No they did not

[ritaxis]

Dorothy Heydt used to say that the moment for her when she dropped a book was when she found herself saying "I don't care about these people."

For me, it's when I find myself saying, "no, they did not," meaning that I do not believe they did or said what the author just told me they did or said.

Sometimes it's because the story is set in a real world milieu and there are particular ways that the people behave in that milieu, sometimes it's a matter of physics or biology, sometimes it's the human emotion or thoguht process that's wrong.

I'm struggling with an old Vonda MacIntyre right now, because of this. I don't think I'm going to finish it, thoguh it has many elements that I love, and it's Vonda MacUIntyre, and I've enjoyed other books of hers. And this is part of a series I started a long time ago.  But the characters are doing things I don't believe they would do and they are saying things I don't believe they would say. And so are the institutions  behind them. And it's getting too annoying to proceed, so I think I'll read myself to sleep with cookbooks again.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

And from that impulse - 'no, that's not what they would have done, they would have done X' seems to spring a lot of fanfiction. Sometimes you can detect the author's iron hand - it would fit the plot for the character to (miss a clue, do something stupid, trust a person they have no reason to trust etc etc) and so they do.

As a reader, that stops me every time.