[LMB] OT: When Favourite Authors Screw Up

[Scott Raun]

raye_j at yahoo.com wrote:
> Anyone else encountered something like that, where
> what should be a casually passed-over aside hits just
> the right way to reveal a sad lack of research, and
> colours the rest of the book?

Well, there's the two page chapter in _Dragonflight_ that I just skip
over every time. I've forgotten the exact numbers, but Anne McCaffrey
made a basic math error that bugs me every time I read the book. (And it
wasn't fixed in the most recent edition I've seen.)

Lessa jumps back on the order of 250 years. The gathered weyrs then
start jumping forward, in jumps of about 25 years each. They make a
number of jumps - about 7, using my numbers - which get them 'close' -
close enough that the final jump is only 12-13 years. The only problem
was that the number of jumps they'd made multiplied by the number of
years per jump was about 70% of the total number they should have
needed. It's far enough off that the error in the 'abouts' just DON'T
cover it!

-- 
Scott Raun
sraun at fireopal.org