Kicked Out Again

[akirlu]

I think I may need a *facepalm* icon.

So there I am, this morning, on the bus, happily reading a bit of Bear's Dust as a break from studying and I'm really enjoying it because she has a nice light touch with the poetry of language, and there's a lot of crunchy stuff going on in the interstices and then I get to the passage where the protagonists eat silkworms for breakfast and, *bam!* *woah!* I'm kicked out of the book. Not for the reason you might suppose. I'm not especially grossed out by descriptions of eating bugs, especially not after some fairly graphic descriptions of physical recovery from a bacterial infection. No. But getting basic science stuff really wrong is distracting. In particular, larvae =! pupae. In fact, they're different life stages. I'm sorry if that makes you work harder to come up with different words to use for the same thing, but it's one or the other. Also, pupae is at least two of them. If there's only one, it's a pupa. This is like 5th grade science, right? Wah.

Otherwise lovely book so far...

Comments

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Dunno from pupa, but aren't silkworms too valuable to eat? Unless served with peacock tongues.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

In context, presumably not. The context is on a massive, semi-derelict generation ship, orbiting a double star that's about to go nova, decades or centuries after some sort of major internal catastrophe that destroyed the ship's main computer. The viable environments within the ship have devolved into warring fiefdoms. There is lots of weird nanotech running around, and genetically modified biota including human descendants, and what seem to be self-aware subsystems of the former ship's computer, and so forth, but sources of meat protein are comparatively scarce, so bugs are presumably more valuable as food than a source of luxury fabric.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Besides which, the pupae are fine (for some flavor of that word) to eat [if I'm remembering the technical terms correctly] -- assuming that this is done soon after they're boiled and the silk is unwound from around them. (Or if the cocoon is cut open -- which is done in certain circumstances, resulting in short pieces of fiber, which are commonly used as fluffy filling in clothing & futons.) Moreover, it's not uncommon for more eggs to be laid, and more larvae/worms to hatch, than the supply of mulberry leaves can support. And yes, of course meat protein generally takes priority over fiber when push comes to shove.

(I note, with no surprise, that you're a Quibbler. Welcome to the Club.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Quibblers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your...er, hmm, not sure what goes best here. Must give it a think.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. And silkworms might be the most available insect, having been worth taking along on a generation ship.

At the risk of quibbling with a quibble ... computer damage and decline in civilization generally, might also explain specific vocabulary terms getting lost.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

computer damage and decline in civilization generally, might also explain specific vocabulary terms getting lost

Possibly, if the story is being told in the character's voice rather than authorial voice, but in that case, to be well done, there should be other instances of corrupted or evolved usage. One stand-alone instance just looks like the author's/editor's/proofreader's goof. (And, in general, I don't like having to tell myself little stories to account for inconsistencies in the text -- that's the author's job.)

[spideyj.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beondegi

Silkworm pupae are a fairly common snack in Korea.

[tysolna]

Funnily enough, three days ago I was in a carpet manufacture in Turkey, where they explained / showed us how silk is unwound from the cocoons (they even placed them in our hands while doing the unwinding, rarely have I felt things so soft), and afterwards the dried dead insects were passed around and we were told they are yummy with some garlic. But they are so tiny that it makes no sense to me to harvest big white cocoons for such small edibles.

All that aside, though, yes. Larvae are not pupae. I've tossed books aside with no small force for things like that.