What’s the term….?

I should know this. The time period of a book or film is particular. Details mentioned don’t fit that time period.
I collect them in my head. Sometimes it’s the main thing I remember about a book.

It also occurs when something is out of season, like daffodils in July.

Anachronism as in when my current book Vagabond Princess talks about large amounts of maize in India in the early sixteenth century. Now why do those details stick so much more than the others?

When Stephen Maturin visits Stockholm in the 1810s, in Patrick O'Brian's The Letter of Marque, he remarks on how clean the streets are and how well people speak and understand English, which are both huge anachronisms.

One danger is that by including even a small detail that doesn't fit, the author risks knowledgable readers doubting every other thing that comes along. Not a good way to read. It is obvious that Lal has done very careful research, but with both Indian and American English in her head has gotten grain/corn/maize mixed up somewhere in translating from the various languages she reads. But it still jars.

>4 MarthaJeanne: Same thing with translations. Somewhere I have a book where the apple sort Gravensteenere is translated as if it was Gravsten (i.e. tombstones), giving the impression that the people in the book had a wooden box of tombstones in the attic.

I've encountered it in fantasy as well. In a completely invented world, the narrator compared an object to a "Chinese vase". I looked in vain for China on a map of that fantasy world.

Yes, fiction or nonfiction, we usually read at some level of 'suspended disbelief', and something like this suspends the suspension.

Another book I recently read in German translation, the translator wrote something that made no sense at all in German. Knowing the English idiom, I knew what the author had written, but a very literal translation did not work unless you could untranslate it. At least it just didn't make sense in stead of being gruesome.

Thanks! I just read Attachments, set in the 1990s. A mention of Black Panther was okay, as I found he was a comic book character from the 60s. But someone expounded on the hormone disruption issue in plastics. Nah.

>8 2wonderY: Thank you for setting off an interesting discussion.

>3 anglemark: The thing about historical fiction is that it should have a sense of history built into it somewhere, otherwise it’s just a pastiche of a book that could have been written during the period it is set in. There has to be some kind of anachronism there to make it work, but it shouldn’t be some random mistake of language or technology that just makes the author look stupid.

I suspect that that’s what O’Brian was doing in Stockholm, putting in a little joke for the knowing reader to break the frame just slightly and remind us that we are seeing things from the perspective of 150 years later, and make us look a bit more sharply at some of the other stuff, like Maturin’s slightly naive approach to narcotics.

One that I recall was a disparaging remark on a battered old Formica kitchen table, part of the furnishings in an old rundown building. But the time period was near World War 2. Formica tables might have existed that far back, but they were high-end, not the broken down discards of later decades.
In fact, my mom replaced our wood dining table with a swell, brand new chrome and Formica model in the late 60s and it had pride of place for many years.

Another story was during the 60s, Vietnam war era. The younger sister in a military family, wore blue jeans (not dungarees) and sneakers ( not tennis shoes) to grade school and used a backpack, not a book bag.

When I went to school in the 60s and early 70s, girls were not allowed to wear trousers to school at all, and even the boys were not allowed to wear jeans.

>12 MarthaJeanne: Same here. Standards did change in the next decade, but started with counter-culture youth, not military.

The book, Shooting the Moon

I once edited a manuscript for a book. Said ms. had so many plausibility errors in it, I stopped half way through and told the author to fix what I had marked up so far and if he did a decent enough job, I'd consider taking a stab at the rest.
Just a few of the issues:
1) Everyone has hazel eyes, until they suddenly are blue or green;
2) The main male character (college aged) drove 1,500 miles in eight hours using back roads and going through small towns only;
3) 1941 motorcycle had an electric starter (Starter wasn't invented until 1964);
4) Ford F350 King Cab truck with a full front end guard made entirely of railroad track (330 lbs per foot, no modification to the suspension);
5) Sawed-off shotgun in the gun rack against the rear window of that truck (King cab, full bench seat); being driven by the main female character, (5'2", old enough to be main male character's mother) was able to reach that shotgun.
6) Later, she was able to swing the shotgun from the passenger-side wheel well and stick it outside the driver-side window, having it come to rest under the chin of the bad guy in the El Camino who had just pulled up next to her. -- I actually tried that, using a 2x4. No way she could have been successful at that maneuver. She's blocked by both the windshield and the steering wheel. Additionally, only 7" of the barrel would protrude beyond the plane of the side window. The seat in an El Camino is a full foot and a half closer to the ground than seat of the F350. There's no way the barrel of the gun was under the antagonist's chin.
7) In separate, but consecutive chapters each main character were mulling over the implications of the incredibly passionate sex that they had, except, there was nothing in the story so far that even hinted that such an event might even happen.
8) Main female character gets her shoulder-length brown hair trimmed. The following morning, it's blonde and down to the small of her back.

I'm going to stop because it's bringing back a LOT of bad memories.
The author got himself a ghost writer and published the book, and at least four more (same ghost writer.) I've seen them on the shelves of an indie book store. I didn't even read the blurbs.

>10 thorold: That's a generous view of it. Thanks, it hadn't struck me that he could have been trying to do just that.

Some 'authors'! I was once asked to translate a novel for a friend of a friend because "You can't get published in German unless the book is already available in English." (not true) Anyway, in the first chapter a professor of two quite different disciplines at a non-existent UK university had car trouble, and drove it to a petrol station, except that particular problem would not have let the car move at all. When I pointed these problems out the reaction was, "Then fix it. That's what you are h ere for." I didn't.

The second chapter had moved rather unbelievably to Central America, with the characters about to be sacrificed on a Mayan temple. At which point I dropped out of the project on the grounds that my niece is a Mayan archaeologist, and I didn't want to embarrass her.

Please note, I was asked to do this as a favour, and was never offered any payment, nor was I ever going to be given more than one chapter at a time.

Totally unpublishable, but she was convinced it would be a best seller.

I am enjoying this thread very much! Here's my offering: a published novel set in Paris in the seventies. The writer isn't French, and probably didn't spend more than a few weeks in the country, which doesn't help.
In the book, jeans are a marker of poverty. The thing is, in the seventies, jeans were fashionable, imported from the US, and not cheap.
The main character decides he doesn't want to be married anymore, walks into a police station, and comes out with divorce papers. At the time, the proceedings took years, and still required either proof of fault or non-consummation. And even now, they are still handled in court, not in police stations.

>17 Dilara86: In Vienna of those days social workers working with refugees had problems with young people coming from the Soviet Union shoplifting jeans that were on racks in the street in front of stores because they had wanted 'real blue jeans' for so long.

One wonders how the divorce bit got past the editors.

>8 2wonderY: But someone expounded on the hormone disruption issue in plastics. Nah.

The effects of endrocrine dispruptors on wildlife was definitely known about by 1999, whne the book is set. I was involved in campaigning on the issue (among a lot of related ones) in 1996 and the term was first coined in 1991.

>19 tallpaul: Yes, but this was a random housewife with no scientific background. The awareness of this issue is still just seeping into general knowledge.

An historical level I once read confused Theodora, empress of Byzantium 527-548 and wife of Justinian, and Theodora, empress regnant of Byzantium 1042 and 1055-56. What’s half a millennium between friends?

The same book had a Muslim character offhandedly give a Latin translation of the Quran to a Varangian who’d expressed a passing interest in the religion. Apart from there as far as known being no Latin translation of the Quran until the next century, books were expensive things in the 11th century, and gifting one wouldn’t be treated lightly - and the character, a sea captain, being unlikely to own many if any to gift at all.

>11 2wonderY:

In the ‘60s, I wore blue jeans (no one used the term “dungarees”) and sneakers, though not to school.

Yes, agree with lilithcat... I, too, wore jeans and sneakers in the 60's. My grandma still called them dungarees though. Sneakers, I think, was an East Coast word because when we moved to the West Coast, then everyone called them tennis shoes.

In (postwar) England, “dungarees” only ever seemed to be used for bib overalls. Otherwise they were “jeans”. Odd how the trousers originated in California, but “dungaree” was a Hindi word, “jean” referred to Genoa and “denim” to Nîmes. They were all originally terms for various kinds of rough cotton cloth, of course.

And by 1959, Zazie was obsessed with owning a pair of "bloudjinnzes", as Raymond Queneau spells "blue jeans" in Zazie dans le métro. Not sure what the English translator did with this idiosyncrasy...

Speaking if jeans, don't wear them if you want your show to be shown on North Korean television.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68664644

I've mentioned this before but my favorite in this regard is On the Blue Comet. It's a bit of YA time travel fiction and the mistakes with respect to factual details of objects as well as general history start with the illustration on the cover and go on for pages.

Another one that comes to mind is Firestorm. The central character is supposed to be a young 19th Century girl whose mother recently passed away. Her behavior is strictly 20th/21st Century spoiled brat and does not match the time nor the position in life she is supposed to represent. Her concerns for the environment do not mirror the views of the times and there are other aspects of her being/behavior that simply would not have been in evidence in the 19th Century.