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Pet peeves in novels, novellas, short stories, and other literature

I got a freebie for Kindle -- Kevin ("Girding his loins") Anderson's Assemblers of Infinity. Alien nanobots are building something on the moon. Through the whole narrative. I have less than 60 pages left and I hope something happens. The payoff better be damn good.

Anyway, he still has the "Girding his loins," writing tendency as a way to begin paragraphs. Many, many of his paragraphs begin with that style of phrase. ("Taking a breath, he did the next thing." "Reaching the door, he did the next thing." "Going inside, he did the next thing." "Closing his phone, he did the next thing." "Driving away, he did the next thing." "Something the something, he did the next thing.") Once I became aware if it it became really grating. I don't know if the change in tense is part of it. The beginning part of the phrase is happening now, using present tense. The last is written in standard past tense narrative.

Oh, and this one he has people sweat. A lot. He even has a person sweating that in the previous paragraph was musing on how dry the station air was, meaning he'd have to order some lip balm in the next shipment from Earth. I don't think people sweat much in very dry air because it evaporates immediately, but I could be wrong.

I like a story where I can concentrate on the story, rather than the author's quirks. It is an easy, quick read, so I'll give him that.
 
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Grrrghh...
The last chapter had two more occasions of people sweating. and the last line of the book -- "Laughing, he sped up to catch her." And no, there was no payoff. I know he's a really prolific author but that's the last thing from him. I'll ever read.

At least it wasn't an un-indicated beginning of a trilogy. Or was it?
 
SpitfireIX said:
I read that at least 10 times when I was a kid, and I read the sequel, The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club, at least 20 times, because I acquired it first. I bought the latter from Scholastic Book Club, I think when I was in 4th grade, because the title and cover art looked intriguing. Then, my 5th grade teacher had a copy of it as one of the books we could do book reports on, which I naturally did. But I couldn't find a copy of the first volume anywhere, and apparently it was out of print, because I never saw it in a book club brochure. (I should have tried the public library, but it didn't occur to me.)

Then, when I started 6th grade we moved, and my teacher had a copy. I of course borrowed and read it several times, and then, at the end of the year, he picked out several books from his collection that were worn out, and offered them to anyone who wanted to take one. The Mad Scientists' Club was one of them, so naturally I took it.

BTW, those stories all originally appeared in Boys' Life magazine back in the 1960s. I should reread them one of these days and see if I find the language jarring after all this time. Maybe I'll also read the two novels the author wrote, The Big Kerplop! and The Big Chunk of Ice, although I understand they're not as good as the short stories.
Click to expand...

Loved the first book as a kid; when I tried to write a book in 6th grade, I basically copied the story about the haunted house. After I read your post, I went back and found a couple of the stories in Boy's Life on archive.org (The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake", "The Great Gas Bag Race" and "The Secret of the Old Cannon"). I remembered the latter two and was pleased to recall that I knew back in the day that their supposed advantage in the balloon race didn't make any sense:

They were apparently flying a helium or hydrogen balloon, not a hotter-than-air. The problem with gas balloons (we are told) is that at times you have to let gas out to reduce altitude and at other times you have to drop ballast over the side to gain altitude. Henry (the genius inventor) figured out that he could just pump gas back into containers on the balloon when they needed to drop, and pump it back into the envelope when they needed to climb. Of course, this means that the weight of the balloon never changes; simply pumping helium back into a container doesn't increase the weight of the entire system.


Still the rest of the science seems mostly credible for the time and is routine nowadays; in the cannon story the kids rig up a motion-sensitive camera, complete with a signal to them (miles away) that someone has tripped it. They also use fiber cable to take a picture inside that camera. Agreed, it is unlikely that kids would be able to afford such technology back in that era (at one point the narrator even mentions that the local economy has been poor recently). We also never hear about parents, or siblings (with some exceptions). But that doesn't really matter; the stories are about kids being kids; we never saw the adults in Peanuts either.
 
Yeah, I think in one story they talk about only having about $3 in the treasury. Yet in many stories they buy or have a lot of advanced equipment. That is, when they're not outright stealing. (In one story they're filching several bamboo fishing rods out the back door of the store where one of the kids works. No mention of recompense for the store owner. And they end up getting destroyed, so they can't be returned. The "borrowing" option wasn't mentioned either.)
 
Might have mentioned this before, but... the whole Cinderella story.

So the prince dances with a charming girl for hours, and ALL he can remember to tell his envoys is that her feet fit into a transparent shoe? Like, not even, "about yay tall, blonde hair, small mole on her right cheek near the corner of her eye, slight freckles, flat and skinny so you can feel her ribs like a washboard"? Nope, all he remembers is her feet in transparent shoes.

Sounds like a bit of a fetish, is all I'm saying. I mean, I can relate, but just saying...
 
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Brainster said:
Loved the first book as a kid; when I tried to write a book in 6th grade, I basically copied the story about the haunted house. After I read your post, I went back and found a couple of the stories in Boy's Life on archive.org (The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake", "The Great Gas Bag Race" and "The Secret of the Old Cannon"). I remembered the latter two and was pleased to recall that I knew back in the day that their supposed advantage in the balloon race didn't make any sense:

They were apparently flying a helium or hydrogen balloon, not a hotter-than-air. The problem with gas balloons (we are told) is that at times you have to let gas out to reduce altitude and at other times you have to drop ballast over the side to gain altitude. Henry (the genius inventor) figured out that he could just pump gas back into containers on the balloon when they needed to drop, and pump it back into the envelope when they needed to climb. Of course, this means that the weight of the balloon never changes; simply pumping helium back into a container doesn't increase the weight of the entire system.


...snip...
Click to expand...

Are you sure?

Doesn't buoyancy change as the gas envelop gets bigger or smaller?
 
HansMustermann said:
Might have mentioned this before, but... the whole Cinderella story.

So the prince dances with a charming girl for hours, and ALL he can remember to tell his envoys is that her feet fit into a transparent shoe? Like, not even, "about yay tall, blonde hair, small mole on her right cheek near the corner of her eye, slight freckles, flat and skinny so you can feel her ribs like a washboard"? Nope, all he remembers is her feet in transparent shoes.

Sounds like a bit of a fetish, is all I'm saying. I mean, I can relate, but just saying...
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At least some versions solve it by her using a veil:

Tři oříšky pro Popelku / Na bále
 
Also let us thank the elder gods that out of all the things transformed around, the fairy godmother didn't turn a pumpkin into a tampon. Just saying :p
 
Darat said:
Are you sure?

Doesn't buoyancy change as the gas envelop gets bigger or smaller?
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Don't the helium tanks get lighter or heavier as gas is pumped in or out? Keep in mind, this is a closed system.
 
Brainster said:
Don't the helium tanks get lighter or heavier as gas is pumped in or out? Keep in mind, this is a closed system.
Click to expand...

The total weight of the system would remain the same when you pump helium from the balloon to the tanks, but the total volume of the system would change (assuming you're compressing the helium as you pump it from the balloon into some metal tanks and not just another balloon). Given that change in volume but constant weight, the buoyancy should change.
 
alfaniner said:
Yeah, I think in one story they talk about only having about $3 in the treasury. Yet in many stories they buy or have a lot of advanced equipment. That is, when they're not outright stealing. (In one story they're filching several bamboo fishing rods out the back door of the store where one of the kids works. No mention of recompense for the store owner. And they end up getting destroyed, so they can't be returned. The "borrowing" option wasn't mentioned either.)
Click to expand...


I just finished reading The Big Kerplop!, in which they're able to borrow some special equipment that they need. I don't recall whether that ever happened in any of the short stories, but in one, they get a newspaper (the Cleveland Plain Dealer, IIRC), to buy the club "an oscilloscope and a ten-channel transceiver" (IIRC) in return for an exclusive story on the truth behind one of their hoaxes.

And the hardware store owner was one of the kids' fathers (not that that makes it okay, of course).
 
Bait-and-switch storylines. This is kind of a weird one, since they don't always peeve me. And honestly this time, I'm not sure what I expected.

I'm reading a short story collection by an author who reliably sticks to certain recurring themes. It's always about someone stumbling across cosmic horror in the course of their normal work. Archaeologist unearthing something is the classic example, but it could be anyone. A B-list actor moonlighting as a cameraman for an Internet reality show, for example.

Anyway, this time around, it's a high-priced consultant, contracted to investigate industrial espionage in a multinational corporation, nail the spies, and close the leaks. Turns out I wanted more of that story, and less of The Crone Mafia Strikes Again. I guess the main reason it peeved me is that the Crone Mafia storyline had nothing to do with the industrial espionage storyline. It was just a coincidence that the investigator's corporate hosts weren't involved in the espionage, but happened to be involved with the Mafia.
 
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This peeve of mine isn't really fair. But still.

One thing that happens from time to time in "literary" novels is some sort of disaster followed by a time skip. The novelist will build up a whole setting, populated with fully-realized characters. All in the service of killing some of them off, and making some drastic change to the world they've established. Then there's a big time skip. Now it's years later. We're following completely different characters in a completely different setting, and wondering when it will all dovetail back to the beginning. Or if it will dovetail. Or are we just supposed to intuit the implications of the disaster, and how it informs the story we're reading now?

I bounced hard off Wool, when I got to the first such disaster. I bounced off another novel, the title of which I now forget, that did this in spades. It's not something I see often, thankfully. Because I tend to hate it.
 
theprestige said:
This peeve of mine isn't really fair. But still.

One thing that happens from time to time in "literary" novels is some sort of disaster followed by a time skip. The novelist will build up a whole setting, populated with fully-realized characters. All in the service of killing some of them off, and making some drastic change to the world they've established. Then there's a big time skip. Now it's years later. We're following completely different characters in a completely different setting, and wondering when it will all dovetail back to the beginning. Or if it will dovetail. Or are we just supposed to intuit the implications of the disaster, and how it informs the story we're reading now?

I bounced hard off Wool, when I got to the first such disaster. I bounced off another novel, the title of which I now forget, that did this in spades. It's not something I see often, thankfully. Because I tend to hate it.
Click to expand...

It's been a while since I read it, but I don't recall that happening in Wool.
 
As you pump helium out of the envelope it loses volume. The upthrust depends entirely on the weight of the air displaced and not at all what is inside the envelope.
 
I talked about it in the Pet Peeves in TV and Movies thread about three years ago, but it fits better here than in that thread, while we're discussing writers not understanding technology.

This was in "The Stand", by Stephen King.

"Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth's glass wall."

That's not even remotely close to what a recoilless rifle is. It's light artillery or a man-portable anti-tank weapon. It's definitely not something that you're going to fire at a person at close range in a confined space.

When I tried to look up what a "gas-tipped slug" was supposed to be (Hint: It's not a real thing), I found a wiki of Stephen King firearm mistakes.
 
Armitage72 said:
I talked about it in the Pet Peeves in TV and Movies thread about three years ago, but it fits better here than in that thread, while we're discussing writers not understanding technology.

This was in "The Stand", by Stephen King.

"Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth's glass wall."

That's not even remotely close to what a recoilless rifle is. It's light artillery or a man-portable anti-tank weapon. It's definitely not something that you're going to fire at a person at close range in a confined space.

When I tried to look up what a "gas-tipped slug" was supposed to be (Hint: It's not a real thing), I found a wiki of Stephen King firearm mistakes.
Click to expand...
This also appears in It.
 
Armitage72 said:
I talked about it in the Pet Peeves in TV and Movies thread about three years ago, but it fits better here than in that thread, while we're discussing writers not understanding technology.

This was in "The Stand", by Stephen King.

"Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth's glass wall."

That's not even remotely close to what a recoilless rifle is. It's light artillery or a man-portable anti-tank weapon. It's definitely not something that you're going to fire at a person at close range in a confined space.

When I tried to look up what a "gas-tipped slug" was supposed to be (Hint: It's not a real thing), I found a wiki of Stephen King firearm mistakes.
Click to expand...

Heheheheh...

I've mentioned it before, but an acquaintance was trained to fire a 106mm recoilless rifle, which was mounted on a Land Rover. As per your description, it was intended to be an anti-tank weapon. I believe that he never shot a round in anger. :)

One of these things:
https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/REL:19356

In this case though, I don't think it counts as 'man-portable'.
 
novaphile said:
Heheheheh...

I've mentioned it before, but an acquaintance was trained to fire a 106mm recoilless rifle, which was mounted on a Land Rover. As per your description, it was intended to be an anti-tank weapon. I believe that he never shot a round in anger. :)

One of these things:
https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/REL:19356

In this case though, I don't think it counts as 'man-portable'.
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Very handy for avalanche control too. If you want a shoulder-fired recoilless, try the Carl Gustav, currently on its fourth generation and available with various enhancements. Lovely piece of kit.
 
Armitage72 said:
I talked about it in the Pet Peeves in TV and Movies thread about three years ago, but it fits better here than in that thread, while we're discussing writers not understanding technology.

This was in "The Stand", by Stephen King.

"Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth's glass wall."

That's not even remotely close to what a recoilless rifle is. It's light artillery or a man-portable anti-tank weapon. It's definitely not something that you're going to fire at a person at close range in a confined space.

When I tried to look up what a "gas-tipped slug" was supposed to be (Hint: It's not a real thing), I found a wiki of Stephen King firearm mistakes.
Click to expand...


I've been binging Stephen King audiobooks in my car recently. I don't know if it was in The Stand or not, but there was another reference to someone standing guard at a door or something holding a "recoilless rifle" as a personal weapon, and I remember groaning out loud at that one.

I'm willing to overlook lots of trivial firearms mistakes in movies and writing so long as the goof doesn't materially affect the scene it happens in. Like saying a specific revolver holds five rounds when it actually holds six, or (from the link above) saying the lever on a break open shotgun is on the side when it's on the top. But in more than one instance referring to a recoilless rifle like he did really breaks things for me.

Another example was in a horror novel from back in the 80s or so. The setting was a few law enforcement officers and two civilians were investigating an isolated and suddenly deserted town, with very strong 'Mary Celeste' vibes. At one point in what's supposed to be an incredibly tense moment they're in the local sheriff's office and find no people and no signs of a struggle apart from a single spent casing on the floor. Looking around they find no bullet holes anywhere, but they do find ... the sheriff's revolver which, upon inspection, has a single empty chamber in the cylinder.

I mean, if you're going to write about something at least do some rudimentary research.

Oh, and that reminds me of another peeve that happens a handful of times across Steven King's works. He'll have scenes where a character is leaving a note or the like for someone else and the amount of text written is far more than could fit on the medium they're using. There was a bit in (I think) Needful Things where the main character stops by a shop to speak to the shopkeeper, who is out. So King has the character leave a note on the back of one of his business cards and I swear the note was like three paragraphs or so. Meaning he's either writing in 0.25 point font, or his business cards are around 4" x 6" in size.
 
There was a short story I read in a Cthulhu Mythos anthology in which mysterious meteorites are falling all over the area. The main characters carbon date a meteorite and get a negative result, revealing that the meteorites are from several hundred years in the future.
First, you can't carbon date rocks.
Second, how do you get a "negative" value when carbon dating? It has more than 100% of the carbon?
The author clearly had no idea how the process actually works. The characters basically put the meteorite in a box, pushed a button, and it said "DING! Age: -500 years."
 
Armitage72 said:
There was a short story I read in a Cthulhu Mythos anthology in which mysterious meteorites are falling all over the area. The main characters carbon date a meteorite and get a negative result, revealing that the meteorites are from several hundred years in the future.
First, you can't carbon date rocks.
Second, how do you get a "negative" value when carbon dating? It has more than 100% of the carbon?
The author clearly had no idea how the process actually works. The characters basically put the meteorite in a box, pushed a button, and it said "DING! Age: -500 years."
Click to expand...

While you are pretty much entirely correct, its conceivable that an object could have an artificial amount of Carbon 14 added to it which would make would give carbon dating a negative result?????? But, clearly doesn't make dating inorganic matter sensible and artificially inflated Carbon 14 would just mean some kind of artificial intervention rather than from the future.
 
Armitage72 said:
There was a short story I read in a Cthulhu Mythos anthology in which mysterious meteorites are falling all over the area. The main characters carbon date a meteorite and get a negative result, revealing that the meteorites are from several hundred years in the future.
First, you can't carbon date rocks.
Second, how do you get a "negative" value when carbon dating? It has more than 100% of the carbon?
The author clearly had no idea how the process actually works. The characters basically put the meteorite in a box, pushed a button, and it said "DING! Age: -500 years."
Click to expand...

"Look here! On the underside of the meteorite it says: 'Hecho en Mexico 2524'! It's from the future!" Problem solved!
 
Armitage72 said:
There was a short story I read in a Cthulhu Mythos anthology in which mysterious meteorites are falling all over the area. The main characters carbon date a meteorite and get a negative result, revealing that the meteorites are from several hundred years in the future.
First, you can't carbon date rocks.
Second, how do you get a "negative" value when carbon dating? It has more than 100% of the carbon?
The author clearly had no idea how the process actually works. The characters basically put the meteorite in a box, pushed a button, and it said "DING! Age: -500 years."
Click to expand...

What if the meteorite was made entirely of Carbon 14? ;)
 
ZirconBlue said:
It's been a while since I read it, but I don't recall that happening in Wool.
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It was a fairly mild case in Wool. But a character I was following died very suddenly, bringing that story arc to an end. Since I was invested in the character and the story arc, it sapped my enthusiasm for continuing beyond that point.

I guess that's the issue I have with this trope. I went into Game of Thrones knowing that this was a big part of the story, but even so it got old after a while. I eventually became invested in a character that then got killed in a particularly obnoxious way, and that was the end of my attempt to read the series.
 
catsmate said:
Very handy for avalanche control too. If you want a shoulder-fired recoilless, try the Carl Gustav, currently on its fourth generation and available with various enhancements. Lovely piece of kit.
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The Carl Gustav appears in several of Richard Stark's Parker novels.

In a 1974 interview, the author of those novels said
I'll tell you a funny thing. In the early sixties, when the first Parkers came out in paperback, Richard Stark got a bunch of fan mail. [....] And almost all of that fan mail was from inner-city black urban males. I think what they liked about Parker was that he had chosen to reject society, rather than the other way around. He was the prowling outsider, but it hadn't been forced on him. Or maybe not.

That fan mail trickled out in the late sixties, by the way, and now all I get is sheriff's assistants in Nebraska telling me I got the guns wrong.
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Source: The Getaway Car, edited by Levi Stahl, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pages 154-155.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
The Carl Gustav appears in several of Richard Stark's Parker novels.

In a 1974 interview, the author of those novels said

Source: The Getaway Car, edited by Levi Stahl, University of Chicago Press, 2014, pages 154-155.
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Was that the 84mm or the sub-machine gun? I didn't know personal artillery was that prevalent....
 
catsmate said:
Was that the 84mm or the sub-machine gun? I didn't know personal artillery was that prevalent....
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84mm. The author's descriptions of the weapon were accurate so far as they went, but not detailed. From those descriptions and the Wikipedia pictures, probably M1 or M2.

Richard Stark said:
"It's a good idea," Parker said, "for me to know what the locals think happened."

"Fine. But one thing."

He looked at her. "Yeah?"

"If she gets a part wrong," Claire said, "don't correct her."

[In the next chapter, Mrs. Bartlett tells Claire and Parker it was an inside job.]

"But the law got them," Parker suggested.

"Oh, yes, of course, the police immediately captured them," Mrs. Bartlett said. "They'll pay for their crimes, don't you worry. But not the robbers, no, not the people who actually took the money."

"The people with the bazookas," Parker said, because the Carl-Gustaf antitank weapons from Sweden had not been bazookas.
Click to expand...
 
W.D.Clinger said:
84mm. The author's descriptions of the weapon were accurate so far as they went, but not detailed. From those descriptions and the Wikipedia pictures, probably M1 or M2.
Click to expand...
Fascinating. And accurate in the differentiation between the Charlie and the "bazooka".


OK here's one of mine, which I posted in my 'list of things people writing fiction set in the Victorian period' list long ago but has sprung up again.
The price of gold.

In The Borellus Connection, an RPG campaign set in the late 1960s, there is a scene where ten million (US) dollars in gold are being unloaded from a ship (to exchange for raw morphine and a mummy, don't ask). The author explicitly states that each box, containing a million in bullion, weighs about 'two hundred pounds'.
Eh, no. Gold was around $1.5 per gramme, so more like seven hundred kilos per box. So I doubt two sailors could have carried them.
 
When an author has a great setting, but fails to use it for all it's worth. Rowling (for all her faults and the faults of the HP books) is an example of an author doing this well, she really leaned into the wizard school setting. Many authors, however, have a great setting only to let it be more of a backdrop to the actual story. Like, why set your story to a cool place if you're not going to actually make full use of that setting?
 
catsmate said:
Fascinating. And accurate in the differentiation between the Charlie and the "bazooka".


OK here's one of mine, which I posted in my 'list of things people writing fiction set in the Victorian period' list long ago but has sprung up again.
The price of gold.

In The Borellus Connection, an RPG campaign set in the late 1960s, there is a scene where ten million (US) dollars in gold are being unloaded from a ship (to exchange for raw morphine and a mummy, don't ask). The author explicitly states that each box, containing a million in bullion, weighs about 'two hundred pounds'.
Eh, no. Gold was around $1.5 per gramme, so more like seven hundred kilos per box. So I doubt two sailors could have carried them.
Click to expand...

Whereas 10 million dollars in 100 dollar bills would be about 100kg, and could be carried in about 5 briefcases, if my maths is right.

Fiction is really bad at weights and volumes of money.
 
gypsyjackson said:
Whereas 10 million dollars in 100 dollar bills would be about 100kg, and could be carried in about 5 briefcases, if my maths is right.

Fiction is really bad at weights and volumes of money.
Click to expand...
Sounds about right. It's set in 1968 so there were also larger dollar banknotes still in circulation, up to $10,000, so it could fit in a money belt.
But gold.......
:D
 
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