Readers expect a lot from their authors. In fiction, they expect entertainment, at the least, and in non-fiction, entertaining or not, they expect such accuracy as the subject field or scope lends itself to. In any case, they expect truth, for some value of truth, and they trust the author to satisfy their requirement, either by providing facts and the results of actions (showing their work) or by presenting a simulacrum of the behavior of autonomous beings.
How could it be otherwise?
When we read or hear an account, non-fiction or fiction, we are always testing it in our heads for plausibility, and thus trust. We may disagree with the actions taken or conclusions drawn, but first they must seem real in some simulated way — the “and then a miracle occurs” cop-out is not a respectable position to take. We base our beliefs on whether the constructed world (even non-fiction has a “constructed world” of the facts of the case) is, on its face, at least possible, if not necessarily plausible.
How can we decide if a starship voyage to Jupiter or an alien invasion is plausible? Well, in some genres, we accept genre “givens”: “Given that aliens exist, they need our brains to survive. Go with it…” or “Given that I want to rule the world, I need to kill the King of the Goblins to take the unseen throne.”
For some genres of fiction, the customs of “given that…” can be very permissive. For non-fiction, the barrier is “are the attested facts accepted as true (else “prove it”) and adequately complete (“all the known facts/arguments”), and are the stated conclusions logically possible, if not proven or certain. Theories and counter arguments are fine, as long as they play by the rules in their subject matter.
Expertise in non-fiction generally comes from immersion in a body of subject matter, via either professional or direct experience. Expertise in fiction… well, how does one become expert in something that may not, or perhaps cannot, exist at all?
It’s a matter of the “givens”. You must respect the “givens”, the rules you plan to use. Once you do that, in sincerity, you can hope the readers will let themselves be lulled into belief in the story, buoyed by your sufficient conviction of an appearance of belief.
What are the worst examples of failure-of-expertise you’ve encountered as a reader? Any of your own inadvertent specimens you’re willing to admit to (even if you fixed them before anyone else could recognize them)?
Mad Genius Club 
12 responses to “An Expectation of Expertise”
In ‘Live Free Or Die’ by John Ringo, he has the engineers put spaceship gravity drives intended to rotate the asteroid fort Troy at the ends of long internal ‘horns’ or levers. To make them more effective.
‘Twould not work. It would achieve the opposite, making them less effective by placing them closer to Troy’s center of mass. How did none of his technical consultants or beta readers catch that?
There are configurations in which long levers result in mechanical disadvantage instead of mechanical advantage. That is one of them.
In another, not mistake, but what I consider a poor choice, he named Troy’s AI after that useless fop Paris instead of Hector, the general who kept the Greeks out of Troy for over a year.
Oh, lordy, lord – where do I start? Because my expertise is in writing historicals, I am pretty well grounded in what tech was available when, and what social customs and practices were in force at any given time.
I read and reviewed an absolutely cringy WWII espionage novel and noped out about a third of the way in, when a secret room in Occupied France was supposed to be insulated with Styrofoam… which wasn’t even developed until around 1942, and then was used by Americans in a limited form for life jackets.
A pioneer trail novel which described a man driving an ox-team wagon, by sitting on a seat in the wagon and driving the oxen with reins. Nope. Nope. Nope.
And another novel set in the 1880s which described (among other gross improbabilities) a pair of teenage girls running away from home, by taking a train to the big city, where they checked into a hotel … and went out to meet some men to go drinking.
A thousand times, nope.
I still remember the novel where our heroine managed to get snowdrops and foxgloves to bloom at the same time. And grow camellias on the shores of Lake Michigan.
It was minor, but it threw me out of the novel, hard.
Setting – late 1600s. Heroine runs away from central England, hops a ship (without much in the way of funds) and keeps her virtue intact as they sail to the Barbary Coast. Gets work and has honorable celibate marriage to Muslim man and lives mostly independently ever after.
I walled the book because up until that point, the writing and research had been pretty sound. That last bit? Oh come on!
A historical novel got walled early on because medieval women could vote in city elections. Which were open to everyone over 18, no property qualifications. Double facepaw
I think I remember that one — touched on the bubonic plague, did it? And she got work as an herbalist, or something pretty unlikely?
You got it. I suspect the author wrote herself into a corner, and tried a sort of “Hail Mary,” based on her previous writing and non-fiction research. It didn’t work for that time and place.
I remember when I was reading western romances for market research. There was the one where the native American rode around on “gigantic” horses that put them nearly on eye level with the person driving the covered wagon from the front seat. The one where the heroine goes chasing after the pet chicken in a windstorm and and the hero mentally castigates her for being a sentimentality and neither of them show the faintest awareness that pet chicken is AN IMPORTANT SOURCE OF PROTEIN. The one where the nearby frontier town has basically a café (pastries and coffee) and okay, maybe that would happen, in some relatively large, cosmopolitan town like silver – rush – era Denver. But the farmer with daily chores to do in the spring/summer timeframe, hitching up the backboard every couple days to indulge his new wife’s addiction to not-starbucks, nope.
It was about at this point in my research that I was really dumb to think there would be a market for a bunch of frontier adventure romances, with g-rated relationships and pg-plus rated action scenes, where the male leads mostly looked like Eastwood or Van Cleef or men of that stamp 😀
Personally I think that would work. Sounds like a lot of Louis L’Amour’s books.
My undergraduate major was Russian language and literature, and I’ve lost track of the sheer number of otherwise excellent books in which Russian characters’ names aren’t formed correctly. I’m more forgiving in an older book where the Russian character is a “far tree” who’s just mentioned in passing, but if we’ve got a relatively new book with a substantial character, that book better have been absolutely absorbing before that point, and even then I wince, because all the author (or beta readers) needed to do was check on the Web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Slavic_name
I have a pseudo-linguistic background (Western, Classical), but not in the Slavic languages. This level of attention to personal names doesn’t surprise me, but I didn’t know it. I can see how misuse would be really irritating. 🙂
An action adventure novel lost me when the protagonist pulled back the hammer on his steel-framed Glock pistol. Glock pistols don’t have hammers and they use polymer frames.
A book on railroads went off the rails (SWIDT) when it described the stainless steel equipment on the Great Northern Railway’s Empire Builder. The GN’s postwar passenger trains were painted green and orange from the late 1940s until the railroad adopted “Big Sky Blue” in 1967.
And don’t get me started on the WW2 comic that had P51 Mustangs flying off an aircraft carrier . . . .
The real problem is that you are vastly outnumbered by your readers, so your expertise can’t match theirs.