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Those Little Things Readers Won’t Leave Alone
A lady named Linn Ullman wrote a book called Before You Sleep. In it, she has some magic realism, which includes a guy getting turned into a mackerel. The protagonist puts him in a bowl of water.
A reader’s response to this was that it wasn’t realistic. Because…mackerels can’t live in tap water. (They were right. Mackerels are a salt water fish).
The thing is that often readers will swallow your whoppers but notice the little things. When I met Naomi Novik at World Fantasy Con a few years back she preemptively informed her fans that yes, she is well aware that there is no way Europe could produce enough meat to feed all of those dragons.
(Sadly, we also see this phenomenon amongst people who object to, for example, black people in worlds only loosely based off of Medieval Europe. Although we know what their real objection is).
So, what can you do about this? There’s two things you can do.
Get the Small Stuff Right
When it isn’t important to your story, then make sure you follow the rules of physics. Or of what actually happened in history (which includes…