Home of the Snarkmaiden

Sorry but it's not the WW2 details she mucked up, it's basic facts about London as a city. She has characters taking tube lines that weren't going to be built until 20 and 30 years AFTER the war. She has phone calls and stamps made/posted in currencies that didn't exist until more than 25 years after WW2 ended. Then she had characters taking hours to get from A to B, when A and B are about as far apart as Belltown and Pioneer Square - but with much less inconvenient geography in the way.

Added to the lack of computers and mobile phones in her 2060s Oxford and you've a bunch of poor research about the basics of the place you've set your novel in...

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I'm not saying that it was the WW II details that Charlie is complaining of, I'm saying that he says it somehow matters more because the details 'take place,' for want of a better phrase, in the period of WW II. Getting the details wrong somehow matters more because the period matters more. I just don't think I buy that. Getting the details right matters in itself, irrespective of when or what the book is about, and to the extent that Willis was lazy or ineffectual or uncaring about getting the details right, she's wrong. But especially if it turns out she's merely ineffectual, Charlie doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Then she had characters taking hours to get from A to B, when A and B are about as far apart as Belltown and Pioneer Square - but with much less inconvenient geography in the way.

Aw, now, be fair, I've had actual Londoners tell this one on themselves, though, admittedly as an artifact of the way the graphical diagram of the Tube doesn't map to the surface at all. It's apparently quite possible, depending on where, to stick out a bunch of delays on the Tube, taking hours getting from A to B, only then find out months or years later that Tube stop A is literally around the corner from Tube stop B.

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Sure, but she wrote this book recently in the days of Google Maps, so she didn't even have to, *gasp* find herself an old A to Z to realise that Edware Road/Hyde Park Corner and Selfridges on Oxford Street are practically on top of each other.

He also has a strong point about having a 2060s era *expert* on WW2 unaware of what Bletchly Park was when, frankly, it was about one of the most pivotal allied operations of the entire war effort.

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asfi.livejournal.com

Yeah, the Bletchley Park bit *really* bothered me, in a "how is this plot even possible?!" kind of way.

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I'd point as, as a Brit, that the shadow that WW2 casts over modern Britain is far longer than that of WW1, purely because most people in the UK, have either a parent or grand-parent who was actively involved in WW2. Not to mention, if your family is from the South, then said Grandparent or Parent (in my case) lived in London during the blitz.

As M says, even 60 years later, WW2 is a massive distorting mass in the rubber sheet of British modern history. So YES it is that important to Brits. :)

Actually, she didn't say it like that but I like the imagery.

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Hey! The Blitz wasn't only southern :-) My grandma spent her wedding night in the cellar of the hotel they had held the reception in, as the bombs rained down on Manchester.

But to support you: the Great War left psychic and emotional scars far greater than the Second World War, but it's the Second World War which left physical scars on the landscape so great that people who are forty today grew up playing on old bomb sites.

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Well, I'd have to agree and I was mostly exagerating to effect :)

Mum's major problem wasn't actually air-raids but when the V raids started, especially the V2s while she was at school.

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Yes, well, what I was alluding to is that in many ways, WW I is the iceberg below the surface of which the visible bit is WW II. The latter may be easier to notice, but the former matters just as much. It's pretty clear that WW II would not have happened but for the godawful mess that Churchill and others made at Versailles, and if Churchill was the savior of England and the great indomitable spirit of Englishness, it was really only the least he could do for landing England (and France, and Belguim, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia,and Scandinavia, and Palestine and the Middle East, and, and, and...) in that mess in the first place with his bellicose ways dating back to the time when he was First Lord of the Admiralty.

And if most people in the UK do not also have a great-great grandfather who was in WW I it would only be because the tragic thousands upon thousands of them died in the trenches and never returned. That by god is a bowling ball distorting your rubber sheet, it's just harder to spot because it is an absence, not a presence.

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I think the issue here is that on a meta-level, for Planet Earth, WW1 was by far and away a more influential event than WW2, which you correctly state was an extension of. But for British people WW2 is significantly more of an influence - for the record my mother had several uncles who either didn't make it back from WW1 or were shell shocked to the point of incompetence when they did.

There's a lot of reasons for that. The damage from WW2 lasted well into the 60s and 70s; rationing of food and other basics lasted into the early 50s, so much so that you will know people in fandom who aren't a lot older than us who'll have ration cards in their names. It was the final end of empire. Empire Day was a holiday in the 30s and 40s and by the 50s it was not.

The collective scars of WW2 are on the entire British psyche in a way that the deaths in WW1 were not. People who went away and didn't come home don't impact families in the same way as entire streets vanishing while you're at school... as happened to my mother in '44 during a V2 raid.

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Clumsy writing on my part here. When I talk about impact on families, I'm talking about impact on civilians at home. WW2 was about the impact on the home front in a way that WW1 never could be.

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Churchill had little to do with Versailles. Lloyd George and his personal advisors (not mostly the other major government ministers, who stayed home) did that by themselves. And if there's a single individual most responsible for pushing the treaties so far that the Germans were bound to lash out in frustration sooner or later, it was Woodrow Wilson, whose sanctimoniousness would put Joe Lieberman to shame.

Churchill's tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty was a inseparable mixture of the good (getting the navy prepared for the war which was coming regardless of what he did) and the terrible (the list starts with Gallipoli). The greatest harm Churchill did to the UK, however, was signing off on the restoration of the gold standard as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, which sparked off the general strike the next year as well as increasing Britain's vulnerability to the Great Depression. He later admitted it was the worst political decision of his life, which illustrates the danger of the British practice of handing out government office as political coupons without consideration as to whether the minister knows anything about his department.

Churchill got his high place in WW2 because he'd been so spectacularly right about Hitler when hardly anyone else was. Nobody paid any attention to him earlier on, because he was so spectacularly wrong about everything else. (See his opinions of Gandhi.)

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Churchill is an interesting figure in British history. He's revered, naturally, for being perceived as the only person who could have led the country in WW2, but this means that a lot of his really really bad stuff gets ignored. In addition to Gallipoli, there's his work in the middle east across the first 20 years of the 20th century, Gandhi and his position on stuff like national health care.

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Yes. My take on Churchill is that he's the perfect man for the job when you need a bellicose bulldog, but you have to keep him locked up the rest of the time.

Re health care, Churchill seems to have had an attitude towards domestic policy similar to that of today's Republicans: that the populace are sturdy self-reliant yeomen and government help of any kind will only get in their way. Interestingly, though, when he returned to office a few years after the NHS was established, he wasn't fool enough to try to dismantle it. Instead, he appointed Iain Macleod to run it, one of the wiser results of the "government office as political coupon" system.

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One of the things that is interesting about Churchill is he appears to have been inherently quite lazy, which made him a pretty effective manager. A lot of his WW2 "success" was by giving people who knew what to do jobs and leaving them to do it.

Hitler, OTOH, appears to have been a nightmare of a micro-manager.

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No need to put scare-quotes around success; that's a large part of what a top leader's job is about. If you've got the right vision (Churchill had that, for the circumstances), if you're good at being the public face of the organization (everyone acknowledges Churchill was absolutely superb at that), and if you can pick the right subordinates and let them get on with the job, you're doing what a CEO or equivalent should do.

Churchill had two managerial flaws: he tended to bully his subordinates (a bad habit left over from when he was an outside critic, and didn't yet have the power to fire them) and he was terrible at running efficient meetings.

I know less of Hitler's managerial style, but I think his problem was less being an inherent micro-manager (the way, say, Jimmy Carter was a micro-manager) than one of having a poorly-imagined and incoherent vision and not being able to convince his top subordinates of its rightness. As a result he became in constant conflict with his generals, and had to push them around forcefully to get them to do what he wanted (which they increasingly thought of as insane), which is what amounts to micro-managing.

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joyful-storm.livejournal.com

Which of his works are you criticizing? I've heard complaints about his depictions of Cambridge, MA in the Merchant Princes series, but as someone from Massachusetts I have to stay that nothing struck me as odd. (IME, the region has kept a fair number more British turns of phrase than many other parts of the US.)

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Used a lot of nail varnish in Cambridge, did you? Watched a lot of sport on the TV? Used coffee as a count noun? Have a lot of federal agents seconded to other agencies? Yes, I mean the Merchant Princes series, and yes, I really do find lots of the usage entirely at variance with American English, even Cambridge English, even if all of Charlie's American characters hailed from Boston, which they don't. It's not a question of retained phrasing, it's contemporary British usage that has never been current in the US.

I complained bitterly at Charlie after the first one and offered to read through the current manuscript for him. I made the mistake of reading through the second book first at his suggestion, which while still technically in manuscript form was already past recall in terms of text edits, and it broke my spirit. My copy was so covered in hi-liter that it looked like some festive form of ribbon candy, and all that language I found out would be going to press that way. When I got to the third book manuscript, the "nail varnish" was in the first paragraph of the first chapter and I just couldn't go on, especially since, by the third book, Charlie's editor was supposedly reading through to catch British usage, and it was still that egregious. I owe Charlie a big apology for not immediately and explicitly confessing my failure at that point, but I really was surprisingly dispirited by the whole experience of reading through finding changes that would never see the light of day anyway.

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joyful-storm.livejournal.com

Fair enough. I just wanted to clarify what books you felt had issues (I haven't read everything of his yet). I didn't say there weren't any errors, just that nothing happened to jar me enough that I broke out of my reading flow.

The one I've heard the most complaints about is the coffee. "Want to go out for a coffee?" or "Should I bring you back a coffee?" sounds totally natural to me.

I could make more strained arguments as to why the nail varnish and people seconded somewhere didn't trip alarms, but so it goes. I must just not have noticed sport on the TV, as I'd agree that's just a plain error.

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Look, these are just examples that I still remember after having done my best to forget. The books were absolutely full of this stuff. I can't even remember what he used the word "junket" to mean, but it definitely wasn't a subsidized trip in aid of public relations or marketing. Yes, you may well be able to make individual cases for one or two things, but when you sum it all up together, page after page, it just screams Britishness.

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mjlayman.livejournal.com

Erm. The Merchant Princes aren't in our world.

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dd-b.livejournal.com

I only had one speed-bump of significance in the Merchant Princes books set in the Boston area, and I lived (exurbanly) in the general area for 4 years. I don't remember the dialog being un-American (I'm bad at accents though).

And perhaps more to the point -- Charlie knew that was risky, and made efforts to have the book reviewed by Americans. I wasn't one of them, so I don't know how much stuff was caught and fixed :-). The story to date seems to suggest that Connie Willis didn't care enough to make that kind of effort.

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I'm not trying to defend Willis' failure to do her homework, if she didn't (or if she simply did a rotten job). But as far as I could tell, Charlie only "made efforts" rather ineffectually, after two books were already in the pipeline. So, again, pots and kettles.

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mrissa.livejournal.com

Did you ever hear the expression "two wrongs don't make a right"? As far as I'm concerned, Charlie could write about the flatlands surrounding Denver, CO, on every side, and that would make him wrong about Denver--it wouldn't make Connie Willis right about the UK.

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I don't know what I've said that would make you suppose I thought otherwise. I'm simply pointing at Charlie's massive hypocrisy on this.

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I have heard Charlie say that he tries, and is always open to correction. The shocking thing about Willis's book was that she didn't seem to think it mattered at all.

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Are you basing that "didn't seem to think it mattered at all" on something she's actually said, or what you think of the result? She certainly seems to have tried quite hard, to read her own account, to get the details right for Firewatch, and yet I know Maureen Speller cannot stomache it because Willis got the geography of Oxford so deeply wrong. It's only a hypothesis, mind, but I think it's possible that for people familiar with her locations, the research she focuses on isn't the right research. I honestly don't know. I have no idea how much effort she put into getting the details right. Maybe she really did blow it off. But it's not clear to me that you can tell how much effort she put in by the result she got.

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Yes. She said it to a close mutual friend, and also in my hearing.

But re research: there is a lovely museum in Covent Garden, you can't get much more central. It has maps of which lines were built when. It takes about an hour to go around. There is also a map shop about another ten minutes away that sells historical maps of London. Stanfords is world famous and is in all the guide books. None of this was terribly difficult or required hours of archive research. She really did get very basic things horribly wrong.

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Forgot to mention the name of the museum: The Transport Museum. But actually, most of this stuff is on line.

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Well, if she said it, then fair enough, and Connie Willis presumably has the wherewithal to get to London to research her books these days, but again, I really don't accept that "I could find that easily" equates to "she didn't care to try."

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She did go to London. She spent some time in the Imperial War Museum, and chatted to some women she met there on a day trip. She talks about her research a lot which is why it's so infuriating that this doesn't seem to matter to her. It would almost be easier if she didn't care *at all*.

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Well, so this rather supports my hypothesis that, in effect, she cares about the wrong bits, not that she doesn't care, full stop.

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mrissa.livejournal.com

Let us say that one is an author who has published a thing with errors in it.

What, then, are the constraints one must observe when discussing other errors in literature, to your way of thinking?

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carbonel

I think you're talking about differences of kind. Charlie's books need better U.S.-checking. I find it moderately frustrating that while I'm on his beta-reading list, he specifically says that what he wants feedback on is plot stuff, not anything nitpicky like incorrect usage. But it's usage, not facts, that's the essential issue.

What Connie Willis gets wrong is an entirely different level. I find her writing to be enormously engaging, but nevertheless frustrating. Her books are rife with idiot plots and crossed-in-the-mail problems and messages not passed on (or too late) and people talking at cross purposes at each other or people just refusing to listen to each other. She doesn't get a free pass from me on any of that, much as I'd like to give her one because it makes for an entertaining book. The problems Charlie notes are minor manifestations of the larger problem, in my opinion.

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I'm sorry, I don't see how facts about usage are not facts. Charlie also gets other facts quite wrong -- my paradigm case was the revolver with a safety on it, and I've got it on good authority that he gets a lot of little throwaway technology bits wrong, too -- but it's the usage that particularly bothers me.

But as for Willis, I agree with you on the use of idiot plots and the annoying nature of same, and reading her is not without its frustration, to be sure.

But from what you say here, Charlie has even less of a leg to stand on than I realized when complaining of someone else who cannot be bothered to get it right. If he's explicitly telling people that he doesn't want to be corrected on usage, that's news to me and that sounds like actively not giving a fuck. Bloody hypocrite.

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carbonel

My assumption (based to a certain point of other things Charlie has said) is that while he isn't asking for usage corrections at the point at which he passes books on to his beta readers, he does care, but chooses to address those issues at a later point, say after the copyeditor has had her way with it. Which is not the same as not giving a fuck.

Lois Bujold doesn't want grammar corrections from her beta readers, either. She wants to know if the plot works with the characters.

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