And my sister has never watched Pirate of the Caribbean. She’s a SCAdian and vintage dancer and can’t stand the corset scene.

But — the things that really kill me are the philosophy. Political philosophy, religious philosophy, etc.

No, people, it really is possible to believe democracy a terrible form of government and monarchy a good one. And believe in it a manner that will not be perturbed by someone mentioning that they believe the opposite.

And those religions? You do know that people could _believe_ in them, right?

People didn’t age faster back then. The average was brought down by infant mortality, warfare, starvation and disease. People who avoided these things aged normally.

Grrr.

Here are three:

Robert Forward’s Flight of the Dragonfly. The late Dr. Forward was a propulsion specialist, and the best thing in his stories are usually the spaceships. So expect mediocre plots and characters. The interesting thing here is the science, and in that way, it’s an introduction to the “Golden Age” hard sci-fi stories that were all about engineering and physics. If you like this, start digging for Asimov, E.E. Smith, and the others. This is classic “fiction of ideas” type stuff.

Julie Czerneda’s Survival and its two sequels. The science here is more hand-waving, but it’s fun to read and fairly easy to find. Also, the science here is biology, not physics.

If you’re into weird biology and horror, try Peter Ward’s Starfish. It’s available free online through a Creative Commons license at http://www.rifters.com (thanks Peter).

Charlie Stross’s Halting State. Charlie’s got some of the more information dense books, in the sense that they’re full of ideas and in-jokes. They’re fun though. Halting State is not an easy read for the first few chapters, because it’s written in second person (i.e. you did this, you did that) with several points of view, and the characters are separated by their different voices and situations. Once you figure out who’s who (after the first few chapters) it’s easy to read. Halting State is a police procedural set 20 years from now, about a seemingly impossible crime that takes place in an on-line game (basically, a bunch of orcs rob the central bank of a World of Warcraft-like game). This one’s about as hard as the science gets, and someone actually pulled off a caper vaguely like what he described about six months after the book came out.

See what you like.

You the writer maybe right, but the problem remains – the word has jerked the reader out of the story, which is not good. Sigh.

As for accuracy in novels. I think it makes sense for an author to strive for a reasonable level of accuracy, but unless they slap “historcally accurate” all over their publicity I am willing to forgive.
My problem with Gladiator as a film is that a big fuss was made about the level of research and yet their were things that conflicted with even A level classics studies. I have never seen an epic fantasy with historical accuracy as a claim so it never bothers me.