Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I have to confess that when I read a book, my enjoyment of it can really be spoiled by elementary errors, and that's what happened to me in "1632". There's a scene in which a priest makes a "pithy comment" in Latin, and gets the Latin wrong. Studying Latin is one of my interests, and this mistake did, I'm afraid, really annoy me, and put me off the book and its sequels.
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Oh, yeah, that stuff can make me nuts and lose interest quickly too. I must have missed that one and am glad I did. There have been a few spots where I felt my interest begin to fade due to reality creeping in but mostly in 1633.
Perhaps that is why I am not a big fan of longer than a trilogy at most. Did you ever read the Gor series when you were younger? If not they were all shorter reads, maybe 300ish pages at the most...and there ended up, I forget how many, but it got near 20 or so books. I gave up around 11 or 12 I think. I should have stopped after something like book 8 I think. but my roomy and I were both hooked and kept hoping it would get better...just kept getting worse. And reason was simply because the characters and events became just too improbable or really took huge liberties with reality.
Maybe accuracy and good research is why some of the cornerstone SF writers have withstood the test of time. Even reading the early Jules Vern stuff still has some feel of truth and genuine possibility to it, even if the hard science is off because of what we know today.
These are my first Eric Flint reads and I will take a break from him before reading another of his books. I worry his writing style might be sort of mono-dimensional.
I cannot recall the name of the book but once I had a collection of "locked room" mysteries by Asimov (I could be wrong but am pretty certain they were either all his or some his and others from the SF mag with his name.) But those were some of the best puzzle stories I read. Why? because there had the foundations in fact and enough reality to keep my interest. I'll never forget on story involved a landmark that was described as "the cross of Lorraine" and when you finally read what it was you want to smack your forehead and wonder why you don't die of suffocation because you should be too stoopid to breath. Don't Google it or you will see a spoiler right off. But the book(s) were called "The Black Widowers" or some variation of that title. All fun, light but interesting reads...and I actually read them all.
But authors back then seemed to write a larger variety...anything to pay the bills...heck, Heinlein, alledgedly, even wrote some sorta soft porn stuff under a psuedonymn. And if ya recall some of his later stuff and even a couple around the time of Stranger in a Strange Land that writing experience showed through a bit. But the point is these guys wrote about a wide variety of things not just curn it out formulaic serial novels where after the 2nd or third book you know exactly how it will go...