austria to Italy. In 1929...

Surely if he was leaving Austria he'd have been perfectly happy if he could have kept driving on the left. Saved a lot of bother.

In fact, in Austria different provinces drove on different sides of the road pre-war, ...

All on the left pre-WW1 (along with the rest of the empire), & by 1929 only Vorarlberg had switched to the right.

Bledlow's got it!

To compound the error, the character in question was Czech...

The Glass Room is based on the story of the construction of the Tugendhat House in Brno. SM more or less transcribed the detail of the design and construction from real life; so much so that a surviving Tugendhat accused him of hijacking her family's history.

[Bledlow]

Czech? So he was from a country which in 1929 drove on the left & would do so for the next 10 years. If he'd driven from Brno he'd have had to take a long detour not to have been on the left all the way.

[Mr Larrington]

Lack of fact-Czeching, then.

[Efrogwr]

Czech? So he was from a country which in 1929 drove on the left & would do so for the next 10 years. If he'd driven from Brno he'd have had to take a long detour not to have been on the left all the way.

Yep. It's a balls-up worthy of Tom "Butch" Clancy.

[caerau]

Anyway, Escherichia coli never killed anyone.

I think there's a butcher's shop in Wales somewhere that might contest that one O157

[Steph]

Mr Stephen King (the well-known one, not the Amazon identity-purloiner): in 'Dr Sleep', no, the French do NOT  pronounce "Ouellette" as "Oo-lay"

Mr Robert Silverberg: in 'Master of Life and Death', Nairobi does NOT nestle beneath the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, and even in a universe imagined by a combination of Russia Today and Fox News it is certainly not a "City on Africa's west coast"

[Ian H]

Surely, if it's a novel, you can make everything up.

[Peter]

That's a novel approach, Ian, but I think you may be confusing it with political biography.

[Mr Larrington]

Political biography is usually to be found on the "Crime" shelves.

[Pingu]

I should have just built a time machine. Could have popped to the future and grabbed a next-gen massively parallel machine.

Or to the past and got a dinosaur.

[mattc]

Surely, if it's a novel, you can make everything up.

Hmmm ... So are you saying the thread title is in fact tautology?

This could be worse than Crossing the Streams.

[Riggers]

^ 

[Oaky]

You work out the direction of travel by looking at the shape of the front tyre track relative to the rear. The front tyre takes a longer path than the rear and the shape of the loops are asymmetric along the direction of travel.

EDIT http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~ebender/87/bicycle.pdf

Best of luck to the detective trying to deduce which way Wobbly John was cycling

[PeteB99]

One of the Swallows and Amazons books had a plot device where the kids deduced which tyre was which when they were hunting for a bicycle with two different makes of tyre on it.

[PeteB99]

Probably the translator rather than the author but the last Camilla Lackberg book I read concerned a gun that kept being found and used to commit a murder about once a generation. At the beginning it's a .38 calibre, at the end it's morphed into a 9mm.

[caerau]

Probably the translator rather than the author but the last Camilla Lackberg book I read concerned a gun that kept being found and used to commit a murder about once a generation. At the beginning it's a .38 calibre, at the end it's morphed into a 9mm.

But you can just make it all up, it's a novel!   

[drossall]

One of the Swallows and Amazons books had a plot device where the kids deduced which tyre was which when they were hunting for a bicycle with two different makes of tyre on it.

Which one? I don't remember that.