Irony Burns

[akirlu]

Okay, I have to confess, I find the spectacle of Charlie bloody Stross complaining about someone else getting their Transatlantic details wrong a bit giddy-making. It's a wonder he has the face to do it, in light of the patent hash he makes of his own American characters and dialog. He's rather deeply into pots and kettles territory, there.

(You'll have to scroll down in comments to find it.)

I presume the excuse will be that Willis is writing about WW II and this period is IMPORTANT, but I don't know that the alleged importance of the period makes the sin any greater. (I'm also a bit dubious that WW II is really that much more important a period for England than WW I, espeically given the ways in which the latter set up the former.)

Comments

[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.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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."

[fjm.livejournal.com]

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*.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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

[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?