Kicked Out Again
Apr. 15th, 2011 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluI 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...
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...
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Date: 2011-04-15 09:04 pm (UTC)At the risk of quibbling with a quibble ... computer damage and decline in civilization generally, might also explain specific vocabulary terms getting lost.
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Date: 2011-04-15 09:39 pm (UTC)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.)