Fictional details

One’s background can get in the way of a good story.

One of our consultants has recently started on a program of reading recent science fiction.  (In part this was driven by a desire to be more useful to our Science Fiction Science service.)  Although well-versed in science, and an avid reader of the genre years ago, he had not visited it much recently.

One book was definitely important, unsettling, even extraordinary (a word used on the cover).  But about three-quarters of the way through, our consultant was aware of a growing dissatisfaction.  Up to that point there had been a few improbabilities in the science, even some inventions that arguably could not have happened; those could be ignored.  But toward the end there were glaring (to him) errors; things just don’t work that way.  And they were described in some detail.

So our consultant’s knowledge of science detracted from his enjoyment of literature.  Once he was disturbed by what he saw as errors, he found it hard to concentrate on the story and characters.  Is science, then, a hindrance to art?

Musing on this, we placed the episode in a broader context.  Take another novel one of us read in the past year or so.  It was mainstream fiction, and though it took place in the past it was within living memory, and so not really historical fiction.  The author had taken it upon herself to describe New Zealand, though she’d never been there.  Along the way she went into some detail about ships and the sea, farming and building a thriving business from nothing, even how to become an arbiter of fashion and style, among other things.  But in those areas in which we have some background it was clear she didn’t know what she was writing about.

It didn’t bother us so much that an author would refer to something beyond his or her actual experience or expertise.  One can create a story with, say, Waterloo as the background without knowing anything about the tactics of muzzle-loading firearms and cavalry regiments.  In that case one should, however, avoid obvious wrong facts (locating the battle in France, say) and definitely avoid discussing the errors of this or that commander.  Similarly, one can include modern cargo ships in a story, but describing incorrectly the functioning of a marine diesel engine only displays ignorance.

Well, inaccuracies in fiction are nothing new.  No doubt an experienced hoplite could make scathing comments about the battle scenes in The Iliad (one reason the Greeks set most of their stories in an indefinite past age).  We ask a question not about the writer, but the reader: does knowing too much about something ruin one’s enjoyment of literature?  There’s always the willing suspension of disbelief, but that’s a free gift of the reader to the writer.  And it can vanish in a twinkling under too much provocation.  What works of literature do you know of that could be spoiled by knowing too much?