The other day my family and I were sitting around talking about the TV programmes that we watched as children. I was reminiscing about “The Six Million Dollar Man” and remembered how it used to really bug me when Steve Austin would jerk his bionic arm away from his body to break the chains that were binding him. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the strength of steel would know that the chains wouldn’t break; all that our hero would do would be to drag the chain through his un-bionic body, creating an even bigger mess for Oscar and his team to clear up.
That got me to thinking, am I the only person that, upon reading something that breaks the rules, sits backs and moans: “Oh for Goodness sake! Get it RIGHT!” Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to suspend disbelief, but, once I have accepted that faster-than-light travel, or super strength, or whatever, is possible, then the author owes it to us (or at least owes it to me!) to stick within the new rules of the game. Friedrich Nietzsche said that “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you”; and I feel that, when someone breaks the rules, it makes it harder to immerse oneself in what they are saying – I find that part of me is sitting back, looking for other errors.
In the novel that I’m writing, faster-than-light travel is needed. I could have just been vague and made up a technology to achieve it, but I feel that this is cheating the reader. So I went out and researched the options, and settled upon a ship powered by an Alcubierre drive (first proposed in 1994) and have my heroine discuss the basic principles with the ship’s engineer.
When the ship arrives in the target system, they have to make a short hop sunward to reach the planet; I have Talatu note that “days before, I had calculated the distance to the planet. We were thirty million kilometres above the invariable plane of the system and one hundred and ninety three million kilometres out from Campbell’s Star. The planet that we were aiming for was thirteen million kilometres closer to the centre of the system than us, but was also about thirty degrees behind us in orbit. This meant that we would have to shift approximately ninety eight million kilometres to move into orbit around it. This would take us exactly one hundred and five seconds – compared to the nineteen years and nine months that it had taken to get here!”
Again, I could have just plucked a number out of the air, but I didn’t. I dusted off my almost forgotten trigonometry knowledge and worked it out.
Another thing that I do, when writing anything longer than a short story, is to keep a file of notes (pictures of uniforms, potted biographies of characters, technical summaries etc.) so that, if I’m not sure about a point, I can refer back to it, and make sure that everything remains consistent.
So I have four questions:
1) Am I weird in wanting things to be right? Does it get to you as much as it gets to me?
2) What examples do you have, from your own writing, where you went beyond the call of duty to make sure that it was right?
3) How do you ensure that errors and inconsistencies don’t creep in to your work?
4) Please post examples where your suspension of disbelief was knocked by a basic mistake.
Here are a couple of mine…
* In Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” Louis Wu teleports to the east to extend his birthday, this would actually move him later in the day and would shorten his birthday. Niven was constantly teased about this until he changed it in later editions so that Louis Wu teleports into the west.
* In Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons” Robert Langdon tells his students that the Christian tradition of communion, eating the body of their god, comes from the Aztecs; a basic mistake by someone who stresses that his novels are based on facts. Communion has taken place since the first century; some twelve to thirteen centuries before the Aztec civilisation came into being.
Limebird Writers 