Books (not) read Update [purplecthulhu]

Sailing Bright Eternity Greg Benford
Vacuum Diagrams Stephen Baxter
Gateway Fred Pohl
The Clan Corporate Charles Stross
Immortality Inc. Robert Sheckly
Darkland Liz Williams
Starfish Peter Watts
Maelstrom Peter Watts
The Oregon Experiment Alexander et al.
Missle Gap Charles Stross
Blindsight Peter Watts
Air Geoff Ryman
Freakonomics Levitt & Dubner
The Execution Channel Ken MacLeod
The Snake Agent Liz Williams
The Steep Approach to Garbadale Iain Banks
Sun of Suns Karl Schroeder
9Tail Fox Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Moon of Gomrath Alan Garner
Players Paul McAuley

Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Dennis Detwiller

I don't get through books particularly fast but I am very reluctant to give up once I've started. But last night I was forced to drop this one when I was a bit over 1/3rd of the way through.

The book is set in the past of the Delta Green gaming setting. The previous novel in this setting Rules of Engagement by John Tynes was great fun, as was a previous short story collection, so I had high hopes for this novel. DttE tells the story of some of the anti-occult and anti-cthulhoid operations of Delta Green and its relations during WW2. The problems with it are a lack of editing, leading to occasionally twisted and unnecessary prose, a lot of needless and repetitive description and some really quite poor research. The final straw for me last night came amid a scene in Whitby. Firstly the houses of Whitby are described as 'timber framed'. They're not, as any glance at the Whitby tourist info. pahes will tell you. Secondly, and this really was the final straw, is the scene in a pub where one of our heroes pays for two beers with a pound coin and then is surprised to get change. This is WW2 you idiot! There were no pound coins! I could get change from a pound for a couple of pints in the 80s in London!

This kind of absent research just breaks the illusion completely. It verges on the insulting to expect your readers to pass this by.

Still - I guess reading something like this is useful practice for looking for similar flaws in my own writing.

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It is very annoying when fiddly errors just explode the suspension of disbelief like that. It's usually when assumptions replace research I think - except for the bizarre ones that are plain linguistic (I read a story recently where the heroine 'saddled up to the door' to eavesdrop on our hero after which the rest of the plot was pointless because i was still mulling over the ramifications of all that leather). I experienced something similar in Naoimi Novik's Temeraire where small errors in setting kept cropping up. Luckily it was a good story because nothing else could have made me continue after the giant tuna running up the English Channel.

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Ahem. In the second-to-last volume of That Series, JKR has people in the potions class 'swilling' the mixtures in their cauldrons, when clearly, they are 'swirling' them.

Not nearly as bad as your examples, which would drive me absolutely batty. I wonder how much Detwiller thinks a pint cost? I used my not-too-impressive google-fu, and came up with an average price of 6d for a pint. So by my super arithmetical skills, I'm guessing he should have got 19 shillings back from a pound note (I think they existed then). I think you're right. A very silly mistake.

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It would be more realistic that he was surprised that the barman could make change for a pound. There is a lovely scene in Dorothy L. Sayers's Busman's Honeymoon where Lord Peter tips the vicar a pound (or is it 5?) for the church roof fund and there is a stunned silence and the vicar confesses to not having seen a Bank of England note in years!

Re. the swilling. Up North it counted as swilling if the vessel was held in the hand. So the cognac swirl in a balloon glass would have been called 'swilling round'. Bit painful with a hot cauldron though I'd say.

I doubt if you could pay for any drinks in a pub during WW2 with a Pound _note_ without getting some very very odd looks.

Beer was about 20p (4 old schillings) a pint when my brother went to Bristol in 1976, so you'd almost certainly have got change from a 6 schilling note for a couple of pints which were probably still priced in pennies then.

A pound would have been a pretty vast chunk of a person's weekly income. If I look at one of the conversion sites, selected 1942 as the start year...

£1 in 1942 is £32 based on inflation, and £105 using average earnings increases.

I've not found a definative source but £2 a week looks about right as the average weekly wage.

Well, my ex M-i-L said that in the late '50s, her husband's wages were 8 pounds or so a week, and rent (he was a groundskeeper, I think at the time in Tunbridge Wells)

purplecthulhu

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December