After almost three and a half years of silence, I post a new article to critise a very famous and acclaimed author. Perhaps I will resume posting more regularly, but I cannot ignore the Reynolds's blunder. And even before reading the book to the end!

On page 129 of my UK edition (ISBN 978-0-575-09047), one of the main characters embarks on a trip to Venus.

Talking about the space liner, Reynolds states: "Huge millwheel parts of it were counter-rotating, simulating various planetary gravities." This means that no artificial gravity is available in the future that Reynolds describes.

In the next paragraph, Reynolds tells us that the trip to Venus will take three days, and this is where he screws up (pardon my French!)

The problem is that Venus is very far: between 38 and 261 million km. To get there as fast as possible, we can hypothesise that the liner will accelerate for the first half of the journey and decelerate for the second half. We can easily calculate the acceleration according to the formula:
  a = D/2 / square(T/2)
where D is the Earth-Venus distance and T is the transit time. I will save you the details of the calculation, but the end result is that, depending of the relative positions of the planets along their orbits, the passengers will be subjected to an acceleration of between 0.23 and 1.6 Earth's gravities.

This means that you can forget the counter-rotating rings! The passengers would be pushed against the rear-facing walls of their cabins with a force not lower than 1/4 and perhaps as high as 1 and 1/2 of their weight!

Sorry Alastair!

For your reference, here are the links to all past “Authors’ Mistakes” articles:

Lee Child: 61 Hours
Lee Child: Never Go Back
Lee Child: Personal
Lee Child: Die Trying
Colin Forbes: Double Jeopardy
Akiva Goldsman: Lost in Space
Vince Flynn: Extreme Measures
Máire Messenger Davies & Nick Mosdell: Practical Research Methods for Media and Cultural Studies
Michael Crichton & Richard Preston: Micro
Lee Child: The Visitor
Graham Tattersall: Geekspeak
Graham Tattersall: Geekspeak (addendum)
Donna Leon: A Noble Radiance
007 Tomorrow Never Dies
Vince Flynn: American Assassin
Brian Green: The Fabric of the Cosmos
John Stack: Master of Rome
Dean Crawford: pocalypse
Daniel Silva: The Fallen Angel
Tom Clancy: Locked On
Peter David: After Earth
Douglas Preston: Impact
Brian Christian: The Most Human Human
Donna Leon: Fatal Remedies
Sidney Sheldon: Tell Me Your Dreams
David Baldacci: Zero Day
Sidney Sheldon: The Doomsday Conspiracy
CSI iami
Christopher L. Bennett: Make Hub, Not War
CSI Miami #2 (Robert Hornak)
Jack Greene & Alessandro Massignani
Peter James
P.Warren & M.Streeter
Nigel Cawthorne