Firearm facts that authors get wrong
14 Comments Published by Deanna Hoak May 15th, 2006 in copyeditingMy husband pointed me to this very interesting thread on a gun discussion board wherein the members complain about firearm facts that authors get wrong.
I always try to verify such things when copyediting, and I know I’ve corrected the “.12-gauge shotgun” that one member mentions. :-) (I had fun in my Atlanta Nights chapter constantly changing the attributes of the firearm one of the characters carries, because I’ve seen that type of mistake so often.)
I really like it that one of our spec-fic authors, Harry Turtledove, is mentioned as someone who does a great job of getting such facts right. (And no, I haven’t copyedited him, though I did proofread something of his years ago.)
It’s a worthwhile thread for editors and authors to check out.
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I'm a freelance copyeditor specializing in fantasy and science fiction. SF/F novels I have copyedited have been finalists for (and have sometimes won) the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, Endeavour, Golden Spur, John W. Campbell Memorial, Quill, Locus, Philip K. Dick, British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. In 2007 I became the first and only copyeditor ever short-listed for a World Fantasy Award.
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Handguns? Don’t get me started on Tom Clancy and nuclear weapons design. Or his faulty grasp of Hebrew, or his concepts of non-Catholic religions. I read his novels like some people watch car crashes…
Harry tells some hair-raising stories of the letters he gets when he does get gun details wrong in his writing.
Haven’t authors learned to do any handwaving? Why discuss such details at all? Are they contributing to the story?
Charlie Stross had a nice little blog entry and link about something similar: that old cliche where someone breaks into something by shooting off a padlock. Turns out it’s not very easy to do at all.
I heard that there’s a recent popular thriller (maybe a Michael Crichton?) that climaxes with two people firing guns at each other and the bullets colliding in mid-air. Groan…
…the bullets colliding in mid-air
It could happen, but the odds are ridiculously overwhelming, and I don’t know what it would do to modern bullets (there are reports of mini balls found smushed into each other at some US Civil War battlefields).
You ever see the episode of Mythbusters when they try to replicate the catching a bullet in the teeth myth? Hilarious!
Yeah, I read that at the time he linked to it. My only problem with that study, though, is that the locks were swinging freely; I don’t see how that actually replicates the effect of a lock that’s backed by a door. Also, I didn’t really understand why they didn’t aim for the hasp instead of the lock itself.
As someone who’s been handling firearms since the age of three and medieval weapons since eight, I get really annoyed by simple mistakes people make when writing about weapons.
Its not hard to find reliable info on such things…
I am curious about your comments. The only Clancy book I can personally speak about is the “Hunt For Red October”. At the time I read the book, I was doing work with David Taylor Research Center and had close contact with people that had been on subs. Given the fact that the “Caterpillar Drive” had not been invented, they thought he had done a decent job. The description in the book of places I was familiar with was nebulous enough so that you could not tie it to a specific place but accurate enough to give the flavor of the place. Did his research accuracy drop off significantly in later books? Do you know of specific things that he got wrong? I admit it has been quite a few years since I have read something by him. I am asking because I really am curious if I should adjust my own perception of his writing. I am aware that his background isn’t science or engineering.
The confusion about “cordite” apparently is traceable back to Raymond Chandler, who grew up in England and used the word for the smell of burnt powder. Now it’s kind of entered the language erroneously thus.
My favoritie moment for this sort of thing was when I was working at [well-known "lad" magazine]. There was a story about great moments in movies, and one of the ones they chose was the end of The Wild Bunch. I’d certainly agree, but they described it as “William Holden blows away hundreds of cowpokes with a gatling gun.”
Me: It’s not a gatling gun, it’s a machine gun. Dude, I’ve seen that movie three times.
Prissy young fact-checker woman: Well, we have no way of checking that. They’ll just leave it alone anyway.
Me: (after less than five minutes on the Internet) (shows her a still of Holden with the weapon in question, another site that describes it as a 1910 Browning machine gun (the U.S. Army’s weapon in World War I), and a weapons site with caliber, rate of fire, etc., etc.; the two weapons are clearly the same): Is this good enough?
PYFCW: (look of hate) (doesn’t speak to me ever again)
And I don’t think they did change it.
Yeah, but during the larger, longer Civil War battles, there would have been a lot of shots fired. Someone more knowledgeable about Civil War weaponry and history would get the order of magnitude right on how many, but my wild speculation is that for the really big bloodbaths, it would have been hundreds of thousands of shots fired. One in a million odds can happen in a day, if a million shots are fired. The problem with improbable events is that the universe is so big.
Not that that excuses Michael Crichton, or whoever the author in question is, for throwing something that improbable into a single fight between two people.
I’ve read other Clancy books.
First, as to the quality of his writing. By his forth book, The Sum of All Fears, he’d contracted Writers Disease. The first third or so of the book could have been replaced by a four-paragraph summary, but his editor didn’t do his/her job. By the time we reach The Bear and the Dragon, we have a 1000-page monstrosity — and the story starts on page 352.
If you ever want to see the horrible results of an editor falling down on the job, you might want to read Executive Decisions. Clancy started that book at least three times, and each of the different starts (including the exact same phrases) is in the final published copy.
The politics of his writing is another issue. In his latest series, a group of assassins kill a man because he looks Middle Eastern, their target is Middle Eastern, and they can’t be bothered to positively identify their victim. And this group of assassins is supposed to be the good guys.
As for research accuracy, we return to The Sum of All Fears. Clancy attempts to use colloquial Hebrew and makes errors. He portrays “good” Jewish and Moslem clerics as pale copies of Catholic clerics; there’s no accouting for different motiviations or theological backgrounds. His “bad” Jewish clerics are direct copies of fanatical, movie-stock Christian clerics. And Clancy’s personal solution to the war between the Arabs and the Jews, which is to let the Pope supervise Jerusalem, is almost hysterically funny to anyone who is even slightly famliar with the politics of the region.
In the realm of technical accuracy, Clancy describes the architecture of a hydrogen bomb in loving detail. I’m not a bomb physicist, but his description sounded off. For example, he uses a bundle of fibers to bend light through a 90-degree turn and provide pressure to ignite the hydrogen — and I can’t belive it’s possible to funnel that much energy through a turn in the fiber. Another little detail: he doesn’t know that the speed of light in coaxial cable is one-third less than the speed of light in a vaccum. (It’s entirely possible that bombs are built with twisted-pair wires to the detonators, which might give propogation closer to the speed of light, but I’d be surprised to learn atomic weapons were built with twisted-pair wires.)
Clancy was just as wrong as anyone else when it came to describing the shape of stealth fighters as curved intead of a collection of flat planes (in Red Storm Rising).
So, in summary: his writing is terrible, he extols fascism, he revers the Pope, and his research about for non-public, non-military information is questionable.
I’m glad I didn’t read any of his later books. I am not a bomb expert either, but from what I do know, you are right. That is not the way you build a hydrogen bomb. I appreciate you taking the time for a detailed reply. I must add one caution just in case someone reads this and then uses the information. It is the speed of the electrons that slows down in a coaxial cable, not the speed of light. Obviously it is not light traveling in a coaxial cable. For anyone really picky though, light does travel slower in fiber optic cable or any transparent medium. The speed of light is a constant in a vacuum. ok ok – We have probably bored everyone else by now.
No, no.
The speed of the electrons themselves — the drift velocity, which measures the average movement in the direction of the applied voltage — is about 200 miles per hour. The propogation of the electromagnetic wave in the wire is slower than the speed of light, and is measured by the dielectric constant.
Hmm – but I certainly was correct about the light. :-) You are right about the wave propagation verses electron speed. Now if I remember that average velocity is affected by….No I had better restrain myself. By now we have confirmed the stereotypes held by many of the editors reading Deanna’s blog.