book settings

[jennickels]

It always cracks me up when I read a book from a city I've lived in or visited a lot and they get the geography and stuff all wrong. I was just reading a book that is supposed to take place in a small town outside of Portland, OR. So far so good. At some point the kids go to the coast. They take buses which makes sense since it's like a two hour drive, although they never mention how long it takes. They make it seem like it's a short trip.

The one that really got me, though, was when they all take a bus into the city (aka Portland) to go to "one of the malls." Um, Portland doesn't have a mall. Not in the big building with lots of stores in it sense. At least none that I know of. The big mall around here is in Vanvouver. The other is in a town south of the city which is like an hour+ drive from us. It was the one that had the shooting right before Sandy Hook.

I found it really funny that the descriptions did not fit with Portland. Funny enough, another book I read this week had the characters fly into PDX (Portland International Airport) and then drive 250+ miles to southern Oregon for some Shakespeare festival or something. They at least got the geography better. Since the characters were supposed to be big name TV stars (of a recently canceled teen show) I think they could have sprung for a commuter flight to a small airport down state, lol. That's a pretty long drive. I know, I've done it.

Luckily, Veronica Roth is from the Chicago area so all the geography in the Divergent series is spot on. She even uses correct street names and landmarks. I watched a behind the scenes look into shooting the ferris wheel scene in the movie which was pretty neat. I had no idea they actually climbed the thing. They're all nuts. I've been on it and it's freaking high. I believe it's 150 feet at the peak of the wheel. The thing rocks like crazy and for someone afraid of heights--I thought I was going to pass out from the vertigo. It's not about the fear, it's about feeling really, really woozy when I get up high.

Oh, and then there's movies that get the geogrpahy hilariously wrong which only adds to the movie like in The Blues Brothers. That movie cracks me up on so many levels. I love the huge chase at the end where they leave the concert in the middle of the night. It's supposedly 103 miles to Chicago (as stated in the scene: It's 103 miles to Chicago, we have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. My favorite line in the movie) which at the speeds they're driving should take them like an hour. But when they get there it's lunch time. Um, okay. Not to mention the suburb I believe is supposed to be up north, but they show them coming into the city from the South then driving all over the place. Also there's like no traffic. At all. Anywhere in Chicago during the entire chase.

And they wreck and absurd amount of police cars.

Okay, it's almost 5:30am and I really should get to bed. I need to finish a ton of homework tomorrow... er, today... so I can relax and watch football tomorrow.

Comments

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

Maybe because the Twilight movies were shot in Portland, it's become a popular YA setting? Although with Google Maps, there's no excuse to fuck up local geography that bad.

LOLOMG, The Blues Brothers car chases. Deliberately inaccurate & ludicrous & HILARIOUS

[nynaeve-sedai.livejournal.com]

Haha. That's how I feel when I read SG1 S/J fics set in Minnesota. I've had people drive from CO to his cabin in a day and I'm like - ha. HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

A friend of mine from St. Cloud totally critiqued Juno because of the comments with regards to highways :)

[lolmac]

ROFL! I get to see a lot of this, especially with anything set in Seattle, or in New Mexico. There's a joke that the TV/film version of Seattle has magic windows in every house -- no matter where you are, you can see either Mount Rainier or the Space Needle from every window in town!!

My all-time favourite is a Tom Clancy novel, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Clancy is supposed to be the Nit-Picky God of Research, the one who gets every dust speck correctly placed. Well, a chunk of the novel is set in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where I grew up; and I can tell you, he never went any closer to Los Alamos than Albuquerque. Never looked closely at a map, either. He has one character leave the Lab grounds and turn onto the freeway -- which is a neat trick, since it requires teleporting the car a good 25 miles. There were other howlers, but that was the best.

I remember one of the Stargate novels -- one of the supposedly professional publications, mind you! -- has a segment of Daniel doing illegal (and highly destructive) digging in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. I've been to Chaco Canyon (which is a very cool place). Setting aside the violation of just about every ethical component of an archeologist's soul, the sequence also screws up basic geography and climate details. I mean, c'mon. It takes thirty seconds to look up typical weather info online!

When I was writing Reverb in particular, I actually hiked Mount Pilchuck several times after I'd selected it as a location, looking for just the right details for settings. I did end up fudging a couple of minor points, but at least I fudged from a position of knowledge. And I have lovely pictures of the trail, although none of them actually show Mac.

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

The geography in the Divergent series may be spot on, but the third book made me want to stab my own eyeballs out. :)