Inaccuracies in fiction

[HoppyHat]

Do they bother you? I realise I am annoyed/disappointed by simple "mistakes" which surely a decent editor should notice?

A couple of examples

A very very popular novel. Set in modern day London. Character regularly gets the bus from A to B along a named road all of which exist in real life. But they don't use the correct bus number! Nothing bad happens on the bus, the driver isn't awful, nothing libellous. So why not use the correct bus number?

I've just finished a book which I really liked. The author is American. But part of the book is set in a posh English school in the 1950s. The headteacher calls the season following summer "Fall". And says (more than once) "you need to write your sister" (or similar) not write TO.

To me these things are so obvious and quite jarring. Anyone else?

@Riverlee was this 'The distance echo'? Because I'm reading that now and have noticed it too!

One of my pet hates! I haven’t read the whole thread, but was stopped in my tracks soon after starting to read Pat Barker’s “The silence of the girls” when a character or the omniscient narrator (can’t remember which) mentions the scent of mimosa in the air, on a Greek island in ancient Greece (i.e. 800-500 BC). Mimosa comes from Australia, and the ancient world definitely had no trading links with Australia!

There was also oatmeal for porridge, but it was just the general suburban Americanness of Oxford, with the deafening electronic carillon of Christmas carols on the High, Dunworthy describing Kivrin as 'not even a metre and a half tall' and her hair in 'braids', and referring to academics as 'professors' when they weren't etc etc.

I know there are lots of errors in the Black Death parts of the novel, too, but those are surely more forgivable than something that's essentially set in contemporary Oxford minus mobile phones and the internet, but with time travel and a tube system that extends from London to Oxford when Willis has apparently spent extended periods of time in Oxford. Figuring out how the faculties work in relation to the colleges really isn't that hard, and when you're depicting a foul up that comes down in part to academic rivalries between different historians, and access to a piece of time-travel tech that appears to be owned by one college, rather than the History Faculty, you have to make this stuff more plausible. If Dunworthy has lent Gilchrist Badri to run the drop, then doesn't Brasenose (their college) have a net of its own? And has time travel being an academic pursuit completely changed Oxford's history degree. Because Kivrin appears to have spent most of her degree mugging up on milking, weaving, Latin prayers and the practical skills she will need in the past what about the usual gruelling essay schedule that's normal for undergraduates?

And why is it only historians who get to time travel? Don't English Lit undergraduates get to, I don't know, timetravel to Tudor London to check out Hamlet in performance, or to see, if they can't stop, Charlotte Bronte destroying Emily's possible second novel?

Imagine if the Eng Lit undergraduates are still writing essays and grinding their teeth at the time-travelling historians...

Sorry, accidental strike-through...

I just remembered another one from when I read (or tried to read, I gave up after the first few pages) Jilly Cooper’s latest book about football. Rupert Campbell Black is described as being 60 in the present day which would mean he was born around 1962/63, which is surely far too young to fit the timeline of Riders, Rivals etc.

She even mentions his past as a Tory MP and minister in the 80s when he would only have been about 24. Pretty sure in real life he must be at least mid seventies by now, but I assume a 60-something still just about fits into silver fox category whereas a 75 year old who everyone still fancies might be a bit unbelievable.

Only if her mum wanted to spend the money on her which didnt serm to be the case.. The favoured child went to the local school too.

The clue was in the word " imagine" surely?

Yes, I get really annoyed by the use of the word GENDER in anything written that’s set in the last century.

To me it’s like telling someone to ’Google’ something instead of saying ‘look it up’ when Google has only existed in recent years.

To me it’s like telling someone to ’Google’ something instead of saying ‘look it up’ .....

Or 'run and find out' - which is actually from Kipling, I discovered.

Interesting you say that about 'gender', Wappity, as I’m currently doing the Nicholas Nickleby readalong on here and was brought up with a jolt at the latest chapter, which has Fanny Squeers ranting at her former friend, Tilda:

'This is the hend, is it, of all my bearing with her deceitfulness, her lowness, her
falseness, her laying herself out to catch the admiration of vulgar minds, in
a way which made me blush for my—for my—'
^^
`Gender,' suggested Mr Squeers, regarding the spectators with a malevolent
eye—literally a malevolent eye.

And I would have agreed, I’d have expected Dickens to use 'sex' at that point - in fact I went down a rabbit-hole to make sure that wasn’t an updated version, but no, it was the 1839 original text.

@Terpsichore I’m no literary scholar but I presume that in nineteenth century Britain, people of a certain class might have chosen the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ in mixed company?

I’ve no problem with that but it’s the way that recently written fiction uses it. For instance, two working class unmarried women in WW2 who are chatting amongst themselves and discussing the potential sex of their unborn babies. No way would they be saying ‘I wonder what gender my baby will be?’ If they start talking about baby showers, I’ll have to burn the book! 😤

Call the Midwife is another TV series that’s highly entertaining but completely unrealistic in so many ways.

it’s the way that recently written fiction uses it. For instance, two working class unmarried women in WW2 who are chatting amongst themselves and discussing the potential sex of their unborn babies. No way would they be saying ‘I wonder what gender my baby will be?’

oh, I completely agree!

I’m no literary scholar but I presume that in nineteenth century Britain, people of a certain class might have chosen the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ in mixed company?

Anne Elliot said 'sex' when she was talking to a man. 'All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.'

So Jane Austen must have thought it was acceptable, because Anne was never vulgar. If she'd had Lydia Bennet say it, there might have been some doubt!

I’ve often wondered if you are permitted in fiction to name things which will have a copyright (or similar) so something similar is substituted.

id love to know as I’ve been writing a book (fiction) in my head for about four years. One day I’d love to get it on paper, so far I’ve got bullet points of main story lines in various notebooks and the odd bad chapter on my iPad. I’m a bit in awe of a distant relative who is published and well known having started writing in her later years but I’m too shy to ask her such questions.

I’ve often wondered if you are permitted in fiction to name things which will have a copyright (or similar) so something similar is substituted.

Generally yes, if you're referring to the thing itself. "Dr Martens" is a registered trademark, but what that means is that you can't make a big black boot and label it Dr Martens, and sell it as such. Because then you would be making money off of someone else's idea and work. But you can describe a character as wearing Dr Martens, because that's just calling it by name.

Re copyright, you can copyright text but you can't copyright a title. So it's fine to refer to (say) Bohemian Rhapsody, but problematic to have your character say the words "Bismillah, no! They will not let you go!" etc. Apparently some music publishers (owners of the rights to songs) are very eagle-eyed about this, particularly in the US.

In the past, gender was the polite word for sex, when talking about male or female. Maybe that’s why gender was used.

But ‘gender’ has never meant the same thing as ‘sex’. Sex is biological, whether you are male or female, while gender is social — what a particular society, time period etc expects of men or women in terms of behaviour, self-presentation etc.

I mean, I agree that a certain type of person used ‘gender’ when they meant ‘sex’, but this is a mistake, just as saying ‘myself’ when you mean ‘me’ is a mistake.

An unborn baby, after a certain point, has a sex, it doesn’t have a gender, even though gendered behaviour is sometimes already attributed to it (‘Feel him kicking — you’d know he’s a boy!’).

…..and just to muddy the waters, in the very same Nicholas Nickleby there are numerous instances of 'sex' being used correctly, eg:

`In the meantime,' interrupted Kate, with becoming pride and indignation,
I am to be the scorn of my own sex, and the toy of the other; justly
condemned by all women of right feeling, and despised by all honest and
honourable men'.

It really wasn't like that. Remember when things were unisex, not gender neutral?

Google has this wonderful tool called Books Ngram Viewer which searches across all books that Google has access to so that you can search for words and phrases and the date when they appear. I compared "your sex" with "your gender" in British English over two centuries and got the following.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=your+sex,+your+gender+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&case_insensitive=on&corpus=en-GB-2019&smoothing=3

Sex has always meant biological sex, but gender could mean biological sex, or girl = pink/boys=blue.

It’s not a mistake, but the way the way the language has evolved, and it contributes to the confusion today. When I was a child, gay meant merry and happy, and queer meant strange, for example.

I love that book! One of my most favourite ones. I haven't read it for a while though so I will have to have another look now.

JD Robb on one of her eve Dallas crime novels has the victim drowning - how she got into the water being critical to whether it's accident or murder. Robb has the body floating after a few minutes, when what happens is the lungs fill with water, the body sinks and when decomp starts (in days rather than minutes) the gases float the body to the surface of the water again.

And I'm slightly aghast I bothered to find that out.

You might run into issues with branded products if you criticise them - so if your plot line hinged on the sole coming off a character's brand new boots, you might well want to invent a brand for them, to avoid allegations of reputational damage from the owners of any genuine brand.

Slight tangent but that reminds me of product placement in films.

Some companies will pay for a positive image and also pay for a negative of the rival.

So when the hero is being attacked he/she might be next to a coca-cola machine but when they are winning it's next to a pepsi machine. Or the other way round.

I hope that doesn't start to apply in books, although it would be harder to do without interrupting the story.

Yes, that's another consideration. If your character needs to be caught up in a plane crash, be sure they're flying on MadeUpAir!