"A writer cannot do too much research... though sometimes it is a mistake to try and cram too much of what you learned into your novel. Research gives you a foundation to build on, but in the end it's only the story that matters."
Although many talents in fictional media show they Did Not Do the Research, some actually did. In fact, sometimes they learned so much and worked so hard to learn it that it would hardly seem fitting to just not show it off.
The Shown Their Work trope comes in when the creators tweak their stories to show the viewer/reader what they have learned. The trick is to do it so this advances the story instead of stopping it cold. When it's done right in a well made work, awards for its educational value can be just as nifty as the artistic awards.
This often happens in older, harder Sci Fi books, wherein the authors try to keep the science as consistent as possible with currently-understood scientific theories. Of course, since Science Marches On, this may date the book badly.
When an author shows off work they haven't actually done, you've been Dan Browned. Or worse, Encyclopedia Browned. Any examples of that list there, here is about it being done right.
Note that this does not include explicitly educational productions, since they obviously have to be both accurate and explanatory to be effective.
Compare Doing It for the Art (or Narrative Filigree) which may not necessarily be about the research, but is about going above and beyond in regards to production quality..
Note that this is only as good as the writer makes it. Just because you did the research, doesn't mean it adds to the story. Likewise, sometimes it's better just to make things up. Remember that one of the reasons why the Sci Fi Ghetto existed in the first place was because Authors of old (and some still do) overused this trope, creating walls of Info Dump instead of stories. If people wanted to have a lecture in Science, they would grab scientific essays in the first place.
Also keep in mind that referencing things doesn't by default make a work smarter than one that doesn't.
Try to keep this page from becoming Gushing About Shows You Like.There's a LiveJournal community for authors conducting such research on non-trivial topics.
If the work is simply using real locations as backgrounds, consider using Real Place Background. If the work contains both real backgrounds and other research, then by all means include it here as well.
Examples:
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Anime/Manga
The lush visual beauty of the Aria Anime adaptation is attributed to the animators actually having gone to Venice to do research on the architecture, how Gondoliers pilot their boats and how water moves in reaction to a gondola's oar. Yes, they put that much love into producing the series.
Every building featured is drawn as accurate as possible and the geography is also highly accurate. The location Orange Planet is fictional, though, and ARIA Company is actually in where a Traghetto station would be, and that the walkway behind it in real Venice is way wider.
Berserk surprisingly shows signs of either knowledge or research on Kentaro Muira's part, though this is downplayed between the horrific demons Guts faces and the truly insane amount of megaviolence the manga has. The weapons and tactics used by the warring factions early on (cheap plate armor for mercenaries, heavy plate for knights, cannon for support, crossbows supplanting longbows) is spot-on for 15th Century Europe, and later on the period dress a few of the characters are seen to wear are equally detailed and researched
Detective Conan is chock full of this in pretty much every arc, to the point where some arcs are clearly just excuses for for Conan to elaborate on the chosen factoid of the month. Unfortunately, this tends to make it more obvious when the author does not do the research or uses armchair or fridge logic.
Although much of the bread featured in Yakitate!! Japan is extreme in nature, many breads are, in fact, based on real life recipes developed by the manga's baking consultant. Some of the recipes are featured on the live-action "do it yourself" snippets that appear between certain episodes of the anime.
Addicted To Curry is like Yakitate!! Japan, but with curry instead of bread, right down to having the recipes and instructions for the curry right in the manga.
Serial Experiments Lain actually pauses the action to show off what the creators found about computers and technology. Or, rather, pauses the exposition about computers and technology for some action. Some of the computer screens shown in the show (most notably Lain's dad's computer in the first episode) feature interfaces that bear a striking resemblance to NeXTSTEP, the operating system the first web browser was created on. This fits in nicely with the show's theme of everyone being connected through the Internet.
One of the reasons Digimon Tamers stands out from the other Digimon anime series is the sheer quantity of references to real-world computing developments. Examples include ECHELON (one of the SIGINT systems that control information flow on the internet), the Tierra project (an artificial life simulation experiment), and the early Creeper virus (which infected Arpa Net). Its plot neatly grounds itself in reality with the sole exception of the two instances of Minovsky Physics it created (and their consequences). It also features cloud computing, icewalls (instead of the more well known firewall) and a quantum computer in addition to some philosophical concepts like an entelecheia (a catalyst for evolution) and the relativity of good and evil (the importance of the point of view, which leads to a lot of Well-Intentioned Extremist). But what really makes this example stand out is that the writer, Chiaki Konaka (who also wrote the aforementioned Serial Experiments Lain; seriously, this is a guy who knows what he's talking about), set up a Tamersminisite devoted to explaining in great detail the research and thought processes which went into most facets of Tamers.
The broader Digimon canon as a whole actually does an excellent job of showing its work when it comes to basing its Mons on Many real mythological entities, literary works, religious concepts or even specific lifeforms. Sure, Rule Of Cool is in play first and foremost, but they do like to pick pretty obscure stuff to portray and usually do a great job of accuracy in deriving aspects for it; sometimes they even play with multiple Digimon based on different interpretations and views of the same subject (there are plenty of Digimon based on Satan, for instance, exploring different portrayals of him from over the years). Now keep in mind, we're talking thousands of Digimon species, so that's a hell of a lot of work. And of course, though it's rare that much of the details come to pass as relevant in the anime, manga or games themselves, the Japanese supplementary material simply loves to show off how much work they have to show.
Boy howdy, do the animators of Durarara!!!! demonstrate how much work they did, shown here.
Bartender ends each episode with a live-action demonstration of how to make whatever drink was featured in that episode.
Holyland is a fairly realistic martial arts-based series, and there's a lot of different footnotes about how any used or subverted trope fits in with how martial arts and real punches to the face really works.
Vinland Saga gives an accurate depiction of Viking Age Europe, running the gamut from things like weaponry and armour to subtle things like the cultures and religious interplay between the faiths. It's surprising that a Japanese mangaka can get something right that actual Westerners have been getting so woefully wrong for years.
Strike Witches Despite being a show about 13-20 year old girls in panties fighting an evil alien threat, many WWII references were made in both moefied and non moefied ways. Erica Hartmann herself is a walking (slightly exaggerated) Historical In-Joke.
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is very well researched at least in terms of its geography right down to the specific building depicted as Cafe Alpha having been located right where the manga said it would be. It is a private home in real life. The author comes from Yokohama.
Sailor Moon accurately represents Tokyo, in particular Minato ward. One book details over two dozen locations in the series and their real-life parallels.
Historie has erudite references to Ancient Greek history, culture, literature, economy, geography and warfare. Even the main character is an obscure historical figure. It's not everyday you get Iphricates or Xenophon's Anabasis mentioned in a manga.
Neither Alexander nor Aristotle were part of Ancient Greek-ness. They were Classical, living in the fourth century BCC. The attention to detail about stuff like pants (Greeks didn't wear 'em) and people's names is awesome, though.
Of course, the story is set in the 4th century, so...
Axis Powers Hetalia. Since it's heavily based on world history and all the characters are gijinka countries, it'd be disastrous if the author Did Not Do the Research. He even gives an entire bibliography so he won't get sued to show his work.
Still, he did overlook more than one detail so the Refuge in Audacity didn't take a turn for the worse. See the main Hetalia entry.
Noir received a lot of attention for its guns, which were all painstakingly detailed drawings of real guns that even all carried the proper amount of ammunition; whenever a scene called for a gun to fire more bullets than it could carry, the animators always put in a shot of the character reloading. The various real life locations on the show — Paris, St Petersburg, New Jersey, and Sicily are also quite detailed and realistic.
In High School Of The Dead, the rifles are amazingly detailed, and are shown to have actual limitations. Kohta Hirano also makes sure that everyone who even touches one follows strict gun safety, as American gun enthusiasts are generally taught to do. The author also shows a decent understand of how the American government works, although it's a bit more subtle and avoids crossing into Strawman Political territory.
The producers of the Gunsmith Cats OVA actually went to Chicago to study it and ensure that their locations would be accurate in the anime. Many Chicago anime fans have noted that the amount of detail to buildings and locations in the anime were so accurate and detailed, they could tell exactly when and where some events took place. This extended to the firearms and vehicles, behaving exactly as they would in real life.
Mahou Sensei Negima! (the manga) has mages casting their spells by chanting in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. Most of which are entirely correct and are full of references to mythological figures related to those cultures. The compiled volumes (at least the English ones) each have several pages dedicated to explaining in detail the languages used, as well as the etymology and mythology related to the names that are mentioned.
It goes into a ludicrous amount of detail concerning the backgrounds, almost all of which are inspired by real world architecture. For instance, they created a complex CG model of a tower in Kyoto for the relevant arc. Said tower appears a total of 2 or 3 times in the background. For another example, one of the bell towers at Mahora is based off of the bell tower of the Florence Cathedral.
Then there's the time Rakan destroyed an entire dimension, and the volume's bonus material spends several pages explaining how the differences between Newtonian and Einsteinian conceptions of gravity and the nature of black holes made this possible.
Rumiko Takahashi's research of martial arts shows through in Ranma 1/2, to the point where real-life practitioners of these can identify the styles used by the characters right down to the school. Even the anime had a slight concession —the motions that female Ranma, and then Akane, Genma, and male Ranma perform in the first opening animation? Yang-style Taijiquan, form 24. All this in the series that definedMartial Arts and Crafts.
Planetes, both in its original and animated incarnations, is nothing if not accurate to an astronomical degree, up to and including the diaper-clad astronauts. NASA itself has plenty of Planetes fans among its ranks. Rumor has it that if someone actually built the Toy Box (the orbital garbage truck the characters use) as it appears in the source material and somehow got it into space it would work exactly like it should.
One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda frequently makes use of real-life phenomena in the manga, though he will occasionally play with whatever idea he's using and Shonen it up, so it doesn't match completely all the time. Some examples include the Going Merry acquiring a Klabautermann spirit, and the real-life phenomenon of the Brocken spectre, gigantic shadows being cast by people standing at high altitudes. Also noticeable are details concerning sailing, from how weather phenomena work to how the Marines give a backwards, palm-inward salute to avoid showing superiors tar-stained hands.
Many of the characters are named after real-life pirates, and while the names may seem arbitrary at first glance, there is usually some sort of connection between the characters and their real-life counterparts. X. Drake, for example, is a Marine deserter who is seen as a criminal by the government, but is a hero to pirates and revolutionaries; much like the real Sir Francis Drake was considered a criminal by the Spanish but beloved by people in his native England (since he only went after Spanish ships).
Team Medical Dragon is accurate about its information on health care and the health care system, being made by an actual doctor and medical journalist and supervised by another professional.
The anime had another bonus, too. The neighborhood Kyon lives in is based on the author's hometown of Nishinomiya Prefecture. Every scene in the anime mirrors an actual location in the prefecture, right down to the look of North High (Nishinomiya Kita High School)...even the station, Nagato's apartment, the familiar café...a fan actually did a comparison once of shots from the real place looking identical to the shots in the anime.
Sakura Wars repeatedly loves to show its knowledge of history especially in the manga form where among other instances Oogami randomly bumps into the first noble Japanese man to win a Nobel Prize for literature (the reference was eliminated in the Tokyopop translation) and also a real life arms smuggling scandal in Japanese occupied China is mentioned to help develop the villain's backstory. Other examples abound in the games, manga, and stage shows in the franchise, one song in the musical Hanasaku Otome mentions Albert Einstein's visit to Japan in that era and also Frank Lloyd Wrights building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
Hikaru no Go subverts all the usual foofoorah about superpowered gamers by presenting an incredibly informative depiction of Go. Every important match played in Hikaru no Go is based on a famous game played in real life. A real ranked Go player served as a consultant to the series. The series has even been recommended to people who want to know the process for turning pro in real life. You almost forget that there's a ghost hanging over the protagonist's shoulder.
Monster did a pretty good job averting the Hollywood Atlas with regard to Germany. Most of the non-white people we see besides Tenma are Turkish or Vietnamese (two of the most prominent immigrant populations in Germany), while Tenma's adopted hometown of Dusseldorf has a much higher Japanese population than the rest of the country. And Cologne really is notorious for flooding all the time, so a flood washing out the bodies of some of Johan's unfortunate foster parents is very plausible.
In Knights, many of Mist's attacks are taken from an actual German fencing style, and the torture/interrogation techniques used on "witches" are based on actual historical techniques such as pricking.
Pokémon's anime is so devoted to their movie settings that they'll send whole teams of animators out on location to places like Spain (for the 10th movie), Greece (for the 12th), and so on. These trips are described in loving detail on their blogs.
In the Pokémon Special manga, the Pokédex displays use the game mechanics, such as the sprites, entries, maps, stat lists, etc. for that extra nostalgic feeling.
The Emerald arc shows that the author is pretty aware of metagaming, because quite frankly, the Battle Frontier is nigh unbeatable without specifically trained Pokémon.
All of Ruby's Pokémon have natures that go best with the Contest segment they're meant for.
In 'Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Adventure! when Hareta and his friends visit Veilstone City in volume 7, there's a shot as they're approaching the town, the entire city appears EXACTLY as it in Platinum version. Mitsumi had Brown Eyes under most circumstances, but gains Green Eyes when she's a Galactic grunt; as Galactic grunts all look the same, and all have Green Eyes.
Pokémon Zensho is more-or-less Red and Green in manga form. The art style, designs, personalities, and roles from the games are all intact. Satoshi is explicitly stated to be eleven years old, same as his game version (many adaptations go for "ten years old" instead). Several scenes excluded in other adaptations are included, such as getting the Safari Zone guys dentures back and the ghost goggles.
Darker than Black is really good about its research most of the time, to the point where they copied foreign-language graffiti. They also like Rare Guns. The big exceptions are some of the translations; their gratuitous English can be pretty bad and they managed to mess up a Russian translation of the title at the beginning of the second season (but hey, they corrected it in the next episode!).
Fullmetal Alchemist - Hiromu Arakawa obviously did a lot of research on both alchemy (famous alchemists, theoretical alchemic laws, uses for Philosopher's Stone) and chemistry (human composition, conservation of matter). Any breaks from them seems to be either Rule Of Cool, Rule of Funny, or the alchemists in question knowing what they're doing (more so than can be shown with just a few images and some relatively small speech bubbles). All this while being a very well constructed, dramatic, fun, and funny story.
And if you are a bit into the Hermetic philosophy (which is the basement of medival alchemy) you REALLY get to see how much research this woman did. (Ouroboros anyone?)
Also the production of the movie shows Munich in lovely, lovely detail... just to deliver a Did Not Do the Research when it comes to food.
The writers have mentioned that they did quite a bit of research on the historical period being depicted, but that they took some liberties for the sake of plot, which could excuse the food error.
Juushin Enbu, another Hiromu Arakawa work (she's doing the art only), is another case of a lot of research. In this case, visiting Beijing and surrounding areas for closeups on how the architecture looked like and the materials used to make it, as well other cultural aspects of ancient China. She shows the creative team's research trip at the end of each collected volume.
An all manhwa group created the manga Kurokami. The gorgeous Scenery Porn and the cultural references would never clue you in to the fact nobody on the team ever actually stepped into Japan or could speak the language. (The script was translated in Japan before official release) Omakes in the back show the research process, like when they looked through photographs for the backgrounds. Just out of simple curiosity, they once called the actual building that they were going to draw because they liked the structure, asking what the building's purpose was. That building was a condom factory.
The Baccano! anime has been recognized for being one of the few anime that get American history right. It even went as far as to show "Hollywoodland", which was what Hollywood was called in the 30s, in a montage.
Princess Tutu shows its knowledge of ballet and classical music throughout the series. Ballet scenes based on classical ballets generally take choreography directly from the ballet. The details go down to costumes, dance moves, and pantomime. The show also makes clever use of classical music, such as when it uses the "Blue Danube" waltz in an episode about a river.
In "Legend of Galactic Heroes" the author of the novels shows this through details that emphasize the parallel between the Galactic Empire and the First Reich/German Empire/Prussia. For example, the Kaiser's palace is Neue Sanssouci, a new version of Sansoucci, the palace belonging to the German Emperors. The animators take it further by including architectural detail such as greatly decorated gazebos, also existing in the actual Sanssouci.
Then we have the myriad historical allegories and parallels. The main one is Reinhard von Lohengramm being a very direct expy of Frederick the Great, in that not only is he a tactical genius, but he also advocates Enlightened Despotism, ie a monarchy informed by enlightenment values of improving society for everyone, not just for the wealthy, encouraging the production of knowledge, fighting unfairly gained privilege and corruption.
Futari Ecchiis a sex-education and relationship advice guide disguised as an ecchi manga - complete with references.
Kaze Hikaru author Taeko Watanabe's talks at the end of the volumes often talk about all the trouble she goes through to do this: from redrawing parts of the manga that were inaccurate due to relying on popular culture or lazy research to changing a famous plotline from the Shinsengumi's history because it couldn't possibly be historically accurate, even though she knew it would disappoint fans.
Of all things, an H-Manga,Femme Kabuki manages, save "Saint"JodieHanabusa-Abbot to be historically accurate about the years before and during Meiji Restoration to the point one could actually use it as a reference... between "sessions" of course.
Ecchi manga Nana To Kaoru has a number of accurate (and very detailed) segments on the preparation and maintenance of bondage gear.
Sakura Gari does this for the Taisho era, showing the meaning of Cherry Blossoms as well as the literature and culture for these days with LOTS of accuracy.
Ookiku Furikabutte. The author, Asa Higuchi, obviously knows her stuff when it comes to baseball, which makes sense when you consider that she got a major in sports psychology.
More Scenery Porn in Elfen Lied, which takes place in the Kanagawa Prefecture. Each scene looks like a postcard.
The treatment of various transgender issues in Wandering Son: no Easy Sex Changes, being trans as a child, having transgendered feelings as a kid but growing out of it, being a fully transitioned adult, sexual orientation in regards to being trans (hint: gay and trans are NOT THE SAME THING and the author seems to understand this), et cetera.
Dinosaur King has many very obscure dinosaurs and a wide variety of places are visited.
Syun Matsuena puts so many different martial arts and their actual move names into Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple it's like a whistle-stop tour of martial arts, since Kenichi's masters feel compelled to give the history and characteristics of any art mentioned.
Angel Beats! shows firearms and their real life counterparts very accurately.
Zero no Tsukaima gets a surprising amount of stuff about the Renaissance correct considering how much gets thrown into silly harem antics.
Comic Books
American Flagg included a recipe for each story that showed Reuben Flagg's cooking Italian food.
Tintin: A comic famous for its research, such as when Tintin and the gang go to the moon with all scientific plausibility that the cartoonist, Hergé, could create. In fact, Hergé was notorious for his early Theme Park Version travelogue stories, until a friend convinced him to do serious research, beginning with The Blue Lotus. The result is a story in China that has been praised as an excellent primer for the China of the 1930s.
The best thing is walking through the Art/History Museum in Brussels and discovering e.g. the fetish statue from the "The Broken Ear" album.
Herge's drive for realism probably culminated in The Calculus Affair, where the amount detail put into background art and scene composition would have put a movie cinematographer to shame. In fact, in planning for a minor scene in the story where enemy spies force Tintin's car off the road into Lake Geneva, Herge actually sent a employee to drive along Lake Geneva to find a location where assassins might plausibly force a car off the road.
In the same story, the fire truck shown after the house explodes was the exact reproduction of the actual fire truck of the town, down to the NUMBER PLATE.
Probably inspired by Herge's example, anal-retentive amounts of research and detail has become a defining trait of the ligne claire comic artists.
Usagi Yojimbo: Stan Sakai likes to have an occasional story where he features various craftwork of Japan depicted in detail like swordmaking, cheating at gambling, kite making and pottery. It went even further when he devoted multiple chapters in a major arc to the legendary history of the famous sword, Kusanagi, before the eponymous hero came into the story. This devotion to proper research has earned Sakai a Parent's Choice Award for the comic for its educational value.
Many Batman stories written by Doug Moench, especially from the Batman flagship title, take unexpected sidesteps from the actual plot to allow for lengthy monologues or discussions of scientific, religious or philosophical nature. Unsurprisingly, even the discussions between two characters come across like the writer talking down to the audience.
Examples include: a museum security guard explaining the infamous Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus revision in Showcase '93 # 7, police lieutenant "Hardback" Bock giving a lengthy discussion about the origins and details of real-life alchemy in Batman # 546, and a detailed description of photosynthesis as utilized by algae in Batman # 367.
Brian K. Vaughan has a tendency to throw random factoids into his comics writing. While this is reasonable for a comic about the importance of women in everyday life, it's a bit ridiculous when you're reading Ultimate X-Men and a cop mentions how many people are born with a thirteenth rib.
In fact, they've been doing this in Marvel comics for a while. Spider-man, for example, often has tidbits about this or that, mostly about spider biology.
In one X-Men story involving the space shuttle nearly everything was correct - and this comic was written before the first time a shuttle actually went into space. Props to Chris Claremont!
Disney comics are not usually known for their accuracy, with one notable exception: Stories by the renowned comic book writer and illustrator Don Rosa often present surprisingly accurate and well-researched history, geography and even science (for example, if you see some mathematical formula in some comic of his, you can be pretty certain the formula is, in fact, real and accurate). Rosa is known for the amount of research he makes for some of his stories.
DuckTales especially demonstrated scientific principles quite often — possibly to make up for the fact that the main character was a talking duck.
In the collected edition of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Rosa notes out that he found specific points in time where certain historical figures would be in the same place. He also mentions when he has to "bend" the facts at certain points to make a better story, but it's fairly rare.
Just about every Silver AgeFlash story is solved using a random law of physics, expressed by Barry Allen (a forensic scientist) as a "Flash Fact". Wally West, thankfully, remembers the lessons from his days as Kid Flash, though now he has the Speed Force to help him with all the stuff that can't be done by physics (like breathing while running at near-lightspeed).
A famous example of this in the Barry Allen period is when the Flash is fighting an alien who has a destructive sheath of fire around him. What follows is a science lesson of the natural ways to put out a fire with each failing against the creature's extreme heat, until the speedster realizes that fire cannot exist without air and runs around the creature fast enough to drastically lower the air pressure enough within the circle to put out the flames and suffocate the alien.
Like the Flash, a lot of the Silver Age Atom stories were heavily grounded in science and spent quite some time teaching it to the kids. One particularly extreme example is a story that essentially told the story of the telescope with a teensy bit of super heroism thrown into the middle.
Alan Moore loves to do this. Probably the best example is From Hell, which features a lengthy annotations section describing the research he put into making the comic & the truth (or lack thereof) behind the more fantastic elements.
Neil Gaiman does this a lot with mythology. He also has a tendency, though, to come up with things that sound like they came from actual myth or history, but he really just pulled out of his ass to fit the plot. Finding out which is which is part of the fun.
Gaiman pretended at the end of Dream Hunters that the story was adapted from the tale "The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night's Dreaming", a traditional Japanese tale he had found in the book Fairy Tales of All Japan by Rev. B. W. Ashton while doing research for Princess Mononoke. This information was mentioned in almost every critics of the book. A few years later, Gaiman admitted in the preface of Endless Nights that he had completely made it up.
A similar example exists, though not based in mythology when he did research for American Gods. Having researched various cons for his con-artist character, he made up entirely the most overtly criminal of the cons - namely, stealing several thousand dollars from a bank. He was very surprised to find when someone actually copied the plan from the book and stole several thousand dollars from a bank.
Frank Abagale Jr. did that in Real Life decades before Gaiman put it on paper, though it's unclear if he knew about it while writing the book.
His Marvel 1602 really shows how much research he did into Marvel history, or just knew off the top of his head. For example, Nicholas Fury describes his organization as England's "shield", a reference to his "S.H.I.E.L.D." organization in the regular comics. However, he also mentions that Peter Parquagh's parents used to work for him. Most people don't know that Richard and May Parker were SHIELD agents.
Not to mention this universe's version of Iceman: the change between "Bobby Drake" and "Roberto Trefusis" is far from being made up. There's actually a lengthy explanation for this, which you can find in the Marvel 1602 article.
Garth Nix does something similar to the above, but it largely amounts to him throwing in every bit of cool-sounding mythology he can find. No one minds. In one of his books, he says how surprised he was when his editor informed him he couldn't use Aboriginal elements in his story because he was a white Australian.
Wolverine First Class had an issue about Wolverine helping a team of Canadian superheroes rescue the Governor-General of Canada, who was being held hostage in La Citadelle in Quebec City. It had accurate descriptions of Canada's government, fairly spot-on drawings of Canadian military uniforms, and a few nice bilingual bonuses.
Larry Niven did the prestige format "Ganthet's Tale" for Green Lantern, and inserted his own hard science twist to Hal Jordan's known abilities. Hal has to defeat a rogue green lantern, but they are too evenly matched. So Hal uses his ring to fly at near-lightspeed - backwards, away from the target. He then lets loose with a green energy beam of power. But because Hal is moving away at near-light, the beam is red-shifted, and transforms into a YELLOW beam, which bypasses the other lantern's defenses. This was used little if it all afterwards. Bizarrely enough, one of the few other places this turns up in was Superfriends, where Hal Jordan is able to free himself from a bubble created by Sinestro this way.
Clan Apis. Is a educational work that happens to also tell an interesting story. Jay Hosler is an entomologist/biologist and writes his works with education as the main point... though that's not to say that his works don't have a good narrative push. Another example of this is Optical Allusions and... well... you can tell by the title that he's done the research.
In Ex Machina, everyone slips statistics or historical factoids into their dialogue without missing a beat. Then again the main cast is the Mayor of New York City and his staff. Politicians are usually pretty good at spewing out statistics. This is lampshaded when Brian K Vaughan and Tony Harris meet by a statue (yes, inside the comic) and Brian starts to say something about the statue, until Tony interrupts him and pleads him not to say random factoids.
Kingdom Come couldn't possibly have been made without the most intimate understanding of every facet of the DCU.
Mark Waid, the man who wrote it, is known as "the living, breathing DC encyclopedia" due to the insane amount of knowledge he has on The DCU; to the point where DC sometimes holds "stump Mark Waid" contests at conventions just to find out what he doesn't know.
George Woodbridge was a Mad Magazine artist for over forty years. He was also one of the world's foremost experts on historical military uniforms. Every time he drew military personnel, their uniforms were accurate down to the right kind of buttons for the time period.
Y: The Last Man can get annoying when it Shows Its Work. Such as when characters randomly start spouting statistics about exactly how many women are involved in which professions in which parts of the world.
When it comes to adding random (albeit often relevant) factoids into the dialogue, Peter David can outdo Brian K Vaughan any day.
In 52 the writers intended to have ReneeMontoya be an actual alcoholic, not a light-hearted Bottle Fairy. To help illustrate this, in one scene she takes a pair of aspirin while on a stakeout. The panel where she puts the pills in her mouth was specifically drawn to give the impression that she was chewing the pills and not just swallowing them; this is, apparently, "an old drunks trick."
Greg Rucka did a shocking amount of research on the geography, history, weather and politics of Antarctica for his first comic, Whiteout. The portrayal of the continent itself and the behavior of research stations and governments on its territory has been heralded as one of the most accurate depictions of Antarctica in American media.
Anything Pat Mills has written.
Larry Hama is a Vietnam veteran, military expert, and Japanophile. This is apparent in the level of detail that appears whenever he writes a comic book dealing with those topics, such as G.I. Joe and Nth Man The Ultimate Ninja.
Early on in The Losers, some random criminals are ambushed while doing a deal at a dock, near their car. One advises his colleague to hide near the wheel well of the car, since bodywork won't stop their attackers' bullets, while the engine probably would. There are not many people who know this. There are even less who would mention it in the middle of an ambush.
Many of Mike Mignolia's Hellboy stories are essentially retellings of documented folktales, often using details that would usually be lost in modern versions. For example, "The Corpse" is mostly derived from "Teig O'Kane and the Corpse," which originally appeared in a compilation of Irish folklore edited by William Butler Yeats.
Before writing the Mega Man comic, Ian Flynn heavily researched the series, and it shows. Chest, Plum, and Ripot from the obscure Mascot RacerBattle & Chase appear in the first issue reporting on Light's new robots, that issue's Short Circuits has a Mythology Gag to both the cartoon and the hilariously bad American box art of the first game, and Fire Man retains his Southern accent from Mega Man Powered Up.
A lot of details went into the researching behind the locations, schools and universities that appear in the Tsubasa Reservoir Chroniclereal-world AUFreefall, as well as the symptoms of leukaemia, which a main character is diagnosed with early in the plotline.
The author of Hogyoku Ex Machina asked her high school readers if they could define tuberculosis without using Wikipedia to determine if Ichigo and friends would reasonably know.
Film
Before making Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick and several of his collaborators read dozens of reports made by the Air Force and the RAND Corporation. Dr. Strangelove himself is caricature of Wernher von Braun, Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. Interestingly it was Kahn who suggested the Doomsday Machine, which was exactly the kind of defense that Herman Kahn fought against in his work. This attention to the smallest technical and military details is where the film gets its infamous nervous humor. Additionally, at the time of the filming, the interior of a B-52 was highly classified. The film crew made up the layout and look by extrapolation from the older B-29, and laid out the floor plan based on the external measurements of the 52. They did such a good job, the Air Force was concerned briefly that they had an insider source.
Along with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick made the same effort with 2001: A Space Odyssey, in regards to space travel and general scientific accuracy, even though the atomic-powered spaceship does not have radiator fins to get rid of the reactor's waste heat. The makers intentionally left them off, because after a decade teaching the public that there is no air in space, they didn't want them wondering why the spacecraft has wings.
The makers of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World extended Patrick O'Brian's already-extensive shown work by digging deep into history for minute costume and hairstyle details (subsequently rendered in period-appropriate materials with period-appropriate techniques), the inner and outer workings of period-specific tall ships (they fired actual cannons to get the sound effect right), and cultural miscellany to illustrate the backdrop of the film. All extras and actors filmed aboard the ship were put through a "boot camp" to prepare them for their shipboard duties, and most of the filming actually took place at sea aboard a replica of an 18th-century tall ship.
The Galaxy Song in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life is pretty damn accurate for being a joke in a humour movie. Eric Idle has performed that song several times since it was in the movie, and where people have given him better approximations for the distances and speeds mentioned, he sometimes works them in. Remember, they were graduates of Cambridge.
Once showcases Glen Hansard's knowledge of the minutiae of busking, such as cover versions earning far more than original songs.
Since it was a Deconstructive Parody, the creators of Hot Fuzz spent a good deal of time in research and interviews of actual police forces, which doesn't become fully noticeable until you see the "Fuzz Fact" commentary. For instance, they were spot-on about all the politically-correct vocabulary guidelines, and the "unofficial punishments" of making officers buy donuts and ice-cream for minor offences such as forgetting their hats. The best part? Instead of sudden Genre Shift into documentary, all these details are woven into the characterisation, such as showing the protagonist as being particularly stuffy and by-the-book for following all the vocab guidelines to the letter.
The scenes where the officers are filling paperwork were added specifically because the cops they interviewed lamented that paperwork is the biggest facet of the job and the one least seen in the media. This inspired the director to make those scenes where paperwork is presented like if it was an action scene, with Nick Angel eventually going Pens Akimbo while filling forms.
The Matrix Reloaded features a brief glimpse of Trinity hacking a power grid mainframe. Compared with most films' dumbed-down portrayals of "hacking a computer", this instance is remarkably realistic, despite being on-screen for only a few seconds, and references actual hacking tools and known security vulnerabilities (circa 2001). It is likely the creators felt the need to "get it right" since the concept of computer hacking is a central theme in the Matrix films.
The 1983 film WarGames was remarkably accurate in its portrayal of how David does hacking, even if the capabilities of the computers themselves was beyond the reality of the time. Though even the writers acknowledge that Joshua should not have been speaking at NORAD, but the viewer is used to hearing the voice.
Jurassic Park is quite famous for its realistic depiction of Dinosaurs. Not only did the movie had spectacular effects and animatronics but their movement, according to experts, was also modeled quite realistically. Bipedals run like bipedals and T. Rex takes the right stance when lowers its head to feed or bite the car's tires in its first attack. Actually, the animators did in-depth research about the movement of the dinosaurs and tested things on their selves like running and jumping obstacles, before animating the scene with the flock of Gallimimuses (being bipedal species). This is unlike depiction of massive animals, like in Jackson's King Kong (including Kong himself and the dinosaurs).
Unfortunately, it's already fallen afoul of Science Marches On. While the behavior of the dinosaurs is correct, their appearance is almost certainly not— at the time the movie was made, there was an active debate over whether velociraptors were feathered. Now, we're almost entirely certain they were.
Insecurity has a very realistic depiction of hacking. The writer and director is a professional computer programmer, and the actors were capable of writing authentic code on-screen. If you know a little about computers, it is a very rewarding movie.
The rocket launch sequence in Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon - in spite of the fact that rockets don't need to be submerged in water - was extremely accurate and done entirely to justify the studio's hiring of German rocket scientists for the production. This probably makes it the best scene in the film as it contrasts with how much Lang's wife/coauthor Thea von Harbou made up convenient things about the moon: she depicts it with normal gravity, gold-filled caves, and a perfectly breathable atmosphere (what's more, it's a perfect half-atmosphere which exists only on the far side of the moon). All these ideas would have been considered ludicrous even at the time of the film's release.
At the Pearl Harbor memorial base, there is an informative video that tourists can watch that gives a detailed analysis of the battle, including, at one point, a complete survey of the defenses that they had in place which made them confident that they could resist an attack. The Ben Affleck film Pearl Harbor had a character awkwardly quote it word-for-word.
The screenwriters of X2: X-Men United did research on how to blow up a dam for the climactic scenes of the movie; this went mostly unremarked upon in the film (though no doubt the director and effects artists got some use out of it), but was described at some length in the novelization.
Ghostbusters, of all movies, goes to great lengths to show its work, at least when it comes to parapsychology. The script didn't invent ectoplasm: according to parapsychology, it's the residue of telekinetic contact, and having it appear as a result of spectral contact isn't much of a stretch. Virtually every paranormal event Egon and Ray reference, from the symmetrical bookstacking case to the Tunguska explosion, are all real events (although Ray misstates the year of The Tunguska Event), and the way Peter handles Dana's possession, though played for laughs, follows the advice of both exorcists and secular psychologists about never letting the alternate personality intimidate or take control of the situation. And if there's any doubt that Dana's apartment building was indeed built as a portal for the fictional Sumerian god Gozer, it's dispelled by the fact that the top of the building is an accurate recreation of a Sumerian ziggurat. Most of this research comes from co-creator Dan Aykroyd, whose enthusiasm for the paranormal inspired the movie in the first place, and later led to his hosting a documentary series on the supernatural and producing a documentary film on UFO's.
Sneakers is a very accurate depiction of cryptology and hacking. It, in fact, literally shows its work: in one scene, a character is using an overhead projector and transparencies. The mathematics there were written by the movie's consultant, Dr. Len Adleman. As in, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman encryption.
Even the magic decryption box is fairly plausible. Like every cryptographic algorithm ever invented except one (one time pad cryptography), public key cryptography has yet to be proven secure. If someone figured out how to reduce the time complexity of prime factorization from exponential to polynomial time, they might be able to decrypt things that we currently consider to be completely secure.
The Apollo 13 movie. There are a few technical inaccuracies and blended characters and such, but these are primarily in service to the Artistic License and Rule of Drama. The director and Tom Hanks, in the "making of Apollo 13" documentary which was part of the collector's edition, were referred to as the "accuracy police" by someone who worked on it. The actor who played the flight director compared working on the film to cramming for finals - getting all this information in their heads and focusing on it the night before they did it. They even had Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, there every day to make sure that they flipped the right switches and everything.
Scott: "I'm really impressed with the authenticity of the way they're doing this. They're so interested in getting this accurate and precise down to not only the word, but the inflection of the word and the meaning behind the word."
The misquote of Lovell saying "Houston, we have a problem" rather than "Houston, we've had a problem" has been stated to have been intentional, with the reasoning being that they didn't like the use of past tense, for whatever reason (perhaps Rule of Drama, to keep the audience's tension in the moment).
The set for Mission Control was so faithful to the original that at least one real-life Mission Control tech from NASA, who was brought in to evaluate the set, caught himself expecting the elevator from the NASA building when he left through the side door.
Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes shows an incredible amount of knowledge of, not only the original novels, but 1800s London and some other Holmes media. Considering Guy Ritchie and the screen writer are fans and that many of people who worked on the film have shown a good deal of knowledge on the books, it should be of no surprise. Sadly, due to the many unfaithful adaptions of Sherlock Holmes, many people have taken accurate things as Holmes being a bohemian, boxing, using martial arts, Watson being a lady's man and a man of action, Holmes using a revolver, Holmes's sense of humor, Holmes sword fighting, Watson's pitbull, and so on as being unnaccurate when the makers of the film should be getting credit for showing that they know their Holmes.
Tremors shows some good research in Burt Gummer; he and his wife debate the utility of a .223 AR-15 vs. a .375 H&H bolt gun, and the Wrong Goddamned Rec Room has not only a Dillon progressive reloading press but a very large vibratory case cleaner. Also, as one would expect from a man like Burt, he's completely aware of and obeys proper gun safety measures.
They also do pretty well with their geology terminology.
Pixar has become noted for this, especially in some of their most recent films. Some highlights: (just watch the DVD extras for all the details)
In Toy Story, animators wore shoes bolted to 2x4s to figure out how toy soldiers would actually walk.
Coral reefs and particularly how things move underwater for Finding Nemo.
Cars is full of an astounding amount of detail. The King is Richard Petty's iconic 1970 Plymouth Superbird, down to virtually every detail, and his crash at the end of the film is a chillingly exact recreation of Petty's 1988 Daytona 500 crash. (Now watch the movie again and realize that that crash actually happened, with a person inside the car and try not to get goosebumps.) The sound engineers recorded engine sounds of the exact make and models of each kind of car featured in the film so they would sound exactly right even though virtually none of the audience would know any difference. The King's wife is voiced by Petty's Real Life wife and was modeled after the car Mrs. Petty drove in to follow her husband to races earlier in his career.
In Ratatouille, Pixar consulted with chefs and restaurateurs and key animators took gourmet cooking classes to make sure they could get as much right about the way a restaurant works as possible. They even got a haute cuisine chef to show how the craft works and used Collette's mentoring montage to show that research off. That sequence serves not only to establish verisimilitude in that story, but also to develop Colette's character and encourage the heroes and the audience's respect for her.
Not just Colette's speeches, but every scene that SETS up how the restaurant operates is true to life. Up to and including how a restaurant deals with pushy big-name food critics.
For the scene where Linguini jumps into the river after Remy, one of the animators jumped into a pool wearing a chef's uniform so they could accurately portray a soaking wet uniform.
Even the rats' social organization underwent a little research, as they properly refer to their group as a "colony" rather than a pack, and don't have obvious leaders aside from older rats advising their children.
The WALLE crew spent considerable time studying and using actual film cameras like the 70mm Panavision and consulted with famous cinematographers Roger Deacon and Dennis Muren to make the the movie appear as if it had been filmed rather than rendered. They also spent a lot of research on silent acting, because of the limited expressions of Wall-E and Eve. In fact, the little dialogue in the film, and how they got Wall-E and Eve to express so much emotion despite not having faces, is what got the movie so much praise.
Not only is Elastigirl's radio chatter while flying a plane in The Incredibles accurate, the voice actress researched what the jargon actually meant, meaning it sounds realistic as well.
Several Pixar artists went to a South American plateau for a realistic look and inspiration for Up (not exactly a day trip). The rock shaped like a turtle is based on a real rock they saw, as well as the rock they mistook for a person. Considering how alien and fantastic the place looked, it is amazing when you realize how accurate it is, especially since very few people would be able to notice any inaccuracy.
Even the seemingly random changes in the film's weather (such as how quickly mist clears away) is actually par for the course on those real-life plateaus; according to the DVD commentary, the research team almost got trapped there because of sudden rainstorms.
In fact, the animators had actually said that they had to leave out several species of plants because they thought it would look TOO unnatural.
Steve McQueen's 1970 Le Mans would have made a perfectly good documentry. Half the film is the real race anyway, and posterity would've loved to have Steve McQueen interviewing the drivers of the time.
Gattaca has a close to perfect depiction of a leg lengthening device.
The film version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has a scaled-up but otherwise beautifully accurate version of the New York storm drain system as a major set piece.
The military chatter heard throughout in Transformers is real. Michael Bay specifically asked his extras (most of whom are played by real US soldiers) to simply say and do exactly what they normally would do in the situation presented in the script. It also features many accurate military maneuvers and procedures quoted and carried out.
The makers of the film Gojira did a lot of hard work to make the aftermath of Godzilla's attack on Tokyo look eerily similar to what Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after they were hit by the atomic bomb. Considering the original film is an allegory about the horrors of atomic warfare, yeah...
While not always accurate, Osmosis Jones portrays human physiology rather more correctly than a cartoon about a talking white blood cell might be expected to. When reminiscing about his family's history on the police force/immune system, Jones refers to his ancestors having come over on the umbilical cord; before it has bone marrow, a human embryo's blood cells really are manufactured in a yolk sac, which connects to the belly via the umbilical cord (as does the placenta).
The creators also worked with a real martial arts expert to accurately portray Thrax's fighting style.
The creators of the original The Wicker Man did extensive research on the religion of pre-Christian Celts. Unfortunately they did the research on the work of Sir James Frazer, who himself was only talking in terms of 'probability' rather than 'actuality' and only intended his work to be supporting evidence for the earlier work done by Sir John Rhys. Accuracy of both is debated.
Whether or not this is actually indicative of extensive research, a prominent linguistics professor commented that, while most Hollywood films are woefully inaccurate at portraying secondary language acquisition, The Terminal got it surprisingly right.
In addition, Viktor Navorski's native language is very consistent with what Eastern European languages are like (it's a dialect of Bulgarian). Tom Hanks' wife, Rita Wilson, is of Bulgarian descent and so Hanks went to her for voice coaching.
For In the Loop, director Armando Iannucci ensured he could create a realistic portrayal of the US State Department by illegally infiltrating it. He later described this extreme research as "probably international espionage."
The story of the Titanic in A Night to Remember was based on the official findings of the enquiry into the disaster and is widely hailed as the most realistic depiction. The only real error it makes is showing the ship sinking in one piece. But statements that it broke into two pieces were, at best, disputed at the time the movie was made, and that the titanic broke intotwopieces before it sank was only confirmed in 1985 when the wreckage was discovered.
And speaking of the Titanic, James Cameron's blockbuster film featured a re-creation of the doomed ship so authentic that, when he flooded the set to film the ship going under water, real-life Titanic salvagers derived a new explanation of what happened to the spiral staircase based on what happened to the set.
The film of The Good Earth is painstakingly accurate to the actual look of turn-of-the-century Chinese rural life, notably including in the beginning a scene of Wang Lung's neighbors operating a traditional Chinese foot-powered water mill, despite being filmed in 1937. (Originally they wanted to cast only Chinese actors, as well, but the studio declared that apparently American audiences weren't ready for that.)
Inception is a film that runs on Applied Phlebotinum, but that's not to say everything is handwaved away. Christopher Nolan consulted with several PhD or MD-holding psychologists and somatic experts to come up with the various things characters do within dreams. The DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film include a documentary called "Dreams: The Cinema of the Subconscious", in which these experts are interviewed. Among them is notable "lucid dreamer" Alan Worsley, who was the first to use eye-movement as a signal to those in the real world that he was aware that he was dreaming. The concept of the "totems" is also based on "reality-checking", which is how lucid dreamers tell if they are in a dream or reality, since the brain can't differentiate between the two.
My Cousin Vinny is one of the more accurate depictions of the U.S. legal system, regarding procedure and attorney conduct. It is even listed by the American Bar Association as one of the top "Courtroom Films".
The makers went to great lengths to accurately build a German POW camp for The Great Escape. Of course, it did help that several of the actors had been prisoners of war during WW 2. Donald Pleasence, who had been in a German POW camp, made a few suggestions to John Sturges, who wasn't aware of that fact, and was told to keep his opinions to himself. However, when the director learned that Donald Pleasence knew what he was talking about, he was asked for advice all the time.
Many Michael Mann movies fall into this category, but special mention must go to Heat and Collateral.
No funeral pyres to see in Immortals; Theseus buries his mother exactly the way the Greeks buried their dead in 13th century B.C.: the completely shrouded corpse laid to rest in a vault inside a massive tomb... which is where the film's MacGuffin happens to be.
Sucker Punch: The girls keep their rifles on their shoulders, roll in their steps rather than bouncing, and never cross lines of fire when clearing a room (and clearing the room they went from cover to cover, interlocking fields of fire). The firearms savvy troper will recognize EoTech holographic sites, historically accurate firearms (even the Samurai's 20mm version minigun), and a suppressed M4. Even handling a semi-automatic firearm, Baby Doll only crosses her thumbs in back once, but with hands that tiny it's believable she didn't catch the Colt Hammer Bite (when the slide comes back in the cycling of the action and cleaves any flesh in its way).
After they clear the first room in the castle, Rocket signals to Sweet Pea (who is covering the stairs leading away from the room and thus not looking back at the others behind her) that they're ready to move on by giving her a pat on the shoulder, the same as real-life operators working in pairs.
During the production of The Way of the Gun, director Christopher McQuarrie's brother, an expert in firearms training and squad tactics, was brought onboard as a firearms supervisor and consultant - and it shows. Throughout the film, Parker and Longbaugh use effective movement tactics (the "Move-Moving" scene), perform the correct close-quarters entry procedures whenever they enter a room, use tactical reloads and generally perform as a cohesive pair of experienced weapon operators.
In the original Robocop, a sequence depicting Alex Murphy's transport to a Detroit hospital doesn't use actors for the team that brings him into the operating room - it's an actual trauma team using real terminology ("Let's shock a flatline and quit...") and proper medical and diagnosis procedures.
The writers of Contagion consulted real-life epidemiologists when writing their script. If you know anything about epidemic disease, it's possible to appreciate the movie on a whole additional level.
Literature
Willard Price's Adventure series. Starring two brothers as zoologists traveling around the world collecting rare animals, the series includes, among other things, volcano spelunking, undersea exploration, old-school whaling expedition, and elephant hunting. Each book has a healthy sprinkling of fun facts about the locale the brothers are currently in.
Very badly done in every Dirk Pitt novel ever written. Especially clunky in the Sahara novel (this story was changed for the filmversion) wherein Clive Cussler spends a good two pages explaining exactly how the equipment on Dirk and Al's boat works, right down to the most minute and unnecessary details, just to prove he knows all about what he's talking about.
The Sahara film also cut out a good deal of the plot's best/silliest parts, including the novel's climactic battle and several subplots, a blackmail attempt against the female head of the UN, a slave camp full of civilians, cannibal natives driven mad by the Big Bad's pollutants, and a Confederate abduction of Abraham Lincoln to Africa aboard the ironclad.Fans still complained.
Larry Niven is so seamless and smooth at Showing His Work that oft-times readers will learn some obscure fact about physics, astronomy, geology, or chemistry and not even realize they've been taught until they reread one of Niven's stories years later.
At conventions, Niven sometimes tells the story of his first professional sale as a science fiction author, to Amazing Stories magazine. Between the time the editor accepted his story, The Coldest Place, and the time it was published, the science behind Niven's story was proven to be false. Niven was so bothered by getting the science wrong that he tried to send the check he was paid back to the magazine. Amazing Stories ended up publishing anyway, because at the time the story was written and the story sold, the science behind the story was spot-on.
On the other hand, he as been known to get the direction of the Earth's rotation wrong on occasion, such as in Ringworld. This was fixed in later editions. And indeed the Ringworld itself had a design flaw - unlike a planet, it would not be in a stable self-correcting orbit: the moment the sun is off-centre, the world begins to fall into the sun, and gets there startlingly quickly. In the sequel, Niven had to introduce a mechanism to deal with this.
The Langston Field, the shielding device used on many of Niven's ships (and ships of fellow writer Jerry Pournelle's Co Dominium series) was "invented" by real-world physicist Dr. Dan Alderson who worked with Niven in many of his novels; the Alderson Drive which propels most ships in the Niven/Pournelle universe is named after him.
Though when it comes to anything biology related, Niven's books tend to become a painful stream of critical research failures. Having humans (but no other earth life) descended from aliens makes it pretty much impossible for biologists (and people who know at least a bit about biology) to suspend disbelief.
Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels are one of the best examples of this trope. First time readers tend to assume it was simply written by a contemporary author.
Horatio Hornblower also can appear to be a contemporary novel. Both actually mentioned how much bunk space crewmen had.
Dudley Pope 's Ramage series also appears as if it was written at the time. It helps that there's at least one young midshipman around, eager for instruction in the art of seamanship, and so exposition can be disguised as lessons and/or important instructions given in the heat of battle.
Each of K. J. Parker's novels is replete with technical information. This could be quite irritating if the reader is not interested, but several reviewers have noted the skill with which is integrated with the story. Parker makes things in Real Life and this comes through: for example while writing The Scavenger Trilogy he worked in a smithy. From a tongue-in-cheek interview about the Fencer Trilogy:
Q: If you could write your own quote for the front cover of your novel, what would it be?
Jules Verne would include physics formulas in his science fiction to demonstrate their general plausibility, as in From The Earth To The Moon, which only ignored the limits to the thrust a living human can withstand. This created problems when translating his work into English back in the day, as Verne used the metric system, which no English-speaking country was familiar with at the time. Many Just Didn't Care, and replaced "kilometers" with "miles", etc., rendering the numbers nonsensical.
When Tom Clancy was an individual writer, before he became a franchised name, showing his work on the subject of arms, the military, and military technology was his hallmark, to the point where descriptions of the various weapons and vehicles interfere with the story. Not so much on sociological, and political subjects. Since he licensed his name, the accuracy level is as likely to fall into Dan Browned territory as not.
The Sum of All Fears (which includes a great deal of information on the construction of nuclear weapons), he wrote to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory requesting information about the equipment used for the purpose. They sent him copies of the manuals for the machines they use, and various other information. He was apparently not expecting any reply to his request, and was quite surprised when the package showed up in the mail.
Fortunately for us, The Sum of All Fears also contained an intentional aversion of this trope (similar to the Stephen King example below), where Tom Clancy meticulously described what is actually a wrong way to build a nuclear bomb. Those sections read like any other carefully-researched description of military hardware in his books, but Clancy made sure the details were such that anyone following his "instructions" would fail to make a working warhead.
Double Subversion in The Hunt for Red October. After he wrote that, the FBI came in to ask him just where he learned about the Los Angeles-class submarine's inertial navigation system, which was top secret. Actually, he had made it all up from what he knew about submarine warfare...and his made-up version was pretty much dead-on accurate.
Also from Red October is one of the most accurate depictions of exactly what happens when a nuclear reactor goes into melt down; hint it melts
Stephen King certainly seems to do his research when writing a book, to the point that, in the author comments about a short novel, he explains that the way the character starts an excavation machine without the keys (written in detail) is not going to work. He intentionally wrote it wrong to avoid providing criminal knowledge to readers; still he alerts the reader that a specific wire can kill you due to high power electricity.
Amusingly, King has mentioned before that he actually hates explaining how things work, citing Firestarter as a prime example of how he didn't put much thought or research into genetics—the psychic powers in that book having been jump-started by doctored LSD and passed on to the child that a couple of characters had.
When you think about how the hormone DES, taken by pregnant women, caused fertility problems and reproductive cancers in their daughters, though apparently no problems in their sons, but now problems are showing un in their granddaughters by those sons (and by daughters as well, the ones who overcame fertility problems), it seems that chemical alterations are not simple Lamarckian, cutting off rats' tails sorts of changes. Some of it may be related to the fact that DES mothers were women who simply wouldn't have reproduced at all without DES, but the AMA and College of OB and Gynecology generally agree among and between themselves, that the hormone is responsible for the problems into a third generation. Agent Orange caused problems in the children of Vietnam soldiers exposed to it, even though those children were conceived years after their fathers' exposure. While the psychic powers themselves, of the parents in Firestarter require belief-suspension, the passing-them-on-to-children as a result of drug exposure does not.
Jean Auel's Ice Age Earth's Children saga shows its work in a big way — sometimes leading to extreme cognitive dissonance, when we go from descriptions of different kinds of Ice Age tundra grasses to softcore caveman porn (or vice versa) in the space of a few pages...or paragraphs, in one notable case.
Quite comparable to Earth's Children, Björn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger is another novel of the Ice Age which makes constant pauses in its story to relate tidbits of information on Scandinavian flora and fauna of 35,000 years ago. It also deals with the culture and society of various groups of hunter-gather Cro-Magnon and Neandertals in great detail.
In Brett Easton Ellis' book American Psycho, Patrick Bateman describes the clothing of almost every character he encounters, referencing many popular brands from the specific era and culture of late-eighties Wall Street. According to Ellis, he purposely dressed the characters in outfits that sounded accurate and plausible on paper — if you were to see them, however, the characters would look ridiculous. This idea was ignored in the movie, as all the characters are very sharp dressers.
There is one scene where Patrick Bateman puts on two neckties at once.
He does the same thing with food starting out with unusual but plausible culinary creations (red snapper pizza, swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade) and drifting into the absurd (mud soup) as Bateman's connection to reality becomes more strained.
The novel Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder was written to double as a textbook on the history of philosophy. The author even has one character explicitly state this at one point in the book, as part of what definitely qualifies as a Wham Chapter. Thus, chapters advancing the plot are alternated with texts (and later lectures) from the mysterious correspondence course in philosophy that Sophie is receiving. For readers who have an interest in philosophy or who are interested in a comprehensive and readable introduction to the subject, Sophie's World makes a fascinating and thought-provoking read. Unfortunately, readers who are expecting a simple novel tend to feel that the sections on philosophy (which make up fully half of the book) slow the plot down too much, even if the plot itself was designed largely to illustrate and dramatize the philosophy.
One of the strangest examples is Eleanor Hibbert, who wrote historical novels about the crowned heads of Europe under the pen name Jean Plaidy. Her novels are more likely to be historically accurate than those of any other English author of her time. She was the first English-language novelist to portray Lucrezia Borgia as less than a Complete Monster - and the historical record bears her out.
Robert Graves wrote the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God after translating the works of Horace and Suetonius for Oxford University Press.
Robert Graves was a historian. Most if not all of his novels show the theories that he couldn't prove historical, most notably King Jesus, also The Golden Fleece.
In Diane Carey's Star Trek novel Ship of the Line, she makes sure you know by the end that she knows a lot about sailing. If you thought Space Was An Ocean in the series, you ain't seen nothing yet. This is also a case of Author Appeal — Carey sails in real life. This also comes up in her other Trek: TOS novels Battlestations! and The Great Starship Race.
Also, in two different Romulan-related novels by Andy Mangels and Michael Martin, it's very, very clear that all the finer details of Romulan measurements of time, distance, etc. are worked out. With this much made-up alien jargon clogging the works, what's not remotely clear is about how long, far, etc. something is expected to be — or even what they're referring to.
Older Than You Think: they based a lot of their work on Diane Duane's TOS Romulan and Vulcan-centered novels, which are brilliant, if slightly bewildering.
Hah. Try Duane's The Wounded Sky, a marvellous and incredible, if ever so slightly headache-inducing, novel about what happens when entropy stops, time no longer exists, and a gash is torn in the fabric of the universe. On top of that, be prepared for philosophizing about the true nature of different people, cycles of life and death, and the birth of Creation (and a God, on top of that). And the rules of physics. And how to make them up. Just... if you want to really comprehend that novel, get several graduate degrees in theoretical physics, philosophy, psychology, and religion. Doesn't stop it from being awesome.
Richard Adams' extensive research into the most intimate details of lapine (rabbit) biology and sociology in Watership Down enabled him to create a fantasy milieu more detailed — yet less pedantic — than many similar worlds involving "higher" life-forms. Result: a book about rabbits that's become an undisputed classic of human literature.
Robert Jordan was (in)famous for this. In the Wheel of Time you would get realistic military uses, you would hear Mat talk about how to use Light Cavalry to chase a retreating opponents, you would see realistic effects of crossbows, and you would see plausible military campaigns. Not all of this was to the story's benefit; Jordan could go on for many paragraphs about the clothing of the 17th through 19th centuries, which, even as long-winded as it is, created distinctive features for the Loads and Loads of Characters
Jordan actually went so far to accumulate a huge collection of antique weapons from different cultures mainly for research purposes. When he wanted to write about a weapon, he would buy one, go to the backyard, and get a feel for it.
He also did a quite accurate description of Perrin's work as a blacksmith.
Similarly, S. M. Stirling's Emberverse novels go into great depth describing the various medieval weaponry adopted by the survivors, as well as the intricacies of Feudal, Pagan, Norse, Roman, etc. cultures that emerge in the aftermath of the Change. Stirling has confessed to being a "research fiend" who occasionally has to rein himself in and "actually get to writing the book."
Stirling is a huge mixed bag in the Emberverse, his geography and economical understanding of the area is horrible. He goes out of his way to make the major rivers historically filled with barges and riverboats unused just so he can have bikes doing mass movements of goods. He also doesn't research the area going into hippy and new age groups when the area he puts most of the action has a massive Mennonite community.
Robert Asprin's Myth Adventures novels often have a chapter in which a minor character describes his or her mundane job in detail, within the fantasy-world setting but with all the same principles as the real-world version of the job. Sometimes there are details that turn out important to the plot later... usually not so much. Sometimes there's comedy to be found from the job existing at all within the setting... usually not so much. In one case, a character shows up for the sole purpose of delivering a lecture about how hard it is to be a fashion model...to a character from a medieval world who has no idea what she's talking about.
Asprin does so in his non-Myth books, too. In the second Phule's Company book, for example, there's detailed descriptions of Casino security, gambling and common cheating methods (word to the wise: knowing how something is done and being able to do it are two different things. Don't Try This at Home.)
Asprin suffered from bouts of severe writer's block, and would spend months researching topics like fencing, to the point he'd become something of an expert in them.
When writing At the Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft strove to get as many things correct about Antarctica as possible. Unfortunately, Science Marched On and invalidated parts of it; most notably, the idea that the Antarctic continent is actually split down the middle.
The proof that the Antarctic wasn't split into two parts was found when Lovecraft was finishing writing, so he did hastily correct that fact in the story (the narrator tells how the exploration team at that time thought the continet was split in the middle but it was later proven wrong). And there obviously isn't a mountain taller than Mt. Everest in Antarctica, but removing that would kinda mess up the whole plot.
Lovecraft also spent large amounts of time studying the architecture of his home town Providence, which shows in extremely detailed descriptions of colonial houses that often appear in his stories. "Case of Charles Dexter Ward" in particular features a description of Providence which was 100% accurate down to the last detail at the time of its writing.
The concept of "aether" instead of the void of space was scientifically accurate at the time of his writing—but Science Marched On and now the Mi-go using space-wings to fly like hideous fungoid bats seems a bit odd.
There was a time where hideous fungoid bats flying was normal?
The concept of aether was disproved well before Lovecraft wrote his novels - much of his works was inspired by the expanding knowledge to physics and astronomy in his time - but he used a poetic license to describe his creatures. He occasionally implies that the way they fly through space is a bit more mysterious than that, but keeps deliberately vague (the general Fanon consensus is that their "wings" are organic solar sails).
Moby Dick: it's a great novel if you ignore half of it. It's an encyclopedia of seafaring if you ignore the other half. The longest chapter in the book is an excerpt from a book about whale biology.
Whatever else might be said about it, Christopher Paolini's Brisingr has a chapter, Mind Over Metal, where Eragon forges a magical sword with the help of elven blacksmith Rhünon, where the entire process of forging a sword is shown in a high level of detail, except for the magic-induced modifications to make the whole process faster.
Didn't stop that chapter from being picked to pieces in the sporking and its discussion, contributed to by people who do actually know something of blacksmithing.
Specifically, he used the method used for making a katana. As is fairly common knowledge, katana are made with different types of steel for the spine and blade. As is less commonly known, but easily discovered by a quick Google search, they're forged straight, and that the reason they're curved is that when it's quenched, the harder steel of the edge expands while the softer spine is still red-hot, causing it to curve (the spine will bend, but not stretch). Can you think of a problem with a double edged sword, in which, when quenched, both edges will try to expand despite being welded to a not-expanding spine? There's nowhere for the curve to go! So this is a scene which is mostly Shown Their Work, except for a huge Critical Research Failure.
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo spends sixty pages (in the 1400-page printing) describing the Battle of Waterloo. Only the last two pages, in which we learn that Marius's father mistakenly believes Thénardier (far more villainous in the book than in the musical) saved his life there, have any relevance to the plot.
There's also a history of the building of the Paris sewers and a whole chapter on Parisian underground slang. (The slang chapter is an appendix in at least some copies, presumably because it has no plot whatsoever.)
Additionally, there's a set of chapters on the practices, tradition, and history of this one convent where two characters spend several years, while analyzing the history and purpose of the monastic life in contemporary France. There's also a chapter on the life of prostitutes, which was cut from the original edition, but appears in some versions as an appendix.
Hugo justified this by saying that his book chronicled a changing century: what happened at Waterloo affected the entire world and everyone in it. Plus bumping the number of chapters up to 365 is really convenient.
Likewise, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo goes to considerable lengths to describe Parisian architecture, although this too is thematically relevant.
Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay does this to give the (fictional) book a sense of being real history. Footnotes and small diversions from the narrative detail historical events and/or the actions of real people who are at times present in the narrative (such as Salvador Dali), as well as tracing the history of comic books throughout, and offering small 'gossipy' tidbits on certain subjects. It actually works brilliantly, although the reader is never quite sure which parts are real and which aren't.
A good deal of the book version of The Perfect Storm is spent detailing the history and mechanics of Gloucester's fishing industry. It's not a novel, but a Dramatization of a true story—most of which took place on a fishing boat where we don't know much about what went down. Establishing the context of the fishery, and then filling in the events speculatively from that, was the best the reporter could do.
The James Bond novels are full of this; Bond originally used a Beretta, but a Major Boothroyd (yes, the source of Q's full name) wrote to Ian Fleming and advised him to change his Weapon of Choice.
This is referenced in the film Doctor No, wherein the quartermaster demands Bond surrender his Beretta in favor of the iconic Walther.
This applies particularly in terms of foodstuff. Fleming ate, drank and smoked a lot of the stuff that Bond does, probably contributing in a major way to his fatal heart attack at 56.
Probably not regularly. There was an article about the late Fleming in which an old friend is quoted as saying that, refined though Bond's tastes were, dinner at Ian's tended to leave something to be desired. The food, he continues, was so nasty that people would cross themselves before taking a bite, and he himself at least once actually commented on it. But there was old Ian, smacking his lips for more.
One history of the Freemasons commented that Voltaire was far too independent-minded to join the Freemasons, then wrote about Voltaire for about ten to twenty pages.
Julian May's Saga Of The Exiles, Intervention and Galactic Milieu are replete with technical knowledge, trade expertise and personal knowledge. In particular, the field of geology is referred to in some depth, and terms like "diatreme" are used, where many authors would be happy just to say "volcano". One of the Exile novels has an appendix apologizing for taking some liberties with Pliocene geology for the sake of the story, which is another way of Showing Your Work.
Arthur C. Clarke, being one of the original hard sci-fi authors, tended to explain the scientific background of his novels in appendices or "author's notes" sections, especially towards the end of his career. Thankfully he was pretty good at keeping the details out of the plot and dialogue (he assigns his own short Jupiter V to the category of the "gimmick story" where some neat little bit of science takes over the plot).
Travis S. Taylor does this sort of thing fairly often as well, sometimes putting portions or explanations of the formulas in the book, but mostly leaving them for the afterword. He gets away with it on the rare occasions where it takes over the plot because he happens to have a Ph.D. in the physics involved.
There's at least a few things he's gotten wrong, because his work deals with astrophysics rather than nanoscience. He gets rather upset when you bring them up. Specifically Von Neuman's War has with handwaving the effect of an EMP on the Von Neuman Machines saying they are hardened for space and are thus immune. For the sake of tropers outside the field, if something can send and recieve signals on a specific wavelength, it will absorb energy on that wavelength. So if you use Wifi frequencies to send your commands, an eletronic bomb this disables Wifi will at the very least disrupt the Von Neuman machines commucations on the same frequencies.
Yulia Latynina's "economic thrillers" are like that, predictably enough, seeing as she is probably one of the most prominent modern Russian economic journalists. The same goes for economic, social and political details in her sci-fi novels.
Neal Stephenson is pretty infamous for this in general, often taking the form of an Info Dump. He's completely unafraid to take a page or five to explain whatever's on his mind at the time, whether it be physics, chemistry, computer science, economics, religion, linguistics, or the proper way to eat cereal.
Snow Crash has rather a lot of detail about ancient Sumerian laws and writing systems. Might not have been so bad if not for the colossal infodump they arrive in...
Cryptonomicon works a cipher specially designed for the book by crypto expert (and Memetic Badass) Bruce Schneier into the plot, and includes a working Perl script implementing the cipher. Which was unfortunately broken by the typesetters in some editions, who presumably didn't expect to have to print a perl listing that day. Elsewhere, under the guise of trying out Van Eck Phreaking, he delivers an entire essay on weird fetishes.
The Baroque Cycle is usable for studying for a European History test.
Anathem is even more so, you could use it as a text-book on math, with (in the advanced reader's edition at least) several appendices of math problems and a note saying the full book will be launched with a web site for more information about all the "mathic concepts" in it.
Ayn Rand reportedly worked in an architect's office for some time before writing The Fountainhead. For the movie adaptation of The Fountainhead Rand insisted on getting properly avant-garde designs by commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright for the design work. This plan fell through when the studio saw Wright's proposed fee; he was America's Greatest Architect at the time and would have charged appropriately. (Given Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, the irony is thick.)
Terry Goodkind, meanwhile, might not have had as much actual experience with horses as others, but his writing about them in his Sword of Truth novels shows he at least did his homework.
The Lord Peter Wimsey novel Murder Must Advertise is not so much a whodunnit set in an advertising firm as a fictionalisation of Dorothy L. Sayers' own experiences in the ad industry with a murder as justification for Lord Peter getting involved. Whether despite or because of this, it's a highly entertaining read.
Joe Haldeman in the introduction to one of his short stories Tricentenial in an anthology, commented that at the speed the spaceship in the picture traveled "a ping pong ball would destroy it". He then put two lines of equations in the footnotes to prove it.
Michael Crichton's books tend to deal with cutting edge or controversial topics that he researches quite thoroughly. Unfortunately Science Marches On and leaves many of his older books very dated. Sometimes the information is communicated in a speech given by one of the characters, but it might also be communicated in abrupt nonfiction sections (exposition break!) that give new meaning to the concept of the omniscient narrator.
Ahum. State of Fear anyone?
YMMV on that one, he does do his research from fairly hard scientists and makes some good points, but it's politically controversal to say the least, which is why he wrote it
One Crichton novel which manages to avoid some degree of obsolescence is The Great Train Robbery — which, being written about nineteenth-century England, can't exactly become outdated.
It is also notable in this context that Michael Crichton's bread and butter comes primarily from grabbing onto a subject of widespread apprehension, fear or paranoia and then building a novel around it: Jurassic Park, Disclosure, Airframe, and the screenplay for Westworld, to name a few.
He doesn't just show this in the story, either—many of his books have 10+ pages of footnotes and cited references, particularly when covering controversial material like genetics or climate science.
Given that he often includes papers purportedly written by the characters in the book, you may want to treat this as "Michael Crichton knows what a bibliography looks like" rather than that he's showing his work (at least to some degree... some of the references are real).
This desire for accuracy comes across as particularly amusing in The Lost World, when Ian Malcolm has a brief tangent discussing the wrongness of the belief that a Tyrannosaurus can't see you if you don't move—a brief plot point in the preceding Jurassic Park.
Despite having the usual list of references, Prey got nearly every aspect of nanotechnology wrong. The only thing reasonably accurate was the concept and implementation of the swarms' flocking behaviour, which comes from emergent behaviour of very simple algorithms developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. Everything else was based on public, inaccurate fears of nanotechnology at the time.
Lois McMaster Bujold likes to get as much right as she possibly can: Miles Vorkosigan's stint as a meteorologist in The Vor Game was inspired by her father's profession; the casting of the titanium mirror in Falling Free was checked out with metallurgists. She admits that the wormhole physics in that series is Hand Waved, though.
Thomas Pynchon actually worked for a time at a rocket plant, and in Gravity's Rainbow he includes many of the actual formulae used for V2 rocket propulsion systems.
Pynchon's books are full of historical, scientific and mathematical digressions (Gravity's Rainbow also contains several pages describing the processes that led to the extinction of the dodo), which is widely regarded as one of the reasons for their inaccessibility, though most of them relate to his central themes.
Harry Turtledove's Tales of the Fox series incorporates descriptions of chariot combat, feudal societies, god myths and social customs ranging from the Bronze age to Greco-Roman to early Medieval, etc. Since Gerin the Fox is said to be a former scholar and a bit of a pedant, it doesn't even slow the story too much when certain details are elaborated on.
It helps a lot that Turtledove has a PhD in history.
Turtledove's Ph.D. focused on Byzantine history, which he used to his advantage in creating a series of novels set in Videssos, a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Byzantine empire.
One of the most notable examples of Turtledove showing his work is in an appendix to Guns of the South, when he reveals that he simulated the alternate-universe version of the 1864 US presidential election, by taking the original returns and allocating the candidates' votes according to his interpretation of how they would have been split (literally showing his math), without knowing beforehand who would win.
Rosemary Sutcliff did this in Sword at Sunset, a DemythtifiedDeconstruction of Arthurian myth; among other things, it realistically describes the hardships of surviving winter in Post-Roman Britain, the rarity of even chainmail armor, the problems of finding enough horses of riding size and quality and of gathering even a small fighting force under a single warlord, and the available weapons technology and fortifications. As she says in the foreword, however, sometimes reality takes a backseat to Rule Of Cool... but you wouldn't know it from this story, unless you were a historian.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy is a smorgasbord of Done Research, sometimes to the detriment of the story's pacing.
Robert L. Forward's Rocheworld, AKA Flight of the Dragonfly, is built on a rock-solid foundation of plausible details about space travel and physics — since Forward is a physicist and aerospace engineer, he probably wrote most of the research. The sequels, however...
Forward is honoured by Larry Niven in one of his short stories... by making a descendant the Big Bad. Forward returned the favor in a later work.
Connie Willis books almost invariably are filled with random facts about specific subjects ranging from fads in Bellweather to early mystery novels and turning points in history in To Say Nothing Of The Dog.
Willis' characters attempt to do this in Doomsday Book, when they prepare the main character for a venture into medieval England by giving her period-appropriate dress, language training, and backstory. When she arrives, her clothing is made too well, her middle English is at significant variance with what the locals speak, and her backstory worse than meaningless.
Unfortunately Willis' lack of research about Oxford shows a few too many times.
Details? The parts of the Oxford Time Travel Books that aren't set in the past are set at least several decades in the future, so it would make perfect sense for some things to have changed.
Robert A. Heinlein suffered from this a few times, taking far too much time to explain, say, how an artificial gravity system works. At other times, however, he handwaves these details. I think it depends on whether or not the science of the time meant there was research to do...
In the book Expanded Universe, Mr Heinlein explain how Mrs Heinlein and he spent many hours calculating the precise orbit of the spaceship in The Rolling Stones when it departs Luna and slingshots around Earth toward Mars. They had to do it with paper and pen, because in the early 1950s there was no other way and he wanted it to be correct.
On anything technical Heinlein was ready to do the research: on other topics, not necessarily so much. I still don't know whether to laugh or cry at the scene in To Sail Beyond the Sunset where his heroine talks about modern North American neopaganism ... using the jargon of Freemasonry. Hate to tell you this, Maureen, but modern Wiccans do not speak of their initiations as "being stooled", nor do they call their tradition "Wicca rite".
Most Heinlein "juveniles" are about ridiculously smart teenaged boys who end flying spaceships on their own. They typically spend about ten or twenty full pages doing advanced math to escape from nasty aliens/nazis/parents - at least. Somehow, though, Heinlein makes it work. For his one novel about magic lore (Magic, Inc., written in 1940), Heinlein also managed to do enough research about symbolism and demonology to put the original D&D writers to shame (and wrote the other half of the story about lawyer tactics, and still managed to make it sound exciting). By contrast, his pre-new-age spirituality novel Stranger in a Strange Land handwaved everything the main character pulled off with "well, he's from Mars".
One of the first commercial waterbed manufacturers discovered that he could not patent his product because Heinlein had already worked out how waterbeds would operate and described them in detail.
Sean McMullen's Greatwinter Trilogy exhibits this at various points when discussing the array of clockwork technology, antiquated gunnery, historical political systems, and cryptography, among other things. McMullen, who has a background in computer science, admitted in an interview to having crafted a working model on paper of the computer powered by galley-slaves with abacuses around which much of the plot centers.
Greg Egan's novels read less like fiction and more like extended scientific articles. He's posted eighty thousand words (and hundreds of illustrations) which work through the implications of the Riemannian (as opposed to Lorentzian) physics he's invented for the upcoming trilogy Orthogonal.
Philip K. Dick's VALIS would regularly discuss and quote taoism, Mircea Eliade and various Greek philosophers and would go into long Gnostic ramblings about the nature of the universe.
Almost all of L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Saga Of Recluce novels feature a main mage character who also essentially has a 'day job' that is pretty well researched, be it woodcraft, scrivening (book-copying), blacksmithing, barrel-making, or sewer maintenance (quite essential to any city life). He tends to describe the activities involved in these occupations in extensive and minute detail. He puts as much detail into the system of magic used as well, which he describes in similarly exhaustive detail.
Thriller author Dick Francis, once a top steeplechase jockey in his native UK, began his writing career by incorporating his extensive knowledge of horses and the international racing scene into every novel. This 'expert' gimmick worked out so well that in later years, having exhausted every direct racing angle, Francis has expanded out to giving the hero of each book another, vaguely esoteric profession (wine-dealing, glass-blowing, dealing in semiprecious gemstones) the fine points of which are integral to solving the horse-based mystery.
Caleb Carr's thrillers The Alienist and its sequel The Angel of Darkness, both set in 1890's New York, are crammed with so much period detail - including extensive quotes from contemporary authors - that they could almost qualify as either history or psychology textbooks. With a healthy dose of sociology thrown in. Sometimes the results are spectacular (a courtroom battle with Clarence Darrow) and sometimes...not so much (a subplot featuring an 'aboriginal' servant on a deadly mission of vengeance).
David Weber deserves a mention here. Although much of the Honorverse's Applied Phlebotinum is well into the "fiction" side of science-fiction, his distance, momentum, and velocity calculations are obsessively accurate, making this a slightly more literal instance of showing his work.
Though he often gives numbers with ridiculous levels of precision, and regularly has characters giving the answers to simple questions like "How long till we get there?" with long explanations involving base velocities, accelerations, and distances, and by the time they've rung off all that, they've forgotten the original question, and never answer it.
The one case where he conspicuously failed to do the math (at first) was on the size and mass of starships. Several books into the series, somebody crunched the numbers and noticed that his huge, deadly, spacefaring superdreadnoughts were about as dense as cigar smoke. Weber promptly turned around and revised the size figures.
Western author J.T. Edson filled his novels with meticulously researched detail (especially regrading weapons) about life in the actual Wild West. In his later works, this became increasingly intrusive.
Umberto Eco is famous for this. It's gotten to the point that it takes detailed scholarly analysis to determine all the references to works, what's real and what's not, and what languages Eco used and why for his pidgin segments. There's even an entire guide to The Name of the Rose, given the massive amount of references (from ancient theological texts to Sherlock Holmes) and Latin, German, French and babel-speak therein.
The reason no Tolkien imitator comes close to making constructed languages sound so realistic or so beautiful as those in Lord of the Rings is because no Tolkien imitator has been a professional philologist teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, who had been learning and was playing with a dozen languages since he was old enough to read. (This was one reason why Tolkien so consistently avoided Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.) Tolkien knew precisely how languages developed, evolved and worked, what made them sound lyrical or guttural, and pretty much created the languages first, then created an entire, fully-developed mythological landscape just so he could give his made-up tongues a place to live.
Also, though Tolkien allowed some liberties, the basic depiction of siege is realistic - grappling hooks used to climb the walls and catapults not trying to destroy the walls, but hurling things above them.
His Appendices in the back of LOTR also shows not only his language expertise, but that he also thought about the different calendars of his races and how they would account for the leap year in their own way.
While writing LOTR, Tolkien went back to revise some earlier passages because he got the phases of the moon wrong.
If I remember the interview where this anecdote comes from correctly, he was reading passages of the manuscript to his son, Christopher, who pointed out the error. Tolkien re-read it, exclaimed "Damn the boy!", and went off to fix it, deftly avoiding simple mistakes.
It doesn't get shown, but he used a British Army manual on forced marches to make sure that his characters didn't travel further than possible. He exaggerated endurance a bit, though, leaving realism behind.
Justified by the fact that many of his characters are not human beings - at least not ordinary human beings, so he could fabricate almost everything.
In fact, one could argue that the Fellowship, at least, had no "normal" human beings in it. The only two humans are Aragorn, one of the Dunedain that are descended from the Numenoreans and explicitly said to have abilities beyond that of ordinary men, and Boromir, who although less of Numenorean blood than Aragorn, certainly was still partially descended form them.
Frederick Forsyth. He actively sought information and pricing on the illegal weapons and tools required to stage a coup d'etat in Equatorial Guinea while researching for his novel The Dogs of War. Some of his works have even been used as handbooks for criminals due to their level of detail and correctness in terms of the underworld.
He was actually part of a group that sought to overthrow the government of Equitorial Guinea.
Just to drive the point home, you can go to Paris and find the sniper's perch from The Day of the Jackal. There's even still a post office there. Try it on Google Maps. Go ahead. We'll wait.
German author Frank Schätzing did so much reasearch into marine life for his best-selling thriller Der Schwarm (The Swarm) that beyond merely showing his work in the novel, he released a full door-stopper supplementary book about history, nature and possible future of marine biology. In his own words, he only got to show off 20% of his research in the novel and did not want to leave the remaining 80% unused.
Ken Follet put a lot of research into the cathedral architecture that defines The Pillars of the Earth, and he wants you to know it.
The fundamental justification for 1632 series by Eric Flint. Epitomized in the e-zine Grantville Gazette which is half excessively researched short stories and half excessively researched non-fiction articles.
Even before the e-zine, there was Chapter 34 of the original novel, which barely qualifies as fiction. The book also includes an afterword in which Flint lists which characters are historical, which fictional, and which in between.
In the case of Virginia DeMarce's contributions to the canon, it could even be a case of "shown too much of their work"; she gets into so much detail about genealogy and family interrelationships that it tends to bog down her stories and novels.
Cory Doctorow's Little Brother contains research about DRM, computer protocols, historical figures. He's quoted as saying that he wanted people to read the book with wikipedia open on the computer beside him, researching the various topics he explains.
John Le Carre is well known for this, and his acknowledgements pages are always entertaining for the presence of journalists, technical experts, diplomats, arms dealers, etc.- many of which he states he cannot name. He began traveling to the various locations in his novels, beginning with The Honourable Schoolboy, which he set in Southeast Asia when virtually every country there was undergoing some kind of civil war.
Le Carre's books often seem prescient because of this. His novel Our Game involves a civil war breaking out in the Caucusas. Within a few months of him submitting his manuscript the First Chechen War broke out. An interviewer asked him how he felt being so prophetic. He said, "vaguely nauseated."
The fact he worked for Mi5 and Mi6 helps as well.
Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle is pretty much one of the only techno-thrillers to incorporate air-launched missile failure rates into the plot. That's not missiles missing the target- that's missiles dropping off the hardpoint and just falling into the sea. He also made a very accurate guess on the P-700/SS-N-19 "Shipwreck"'s co-operative guiding capabilirty.
Terry Pratchett is known to read extremely in-depth factual books on, as he puts it, "subjects like The History of Ear Wax Through the Ages" or the like. His research never shows through in a clumsy way, but he does sometimes go into detailed descriptions of how things function. These things, such as the semaphore lines in The Truth, the practical daily workings of the city in Night Watch, and a million other little descriptions are all based on historical fact. He's also been known to do things like actually go and shoot different kinds of guns into water with a firearms expert to determine how fast certain bullets would reach a certain point in the water (this was done for Nation).
While Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books are pure fantasy, in "Grave Peril" he not only names the Destroying Angel mushroom correctly, but gets the description of its toxic effects on the system and one of the few antidotes for its poisoning correct. Undoubtedly he picked this one in particular for the Bad Ass name, and got the fact that it's not just toxic, but one of the most deadly mushrooms that can be found as a bonus.
That's why it has that kind of a name; it would be silly to waste a name like that on something that gave you a mild stomach upset.
Physics and science plays a massive part of the magic in the world as well, with Harry Dresden describing difficulties of certain types of spells or modifying spells he knows based on laws of thermodynamics and of conservation of energy and matter. Also, Butters is very accurate in his use of medical terminology and attempted explanations for magical phenomenon such as its effects on technology and the long-lived nature of wizards.
Also worth mentioning is Butcher's Codex Alera, in which he has clearly done some research on Roman legions and cultural mores. Those aren't the only things either; a mention of how to introduce a new sheepdog(IIRC) comes up while Tavi is introducing Kitai to his legion. This is the fourth book. The protagonist hadn't been a shepherd since the first.
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition has a plot involving mysterious videos released anonymously on the web, and the fandom thereof. Anyone familiar with any fandom and Viral Marketing, at all, will find the lengths people go to over the footage eerily familiar.
Max Brooks did an extensive amount of research for his Zombie Apocalypse novel World War Z, interviewing police officers, Federal agents, and FEMA personell. Amusingly, he remarked that everyone he interviewed had put at least SOME thought into what would happen or what they would do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse.
J. K. Rowling actually looked into a dictionary for the Harry Potter series; for example, spell names translate into exactly what the spell does (i.e., "Expecto Patronum" = "I await a savior"). Yes, there is some Canis Latinicus, like "Wingardium leviosa", but most of it is correct.
She did make one mistake: The spell "enervate" wakes someone up after they've been stunned. The word "enervate" actually means the exact opposite: "cause (someone) to feel drained of energy." She likely meant "innervate."
Which makes it doubly funny when she subsequently retconned the incantation to be "Re-enervate" (though she dropped the hyphen). Now the spell not only drains the subject of energy, it does it only after the subject is enervated.
When Hermione corrects Harry and Ron's Astronomy homework in the fifth book, she gives accurate information about Jupiter's moons, as pointed out here.
The Flashman novels by George Macdonald Fraser contain extensive footnotes placing the events of the story into historical context.
The Witches Chillers series by Silver RavenWolf replaces Ominous Latin Chanting with the kind of spells she and her coven would use in real life. The books even go so far as to include a short passage at the end where Author Avatar Ramona teaches a spell to the readers.
Most of Philippa Gregory's novels, including the critically acclaimed The Other Boleyn Girl, are based on extensive research; she includes a fairly long bibliography and includes an author's note about what she fictionalized, what created on her own, and where she got some of her ideas (for instance, she got the idea for the men framed as Anne Boleyn's lovers at her show-trial being a circle of closeted homosexuals from the work of a historian named Retha N. Warnicke, whose work was published several decades ago). She has also visited quite a few of the castles and palaces she has written about, such as the Alhambra Palace in southern Spain and Ludlow Castle in Wales, both of which were featured in The Constant Princess, her novel about Catherine of Aragon.
Warnicke, whose work she used, has tried to distance herself from the novel, disagreeing greatly with Gregory's portrayal of the Boleyn family. Although, in Gregory's case it may be more an example of ignoring the research, as it is doubtable that anyone writing about Mary Boleyn could've missed her promiscuous nature and some of the details regarding Anne's execution.
Definitely a case of doing and then ignoring the research. In TOBG, for example, although some scenes can be downright unnerving in how faithful to the historical record they are, other things are obviously not. For one, Anne could not have returned to England with Mary Tudor as stated in the novel, since she is known to have been at the court of King Francis, who succeeded the old king that Mary had married. As for Mary Boleyn's backstory, that's noted above.
Hal Clement was a classic "hard scifi" author and made sure his science was spot-on. In Mission of gravity some of the descriptions seem quite outlandish, but he included an appendix which explains his "working out" and the physics in detail.
Chuck Palahniuk often goes to great lengths to research his facts and factoids, often with little to actually show for it. For example, 'Lullaby' involved him basically researching an entire encyclopaedia of serial killers, for killers who had worked in pairs, and the resultant narrative barely made over an actual page in the novel.
K.A. Applegate did this for Animorphs, researching as much as she could on animals before including them as morphs in the books. Most of the time it works, setting up how the characters view the world as a new animal; other times it feels very forced, with characters bringing up useless facts for no reason; rarely it is used for High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels, which follow a fictional British soldier through the Napoleonic Wars, offer extremely accurate depections of life in the army, 19th century warfare, historic battles and events, and the important people involved in all three (particularly The Duke Of Wellington, since the novels are loosely structured around his campaigns). Individual novels are often built around a specific battle, such as the Battle of Talavera in Sharpe's Eagle, and they are described in great detail. Each novel ends with a Historic Note, which Cornwell uses to throw in extra info about the period and point out the few places where he's taken dramatic licence with history, as well as what actually occured.
Philip Pullman may be considerably wrong when portraying Christianity, but there's no doubt that he did considerable research on philosophy, language and physics. For instance, the concept of humans having a daemon, ghost and body is derived from several actual phisosophies, most notably the classical Greek concept of the division of the human being into the exact same things. References to Quantum Mysticism, a rather overlooked verse in the Bible and Buddhist terminology all stem from Dust, the cloud fortress of the angels is based on a physics principle, and then there's the whole lot of places and objects named in Greek, Icelandic and Italian. Then there's also the description of the appearence of the cliffghasts; while most likely coincidential, it is quite similar to that of the anurognathid pterosaurs.
The Orthodox Churches and Coptic Church would like to have a word with you.
Judging from the presence of the Russian priest, it seems to be implied that either that division didn't happen either, or that the Magisterium simply swallowed its competitors right up. They seem to be effectively a global superpower in their own right, and their aim is full religious hegemony, so it wouldn't be unbelieavable.
A.P. Herbert's Misleading Cases in the Common Law may seem to tick most of the boxes in Artistic License - Law, only getting away with it thanks to the Rule of Funny. In fact, he was a barrister and MP, and the point of the book is that the cases described, while ludicrous, could happen under English law.
An interviewer once asked Aaron Allston how much research he did for his first novel in the X-Wing Series. He's actually pretty good about only showing it obliquely - the details are definitely there, but they're just part of the narrative.
A lot. I wish I'd had time to do more. I read every Star Wars technical manual I could get my hands on, plus Stackpole's novels, Zahn's novels, other novels in which Wedge Antilles and Rogue Squadron make appearances, comic books, and several of West End's Star Wars game supplements. I watched the movie trilogy repeatedly. I played the X-Wing computer game. I bought eight of the Action Fleet toys and used them for measurements and estimations of their performance in atmosphere. I read books on aircraft carrier life and pilot survival.
And all that I consider a bare minimum of necessary research — it was all the research I had time to do as my deadline came bounding toward me. I'll do an equal amount before I'm done with the second book, and even more before the third book is done.
Fortunately, I like to do research.
In his masterpiece Dune, Frank Herbert explains how one lives in a desert. Anyone who lives in a desert country can vouch for his credibility.
A shame that he coupled it with the classic SF howler, the desert ecology consisting entirely of large predators with no prey species and no food plants.
In kind of an Ass Pull on that particular flaw, it is later revealed that the sand is full of some infant forms of sandworm called 'sand plankton' and 'sandtrout' (that the full worms eat along with various inorganic things). Also, there is some kind of immobile hybrid plant-animal form of sandworm that lives deep under the sand in the system somewhere. Plants and small animals (like the kangaroo rat) can be found in shady rock crevices.
Mary Renault's novels about Ancient Greece. You don't even notice that you're learning a huge amount of factual historical information.
This didn't stop critics from claiming that her novels were "bad history" because she didn't adhere to the tropes of her time. She had to add author's notes to the second editions of so many of her early novels that eventually she gave up and began adding author's notes to her first editions as well to forestall the critics. One example is in Funeral Games, where she was attacked for showing Alexander the Great's body not decomposing for 48 hours after his supposed death, despite the fact that the incident is part of the historical record (and surprisingly plausible, given the circumstances).
Renault finally wrote a non-fiction book, The Nature of Alexander, essentially an expanded version of her notes in the back of the three Alexander novels.
Mari Sandoz does this in Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Lakotah. She interviewed still-living family members and friends of Crazy Horse, combining their stories with general facts about everyday life for traditional Lakotah. Joseph M. Marshall III (a Rosebud Sioux) does essentially the same thing in even greater detail in Journey of Crazy Horse.
Steven Erikson does this in the Malazan Book of the Fallen with regards to how civilizations rise, fall, and eventually pave over the remnants of each other. And in some of the tribal and shamanic practices. The guy is a practicing Ph.D in archaeology and it shows - he knows his civilizations and cultures.
There's an interesting in-story example in H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising — the heroes are able to build an atomic bomb using a well-supplied nuclear facility for parts and tools, and a trashy historical romance set at Los Alamos as their textbook. Fortunately the romance author was a demon for showing her work.
Rudyard Kipling had a lot of knowledge about the cultures and animals he was writing about, often leading to Fridge Brilliance when his young readers grow up. Take, for example, Akela being cast out of the wolf pack when he got too old to hunt effectively in The Jungle Book. It comes off as him being unable to lead the pack, but this frequently happens in actual wolf packs. And don't even get started with the descriptions of Indian culture in Kim.
The Percy Jackson books may be written for kids, but the author obviously put a ton of effort into the mythology behind it.
It helps that IRL the author teaches history and english to things that get you a lot of mythology info.
They also show accurate depictions of ADHD and Dyslexia, having been written for his son, who has both.
Averted with the battle in Walnut Creek, California and the description of Mt. Diablo. Firstly Walnut Creek has no Eucalyptus trees anywhere; two, Mt. Diablo has no serious cliffsides; three, the top of Mt. Diablo has a visitor's center,not a depression with eucalyptus trees. Also, eucalyptus trees' scent is not as strong as the series implies.
Explained away to a degree, seeing as the top of the mountain is entirely clouded by particularly strong Mist and quite a few mythological figures are hanging out around the top.
The Farseer Trilogy contains in-depth descriptions of Fitz treating dog diseases and giving advice for their feeding.
Mary Gentle's Ash manages to avoid infodumps while integrating large amounts of knowledge about late mediaeval warfare and equipment.
Neuropath features extensive sections about psychology and neurology, which goes a long way towards making the villain's Mind Control schemes scarily plausible.
Tamora Pierce does a lot of research for most of her books. Some parts of the Circle of Magic series have two pages of thanks and citations. Gangs being a nakama? Accurate. Psychology of kids going through traumatic experiences? Accurate. All the crafting? Accurate. Psychology of serial killers? Accurate. How lightning works? Accurate. Und so weiter.
One notable exception is that her knights never seem to have more than two mounts—one riding mount and one battle steed—while knights would most likely have four or more, because horses tire out too easily. However, this makes sense as Artistic License since naming and/or describing four horses for every knight in the series would be a serious pain. The mere fact that her knights have two horses puts her leagues ahead of many other fantasy authors.
Manly Wade Wellman regularly displayed his knowledge of Appalachian folklore and music in his "Silver John" stories.
Agatha Christie worked as a nurse and in a hospital pharmacy before turning to writing; as a result, whenever she talked about poisons she knew exactly what she was talking about. One of her novels even saved a few lives as people were able to recognise the symptons of thallium poisoning from it.
The Egyptology and history of archeology in the Amelia Peabody mystery series is solid, because the author, Elizabeth Peters (IRL Barbara Mertz) is an Egyptologist and writes non-fiction under her real name.
Tim Powers definitely shows his history knowledge in his various Beethoven Was an Alien Spy novels, and it's also clear that he researches period-relevant skills, such as tall-ship sailing techniques and marionettes for On Stranger Tides.
Ridley Pearson had guides take him through the multiple parks at Disneyworld as well as interviewed the make of VMK and talked to tons of Imagineers for the Kingdom Keepers series. It helps that Disney publishes it.
James Michener's books feature this. Centennial, for example, includes an appendix at the end of each chapter just to show off some of the research that didn't make it into the main body of the text.
William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries contains a horrifying example of this trope. Several times, the characters are shown engaging in bomb-making, trap-setting, and other paramilitary activities, and everything is described in a very detailed, instructional manner. In other words, the book is a domestic terrorism manual for Right Wing Militia Fanatics disguised as a novel. Considering that several real-life domestic terrorists and white supremacists (including the Oklahoma City bomber) used the book as inspiration for their activities, it worked. It's not for nothing that this book is almost impossible to buy in the US outside the internet or from "that" stand at gun shows (you know, the one that's also hawking "patriotic" German paraphernalia), and even then, many editions of the book carry warnings on the cover.
In a minor example, The Star WarsExpanded Universe gets the genetics of twins right by having Leia, who was a twin with Luke, have twin children Jaina and Jacen. Lots of people know that "twins run in families", but fewer know that only fraternal twins run in families, and only on the mother's side.
The Beyonders features a "cursed lake" named Whitelake, in which everything sinks. However, Whitelake is actually composed of a non-Newtonian fluid—much like cornstarch in water—and all of its strange properties are explained by it.
The Matthew Hawkwood series does a ton of research into Regency London and the people and workings thereof. For example, the secret compartment in a Runner's tipstaff? It was real. The Thames being filled with so much crap, often literally, that it was nearly solid? Yep, that's real. Abysmal health standards? Real.
The main character of Tim Dorsey's books, Serge A. Storms, is a Florida history buff. Expect him to go off on multi-page lectures about obscure points of Florida history between (And in some cases during) his highly inventive and often karmically appropriate murders. Several times a book. This is in addition to all the trivia that gets mentioned in smaller doses, such as the exact hotel room that Jill Masterson was in while she helped her boss cheat at cards in the movie Goldfinger.
The Kay Scarpetta novels go into a lot of detail about forensic pathology. And psychology. And guns. And motorcycles. And citrus canker. And just about everything else Patricia Cornwell wants to shoehorn in. That's just one book, by the way (Predator).
Watching Edward Rutherfurd Show His Work is half the point of his multi-generational history novels, as he describes in lavish detail how various breakthroughs in architecture, craftsmanship, agriculture and economics have transformed Britain and other nations. He's not bad on political, military, and theological innovations, either.
Gary Jennings' Aztec novel is a massive door stopper consisting approximately on 30% plot and about 70% info on precolombine cultures, their societies, religious beliefs and way of living. Tropes Are Not Bad, in part due to the rarity of creative works based on precolombine societies and the fact that few people know about them, a lot of people consider the investigation more entertaining that the novel itself.
Historical romance novelist Georgette Heyer's 1937 novel An Infamous Army was so accurate in its depiction of the Battle of Waterloo that extracts from it were used to teach military strategy.
James Gurney's Dinotopia books are noteworthy for their surprising accuracy in their depiction of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life.
Live Action TV
Despite some of the more cartoony personalities that make up the staff of Sacred Heart Hospital, Scrubs has been touted as being one of the most realistic portrayals of life as a medical intern compared to all the other medical shows on television. Not only do they have doctors on staff as medical advisors (including the "Real J.D."), but they frequently receive stories of odd medical instances from doctors that they then work into the show. People have gotten into medicine because of the show.
This is Wonderland is similarly accurate, though in a courtroom rather than a hospital. Lawyers, apparently, are traded around between courts, work multiple cases simultaneously, and have to deal with people even more unpleasant than the lawyers themselves.
Another example is WKRP in Cincinnati, in its depiction of the (pre-Clear Channel) radio-broadcast industry.
And Barney Miller is often acknowledged as the most accurate cop show ever put on TV.
After being refused permission to film in the London Underground, the Doctor Who production team had David Myerscough-Jones design sets for The Web of Fear based on photos of the Tube tunnels. The result was so good the BBC received legal threats from the London public transport authorities, who assumed they'd done a bit of illegal location filming.
They did it again with an arc that ended with a church being blown up. Their model was so realistic that a number of viewers wrote in complaining that it was a sacrilege to destroy a nice country church for the sake of a television program.
The Thick of It displays a very extensive and realistic documentation of the inner workings of the offices of Whitehall, and has many fictional counterparts for real politicians. Politicians themselves have commented on the realism, noting that the only thing unrealistic about it is the show's infamous amount of profanity. In real life, it's worse.
Carnivŕle demonstrates extensive knowledge of Tarot as well as biblical mythology, and the plot tends to hinge on obscure symbolism that the viewer is supposed to figure out themselves with little guidance.
While Star Trek is often a show-pony for Did Not Do the Research, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has its moments of good research. For example, the episode "Rivals" depicts Dax scanning passing neutrinos and commenting that (paraphrased) "normally, half of them spin in either direction, when viewed from any given angle". This demonstrates an understanding of quantum mechanics several levels above the pop cultural "Uncertainty principle + undead cat = quantum mechanics".
The only problem here is that neutrinos don't have two spin directions, according to Lawrence Krauss (who, as a physicist, really should know this kind of thing), but this is even less common knowledge than spin in the first place, so Trek can still wear most of its research marks proudly. The Other Wikibacks Krauss up on this.
Actually according to the theory they are spin 1/2 particles and they could have both spins, we just never observed it (it's a bit of a puzzle as to why they don't). Also the linked page says that the antineutrino may in fact be a neutrino as well (it may be it's own antiparticle), and since antineutrinos have opposite spin of neutrinos, if that's the case, it would have two spins. Maybe in the future they cleared up this little problem, and concluded that they do in fact have two spins.
This is all wrong. Neutrinos interact via the weak interaction so that if you intercept a beam of neutrinos, they will almost all be left handed. This is covered in any graduate text on particle physics (specifically p. 347 of Aitchison and Hey's "Gauge Theories in Particle Physics, Second Edition" or see this paper . You can make up an explanation for this, but it's clear that Star Trek just invented some Technobabble and didn't talk to anyone that knows the physics of neutrinos.
Roddenberry supposedly told prospective writers for the original series to concentrate on the story over science, saying not to overtly explain things — "After all, when Matt Dillon shoots someone, he doesn't explain how the gun works first."
Similarly, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation has a reputation for Hollywood Science and Did Not Do the Research, but in a snippet of CSI: New York a tech taking out a hard drive for evaluation was shown switching the jumper before putting it in the external enclosure, a small detail anyone not in the know would not likely catch. Especialy surprising given the sad prevelence of Hollywood Hacking on the show.
The sheer number of ways people have died in the CSI franchise makes this trope almost mandatory for the autopsy scenes, as the writers have to do a fair bit of research simply to come up with a cause of death we haven't seem before.
The Closer is a Police Procedural with a surprising number of accurate details. Established in the opening scene when our heroine insists on a seperate search warrant for the garage as it is a "stand alone structure." She goes on to be careful about legal and procedural minutiae. Over the years, when her tactics slide into Cowboy Cop-y occasionally, she gets called out on it in a massive lawsuit—just like real life.
Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing (in its first few seasons anyway) was a surprisingly candid and realistic portrayal as the sorts of conflicts and obstacles any presidential administration must run into on a daily basis, no doubt due to the fact that former Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan were advisers to the show. Some episodes were based on one character having to teach another character (and, by extension, the audience) about certain aspects of the federal government (e.g. Sam teaching C.J. everything she needs to know about the U.S. Census).
Not without its errors, though.
The show actually got a lot more politically accurate after Sorkin left - in particular, the final couple of seasons consist of a VERY meticulous election cycle, with polling numbers and electoral college projections tracked with stunning accuracy. Sorkin didn't care much for the minutae of elections, to the detriment of the first full campaign depicted on the show.
Though they did the entire run-up to a brokered Democratic Convention, without mentioning "super-delegates" even once.
Homicide: Life on the Street is frequently praised as one of the more accurate portrayals of police work, with a good eye and ear for details and dialogue often found within the Baltimore Homicide Unit as well as the cases they worked and the chain of command in the police department. Similar to The Wire, many lines of dialogue are taken word for word from David Simon's book
Burn Notice based its main character Michael Westen on the technical advisor for the show, retired espionage expert Michael Wilson. All the MacGyvering gadgets and explosives are accurate as can reasonably be (They aren't going to give all the ingredients and steps in making thermite on the show, 'cause everyone knows that one mixes rust and aluminum dust, the ratios are somewhat obscure though). And then when you get into items that might be outside Wilson's expertise they call in others. They consulted a radiology expert on how he could make a one-time use x-ray machine in the trunk of his car. Fans love that every explosion comes with a line that justifies it: they taped acetone to a gas tank so it actually would explode when you shoot it; Michael used incendiary ammo on barrels with inflammable water sealant, etc.
While it has created its own mythology, the Supernatural writing staff started out researching actual folklore and urban legends. Some people claim that this is a case of Did Not Do the Research because "everything's wrong," but folklore and urban legends are usually spread orally, so the details of each story change depending on who's telling it, but the writers kept the core elements the same. This is especially evident in the early episodes of the first season.
Sometimes, the writers manage to Show Their Work on actual mythology by having the brothers dismiss the Real Life versions of the tales, claiming they're mistakes and/or disinformation.
Monty Python's Flying Circus owns this trope; as befits a show written by a group of Oxbridge graduates, it often parodies writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Marcel Proust, and frequently mentions philosophy. Even the Monty Python films show their workings; Holy Grail for example steers away from well-known legends such as the Sword in the Stone and concentrates on parodying lesser known Arthurian tales (for example Galahad's temptation in Castle Anthrax is based on actual legends of castles designed to cause knights to stray).
The fun also comes from their famous inversions of typical tropes like "Welsh miners are stupid" when they start talking about things like the 30 Years War and obscure classical architecture.
Rome featured a rather odd case of this trope meeting Reality Is Unrealistic, at least according to the director's commentary. At least one reviewer took the time to complain about Atia's unrealistic bikini line, when apparently they'd gone to the trouble of finding out exactly how the Romans looked after that sort of thing. Apparently it involved sharp seashells...
In one episode of Criminal Minds, the unsub thinks he is the Fisher King of Arthurian legend. In the story's climax, he demands that Spencer Reid (whom the unsub thinks is Sir Percival) "ask the question." Reid refuses, as doing so would deepen the unsub's belief in his delusions. The episode never mentions what question the unsub had in mind, but given that those interested in Arthurian tales know exactly what it was, it's evident that the writers did their mythology homework.
In general, Criminal Minds tries to be as realistic as it could for a network show. To paraphrase a quote from one of the making-of documentaries, "We may exaggerate the forensics or computer technology, but we try to stay true to form on the psychology on the show." Remember that in many profiles, the BAU profilers often cite real-life cases to back up their profile (it also helps that the writers were given access and consulted).
Creator Anthony Horowitz ensured that all the WWII period details in Foyle's War were thoroughly researched. Most episodes are inspired or directly based off actual people, events, or wartime organizations.
There is one scene when Foyle becomes suspicious of a secretive factory that's being presented as a munitions facility, but doesn't have any smokestacks and the employees appear to know more about carpentry than machinery. The maintainers of the factory eventually allow him in, revealing that they are making coffins. Thousands and thousands of coffins, knowing full well they'll be needed. Foyle and Sam are sworn to secrecy, as the knowledge would be damaging to public morale.
Freaks and Geeks does this perfectly with both the time period (early '80s) and the location (anyone from southeast Michigan will enjoy the references to Faygo and the Auto Show, and the frequent use of "pop").
Leverage has an actual pickpocket as a consultant so that all of Parker's Five Finger Discount maneuvers are pulled off as realistically subtle as possible—sometimes, it's not even clear that she's robbed someone until the scene is shown from her perspective in flashback. Sometimes it was not even clear to other people on the set. During one blocking run-through, the director asked the actress to repeat a scene, but "really do the lift this time." She responded by holding up the item, which she'd already stolen on the last run.
Said consultant played Parker's counterpart on Starke's team in "The Two Live Crew Job".
This self-described "honest thief" is also consulted when it comes to Sophie's mind games and grifting tricks. Even some of Hardison's techniques come from him. One of the show's creators recounted a time when he spoofed a phone call to his cell phone to look like it was coming from his mother. Word Of God is that roughly 95% of the seemingly impossible things the characters do on the show are things the consultant has shown them in real life.
The IT Crowd is ridiculously exaggerated slapstick. But the writers put in lots of little details and shout-outs that shows they Did The Research into what IT workers are actually like and into. As a result, actual IT workers love it.
Firefly is one of the few Sci Fi shows/movies (if not the only) that has no sound in space. This actually adds atmosphere to the show and does not lessen the action.
There's also a subversion. Jayne mentions his guns don't work in vacuum, and they have to rig it up so that Vera has atmosphere so they can shoot a space-borne trap. This is incorrect; most modern guns would work fine in vacuum, and doubly so in the future. However, they did consult a firearms expert, he was just wrong.
The Wire is known for its accurate portrayal of Baltimore, police procedure, slang, and based many of its characters on actual police and criminals of the Baltimore area. Furthermore, its portrayal of a newsroom has been touted as the most accurate ever shown on television. And this says nothing of its portrayal of politics, schools, and unions.
The fourth season in particular, it's most critically acclaimed season, is noted for its BRUTALLY and heartbreakingly honest and accurate portrayal of inner city schools and how difficult it is for kids to get out of the cycle of drugs, poverty, and violence.
The Wire is currently being taught in a number of universities in a variety of fields, from law to sociology to film studies. A sociologist has described The Wire as the best sociological text ever written.
Fifth Season: Pearlman was quoting 18 USC chapter 47 section 1014. This troper googled said section, sure enough, it pertained to wire fraud
Often Utz brand potato chips and pretzel snacks can be seen in The Office's breakroom vending machines. Utz is a Lancover, PA product widely distributed in the northeastern United States, and would indeed be seen in a Scranton, PA workplace.
Similarly, Sheetz coffee cups can regularly be seen by the office workers. Sheetz is a gas station/convenience store that is so common in Pennsylvania and several surrounding states that it borders on the point of absurdity.
Another commonly featured brand is Wegmans, a grocery store chain with 75 locations along the Mid Atlantic, including one in Scranton, PA.
The Office features many other Shout Outs to real products, people and places from the Scranton area as well.
Blue Heelers does this to an impressive degree, from procedure in the event of a shooting to the actors playing the role of an officer go through the academy.
Underbelly — based on the book series and newspaper article, actually worked with members of Task Force Purana to get the story right, except when it wasn't.
Also a minor case of Did Not Do the Research...the first series had things like Pure Blonde beer and Coke Zero, in 1995. A Tale of Two Cities got it much better.
Stargate SG-1 and its spin-offs had this in spades because the producers cooperated closely with USAF. All scripts were checked for accuracy, military protocol were uphold, many of the extras were military personnel, two chiefs of staff appeared on the show, actual F-15 and F-16 planes were used, and the show was also shot on a real Russian submarine and a real US Navy submarine in the Arctic.
Lie to Me: The show is based off of Paul Ekman's promising, but not-yet-complete, research. It doesn't acknowledge many of the shortcomings in the research (unlike Ekman himself), and doesn't have time to explain the intricacies of the findings, but the principles are quite sound. Anyone familiar with Paul Ekman's research will recognize things in this show lifted directly from the man's lectures and experiments.
The pilot, for example, used a clip of a microexpression on Kato Kaelin from the OJ Simpson trial — the exact same clip that Ekman has used in his own lectures.
Adam-12, produced by Jack Webb's company depicted police procedures so accurately that episodes were used as instructional films in police academies.
Webb's other well-known production, Emergency!!, is also recognized for the attention to detail it gave to emergency medical response, firefighting, and hospital emergency rooms. Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe (Gage and DeSoto) had actually received paramedic training prior to filming. You can tell that in many of the scenes there's no script and they're simply doing what a paramedic would do in that situation, including reminding each other of things that have to be done or checked. The captain of the station in season one was an actual Los Angeles County Fire Department captain, Mike Stoker basically played himself (he was also an LA County firefighter), and the dispatcher was Sam Lanier, an actual dispatcher for the department.
A Bit of Fry and Laurie was very good about being accurate about details in even the most absurd sketches, for instance, Laurie walks into a model shop in the "Dalliard/Models" sketch and asks for a Messerschmitt 109E, whereupon the clerk hands him... a fully assembled 109E. In the same episode, Fry begins to complain about the show Top Gear trying to be funny, while you never see comedy shows reviewing Nissan Micras, whereupon Laurie immediately gets up and begins reviewing a Nissan Micra parked in the studio, accurately listing the powertrain options and door layouts available. In the "Major Donaldson" sketch, Fry reads out Laurie's character's rank as "Hauptsturmfuhrer (Captain) Freidrich von Stilch," which accurately reflects the rank on Laurie's collar tab. Also, Laurie wears the field-gray SS uniform, correct as the black Allgemaine uniform had been phased out in 1939.
The Devil's Whore is pretty good with these. It even features Prince Rupert of the Rhine's war poodle.
Southland gets a lot of praise for this with former police officers saying it is exactly what their job was like.
Somewhat surprisingly considering its blatant 'sword-and-sorcery' elements and occasional new age mysticism, the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood is by far one of the most accurate depictions of the European middle ages ever to appear in a popular culture context, right down to citing obscure historical events and studying geneologies of particular noble families. Furthermore, most of the elements of the Robin Hood legend that it depicts are well-grounded in (at times obscure) earlier literature.
Early episodes of The Bill were extremely accurate in their depiction of the various aspects of police work. One in particular, featuring by-the-book DS Alistair Greig questioning a local hard case with a reputation for being uncrackable and getting him to crack without a threat or a harsh word spoken, was so accurate with regard to suspect questioning techniques that for many years it was used to teach them.
Despite a lot of script-kludging, when a case is cited on Law & Order, it's a real case, and usually on point. Whether the judges ruling, or the defense counter-point is realistic, is another matter, but the show does cite real case law.
Law & Order, also, over other shows supposed to take place in New York City, is the most realistic, in getting things like the geography of the city right, and the weather. The detectives correctly say for example, that they will go "down" to Alphabet City, when they are in Central Park, and give directions by street coordinates that are real. It rains, or is overcast, for no plot-related reason. People buy food from street vendors, and eat while they are walking.
The Big Bang Theory, being a show about three extremely nerdy scientists (and an engineer), pays unusual amounts of attention to getting scientific jargon and such correct.
Theatre
The original concept album of Chess has an interminable song called "The Story of Chess", in which lyricist Tim Rice shoved way too much ancillary information about the origins of the game. It's generally cut from the staged versions.
Later versions had information more inconspiculously worked into the background lyrics in "You and I/The Story of Chess", "Endgame", and "The American and Florence".
Part of the reason Oscar Hammerstein II wrote "A Real Nice Clambake" for the second act opening of Carousel was to demonstrate his research into authentic New England cuisine. (Hammerstein, however, Did Not Do the Research on "June Is Bustin' Out All Over," and so had to Hand Wave why the sheep were mating in the spring rather than their usual late autumn/early winter season.)
Is that why I kept getting hungry whenever my high school's cast rehearsed that song? Because seriously, everything sounded delicious.
1776 does this concerning the Continental Congress and figures in early American History. For example, the Running Gag of John Adams being "obnoxious and disliked" by everyone in Congress comes from his own description of how other people viewed him, the New Jersey delegation was actually missing from Congress for a while, and New York never voted on anything. Many of the more memorable lines are straight historical quotes, or very slight paraphrases of them. Given the attention to historical accuracy that perfuses the thing, the few obvious strays from history that are made are that much more puzzling — Caesar Rodney and John Dickinson in particular are portrayed quite inaccurately. You could chalk them up to dramatic license, but given the actual drama that hardly seems necessary. *
John Adams' quote about the slavery issue causing war "a hundred years hence" was real... too real for the musical.
All those obscure and no-so-obscure quotes and references in The History Boys? Accurate, and what's more, each of them in some way contributes to the philosophical argument of the play without most of them ever being explained to the audience. The original stage cast effectively took an intensive literature and philosophy class during the initial rehearsal period to make sure they understood all the references and could deliver them so as to have the right impact.
Gilbert and Sullivan employed a curious mix of this and Artistic License. For instance, Gilbert's set designs for H.M.S. Pinafore were so thoroughly researched and meticulously detailed that senior naval officers complimented his accuracy, and the sailors' uniforms were made by the same tailors in Portsmouth who made the real uniforms for the Royal Navy. Yet wooden, sail-driven warships like the Pinafore was meant to be were obsolete by the time the Navy adopted uniforms for the sailors; Gilbert just knew that a uniformed chorus looked better.
Similarly, in The Yeomen Of The Guard, which is set early in the reign of Henry VIII (c.1520), Gilbert correctly puts Yeomen of the Guard on duty at the Tower of London instead of Yeomen Warders (the former guarded the Tower from 1509-1548, when the latter formed to take over those duties). He also received critical praise for the accuracy of his set design, which included a building (the Cold Harbour Tower) that had been destroyed long before the 19th Century. And yet, again for Rule Of Cool, the chorus of Yeomen were dressed in the Elizabethan uniforms audiences were familiar with.
Music
Singer/songwriter Al Stewart is known for the detailed historical references in his songs.
His album Between the Wars is practically a textbook of 1918-1939 European and American history set to music (in a good way). The songs detail with such subjects as the formation of the League of Nations and the life of Marian Hearst.
See also "Lord Grenville", "On the Border", and "Flying Sorcery" on the album Year of the Cat; "The Palace of Versailles" on Time Passages; "Constantinople" and "Murmansk Run" on 24 Carrots; "Josephine Baker", "Fields of France", and "Antarctica" on Last Days of the Century; "Trains" and "Charlotte Corday" on Famous Last Words.
Monty Python had a song about Oliver Cromwell. It is, of course, accurate. Once you learn it, you can conjure up all sorts of interesting facts about Mr. Cromwell. (One of my wife's lecturers on the Civil War made the whole class learn the song by heart because it contains so many useful dates)
They also did 'Medical Love Song' which is basically a list of sexually transmitted diseases with their correct medical names (the writer of the song, Graham Chapman, was a qualified doctor. He was in residency when he dropped out to join Monty Python).
They Might Be Giants has tons of songs like this, like "Meet James Ensor" and "James K. Polk".
When science marched on past their well-known cover of "Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)," they wrote a follow-up song with corrections.
Iron Maiden has several songs based on historical persons or events that are accurate in their details, including "Aces High", "The Trooper", "Paschendale", and "The Clansman". Singer Bruce Dickinson has, of course, a degree in history.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, named for the poem of the same name, is a mostly accurate, if abridged, telling of the tale. It includes several direct quotations- sometimes entire verses, sometimes single lines, or phrases, dropped into the other lyrics.
And a couple other songs refer to literary works, usually with surprising accuracy..."Brave New World" comes to mind.
There's also "Alexander The Great", which mentions the Scythians falling by the River Jaxartes...
Hansi Kürsch does this frequently, with both Blind Guardian and Demons and Wizards probably because he's very much One of Us, a hardcore High Fantasy nerd - with many of his lyrics, practically every phrase is a reference to whatever bit of fantasy, mythology, or history the song is about; figuring them out can be quite fun. On the other hand, the introduction to a song in the middle of a heavy metal concert might not be the best time to start rambling about Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen...
Animaniacs did this quite a bit between "The Presidents Song" (US Presidents in order), "Wakko's America" (US states and their capitols), "Yakko's World" (all the nations), "Yakko's Universe" (showing the relative size of the universe), "The Flame" (a gentle re-telling of how Jefferson wrote the US Declaration of Independence, with another episode re-telling the tale of Paul Revere, and still another about Francis Scott Key writing The Star Spangled Banner), "The Planets Song" (the planets in our solar system), "The Ballad of Magellan" and "Bones in the Body", slipping some actual facts into amusing episodes.
The albums Michigan and Illinois by Sufjan Stevens are filled with references to their respective namesakes. He's apparently planning to do this with all fifty states.
Sabaton's real-life war songs are very accurate, especially in Wolfpack—who knew failure to launch could be rendered so awesomely?
Seanan McGuire's song "The Black Death" is six minutes of well-researched virology and microbiology explaining why the Black Death was probably not bubonic plague.
iLIKETRAINS have lots of historical songs: for example, "Spencer Perceval" and "I Am Murdered" are about the assassination of Spencer Perceval from the perspectives of the killer John Billingham and Perceval himself respectively, "More Weight" is about the death of Giles Corey, "Terra Nova" is about Robert Scott's Antarctic exhibition, "A Rook House for Bobby" is about Bobby Fischer's 1992 match with Boris Spassky and "The Deception" is about Donald Crowhurst's cheating and suicide during the Sunday Times Golden Global Race of 1968-69.
The song "Critical Mass" by british Progressive Metal band Threshold contains a lot of accurate references to particle physics and string theory.
Weird Al Yankovic in "Living with a Hernia". Halfway through the song he starts listing all types of hernias, from incomplete to direct, to a group of medical students.
He did the same with "Pancreas".
Unfortunately, the physics details in that song are off. The attractive force between two pancreases (or any other two objects) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, not the distance.
Professor Tom Lehrer (being an actual professor) did this with a couple of his songs, including "New Math" (an actual subtraction problem explained step-by-step) and "The Elements" (all the known elements of the periodic table at that time).
David Bowie's Rock Opera1. Outside takes place in a Twenty Minutes into the Future setting in which mad artists use violent crimes and even, as the story begins, murder as the basis for works of art. The Bowie-penned short story, "The Diary of Nathan Adler" (Adler being the detective investigating the murder), that makes up the bulk of the liner notes not only establishes the album's storyline and characters, but also weaves in stories of the "precursors" of the art-crime movement. These are mostly Real Life 20th century artists of the True Art Is Offensive and/or True Art Is Incomprehensible schools (Hermann Nitsch, Chris Burden, Damien Hirst, Ron Athey, and Guy Bourdin), and their often-grisly exploits do indeed make the setting more plausible than it might have been otherwise...
Tabletop Games
GURPS is famous for this. Writers efforts to provide accurate stats for the real world lead to pages worth of citations and examples in many 4th Edition books. They also have been known to hire people that know what they're talking about as advisers, altering and scrapping sections of the rules in order to allow better simulation of reality. Notes that appear alongside the official rules often include notes on how to make the game even more realistic, though notes to the effect that using more realistic rules might bog down the game typically accompany them.
This got them in legal jeopardy in 1990, when an over-zealous warrant led to every computer at the firm being confiscated by the Secret Service due to ongoing research at the company for a Cyber Punk genre book. The author had consulted with a few real life hackers, but the book was hardly a 'handbook for computer crime' as one misinformed agent said. It led directly to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Actually, the raid occurred because one of the people working at SJ Games happened to have a pirated phone company book on a machine in his home. The overly-reactive raidand subsequent founding of the EFF did indeed occur; it's just that the manuscript was picked up while the Secret Service was in the building. It didn't help that they wouldn't immediately disclose the reason for the raid, leading those working at the company to the most immediate conclusion (that a sourcebook on hacking had brought down the wrath of some people not known for their affection towards BBS operators).
Ars Magica from Atlas Games has several supplements whose entire purpose is to Show Their Work, most notable for this being Art et Academe. Most of the authors have some qualification in Medieval History or a similar topic.
Warhammer 40,000 goes into this at points when they can justify it. For example, Lasguns are only nonrealisticly displayed in art and video games because they would otherwise be really boring. That they make noise and light is generally explained by psychic influences.
On the other hand, it might be that 40k really does have Frickin' Laser Beams, and the Mechanicum just doesn't know what they're doing.
And then they had the Phlebotium used to fuel most devices be a liquid known as Promethium, which is unfortunately a real substance, which is highly radioactive and has a melting point greater than that of lead (which would make a tank of liquid Promethium a stupidly dangerous thing to strap on someone's back to fuel a flamethrower). They should have given their Phlebotium a fictional name.
Actually, they make it pretty clear that in the 41st Millenium, "Promethium" is a generic term for "fuel". Flamethrower fuel, tank fuel, car fuel, whatever... it's all promethium. Remember that the Adeptus Mechanicus hold the monopoly on technology. The Mechanicus would undoubtedly know that nitromethane is CH 3 NO 2, and napalm is a mix of 33% C 8 H 18 (gasoline), 21% C 6 H 6 (benzene), and 46% C 8 H 8 (polystyrene), but the average citizen would not, and would just call it "Promethium".
Sid Meier. Reading his manuals for the original Railroad Tycoon and Pirates!, for example, was downright educational. The original Pirates! even forced the player to figure out where they were by using a sextant to identify only their latitude and land masses to get their bearing. See Alpha Centauri below for more evidence of Meier's diligence.
Shadow Hearts: Covenant has the Gallery of the Dead, which could also be called "Learn Cyrillic! With Princess Anastasia".
Which just seems odd compared to the game's approach to history, which has all of the accuracy of A Knight's Tale.
The fascinating part is that very little of the actual science has been outright disproven yet.
The designers of Assassin's Creed put a huge amount of effort into studying the layout of the 12th century cities the characters would be exploring, including a lot of still-recognisable landmarks.
The sequel goes even farther: every noteworthy person in Ezio's life and every important or noteworthy location in the various cities has a small database entry that you can view when near that person/place. They're not needed for completing the game, nor are they required for any reason at all, but they're interesting to read and sometimes contain funny/snarky commentary.
The flying machine is also based on Leonardo's designs.
Likewise, the sequel had extensive attention paid to depicting late-fifteenth-century Florence, and Venice (San Gimignano and Forli being far less prominent), with several players and their friends/families commenting on how they'd visited those very locations in real life only to find them accurately (for the time) replicated in the game.
Leonardo's War Machines in Brotherhood were based on his actual designs. As were the flying machine and parachutes.
Similarly, Mass Effect has reams of encyclopedic info on how everything in the Mass Effect universe works, and it makes a fairly clear distinction between what's supposed to be realistic and where the Applied Phlebotinum in the form of the eponymous mass effect comes in. There's far more to read than you'll ever have to to successfully finish the game.
It must be said that some of it is just very good Handwaving, though. For example, the titular "mass effect" caused by element zero is more or less impossible, at least with our current understanding of physics. On the other hand, a lot of thought clearly went into the ramifications of such a substance, and its effects are consistent in-universe.
Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald have a side-quest to catch the legendary golems (Regirock, Regice, and Registeel) which involves reading the Braille language. The Pokémon games have a tendency to drop little educational bits in, like museums and space launch centers. In addition, many Pokémon have Pokédex entries that refer to real-life animals.
The series also generally averts Somewhere A Paleontologist Is Crying, design details aside. As given information is accurate and the series draws upon a somewhat wider range of species than most media (an anomalocaris-like biped, A eurypterid, crinoids, Archelon etc.).
The makers of Quest for Glory 4 have a lot of knowledge regarding Tarot cards, so you get several lengthy (though fairly impressive) fortune telling sequences giving the proper card combinations for the hero's past, present, and future, most of the important characters in the game, and the possible endings.
Metal Gear Solid loves doing this to the point where it starts messing with the dialog. We know you researched Aleut languages. In retrospect, it was probably a bad decision, because any attempt to write this knowledge into the story makes for some really awkward dialog.
Less annoyingly, the military tends to get a realistic presentation in the games, though it goes back and forth. Solid/Naked Snake's CQC is completely ridiculous, but it's pleasing to watch the normal soldiers move and act as whole squads, with the squad leader even giving them hand signals. In Guns of the Patriots, the advantages conferred by the SOP system are logical extensions of basic teamwork and squad tactics instead of magical gamebreakers, to the point where experienced veterans, or even well-trained newbies without SOP can defeat less experienced combatants who are using it.
Actually, the CQC featured in the games was developed by the series' military advisor, Motosada Mori, a former mercenary and SWAT instructor. He explains in an interview that it is best used in built-up areas during situations where there are multiple enemies close to you. He goes on to explain that it is a high level professional tactic that requires extensive experience with knives and firearms and will not necessarily work to your advantage in a fight. He also stated that it is best suited for use by Special Forces personnel. In other words, while it is a very useful technique, it doesn't make you nigh invincible in hand-to-hand combat as portrayed in the games.
The Metal Gear Solid 2 credits include a team of people under "Research/Justification". Which means they hire people specifically to put this trope in.
Metal Gear Solid 2 also delves so deeply into meme theory that some institutions use it to teach meme theory. And your mom said video games would never teach you anything.
Sometimes, it gets to the point where a character's only purpose is to demonstrate the amount of research that went into making the game. Nastasha from Metal Gear Solid was pretty much there to spout off technical info on nuclear weapons and the equipment you picked up, as well as ranting about nuclear proliferation. Sigint got this role in the third game as well. Both characters have worked for intelligence agencies and are on hand as experts, and Sigint went on to become the head of DARPA, so it makes sense that their role is pretty much to spout random facts.
While a lot of the information about genes in MGS is inaccurate, it's justified by the fact that Liquid does most of the ranting (according to Word Of God, he doesn't have a very firm grasp on the subject matter), and the ultimate point of Naomi's personal story is that she's putting too much faith in genetics because it's her only hope of finding out who she is and where she came from. The stuff that they didn't get wrong is astoundingly well-researched.
Apparently writer/director Hideo Kojima is excessively fond of this trope, as his prior work Policenauts, in addition to being unavailable in English, deterred fan translations because of the precise technical terminology used in the Japanese release of the game, including the results of research in biology, astronautics, and history. In fact, an independent translator named Marc Laidlaw (the same guy who wrote the entire plot of Half-Life), spent time with a number of textbooks and other sources of research in an attempt to decipher the decidedly native-centric text dump which included college level colloquialisms and kanji.
The head admin of the MMO Lusternia is a writer, and he is very good at researching the aspects of real-world mythology that were incorporated into the game. For example, the skillset known as "Highmagic" is an extended love-letter to Kabbalah, with each individual skill accurately corresponding to an aspect of the Sephirot (Hod, Keter, Yesod, etc).
The sequel, Riven, requires you to figure out the D'ni numeral system (which uses a base 25 counting system) as part of solving a puzzle.
Even more impressive, the D'ni numbering system is actually a multiple-base number system, which utilizes a base-5 system to construct its numerals, and a base 25 system to allow for the concatenation of numerals to create numbers over 25.
Persona 3's class sequences involve being lectured (and often quizzed) on actual grammar, history, and the like (although on a 6th or 7th grade level); in FES, this is expanded to include a real discussion of tarot cards and paganism that's mostly on the level.
Additionally, the personas you can obtain in the same game are all real mythological figures, drawn from everything from Vodou gods, to Judeo-Christian figures, to creatures and characters of Greek and Roman legends. The in-game compendium offers short descriptions of where each persona comes from.
The artwork by Atlus' master designer and prolific series artist Kazuma Kaneko makes it even more delightful, giving every single monster its own spin while retaining a deep and clear understanding of who they are supposed to be. Even when Shin Megami Tensei games choose to derive its characters from popular culture, such as the Hell Biker, or Alice, they're treated with care and attention to detail.
This has the added effect of people learning sometimes shocking truths about popular deities that appear in other games. Like, say, Shiva.
Both Persona 3 and Persona 4 are also highly notable for getting one specific thing right that so many works across multiple mediums get wrong: Tarot Motifs. The "Social Links" are all built around specific major tarot arcana, and if you play them out and pay attention, you'll realize that, yes, these are in fact accurate representations of what the arcana are meant to reflect, even for the often misrepresented ones.
And this does include Death in Persona 3, which can look like it's being misrepresented as a "oh god end of the world thing" at first. Especially if you're attentive to what's really going on, you'll realize the motif is being used exactly right and it'll probably blow your mind.
The accuracy is also prevalent in how the different meanings are portrayed differently in both 3 and 4, but still being accurate. Even further, Persona 3 Portible's female route (that some would dismiss as fanservice) still sticks to the representations of the arcana in the new social links. Notably, it gives a new and deeper meaning for the Fortune (Ryoji Mochizuki), Moon (Shinjiro Aragaki) and Strength (Koromaru) Arcana.
The Persona series also shows a sound grasp of Jungian psychiatric theory. "Persona" and "Shadow" are obvious, but Philemon being named after a character from Jung's Red Book (and serving much the same purpose!) makes it clear that the developers paid attention.
The original visual novel of Phantom Of Inferno went into obsessive detail on the guns the characters used. Obsessive. It's borderline disturbing. It was toned down in the US DVD-play release of the game (which removed the option of letting you choose which gun you wanted to use) and was (thankfully) skipped in the anime.
SimAnt has two lengthy, chapters on ants in the User's Manual, plus famous quotes about ants and an appendix full of scientific terms. To top it off, they included an unreasonable number of ant puns. It's freaking fantastic.
Moving away from all this antagonism, other early Sim games such as SimEarth, A-Train and SimFarm have lengthy sections at the ends of their manuals devoted to the subject of the game (Earth science, the history of railways, a study of farming...). And they're all pretty damn awesome.
This seemed to be more common in the '90s, as Lords of the Realm and Jane's Fighters Anthology both came with a pamplet describing certain 12th century castles and their histories in the case of the former, and flight and air combat tactics and principles in the case of the latter (in fact the "pamphlet" was a book a few hundred pages long in the case of the Jane's game, which is not suprising given Jane's role in the game).
This was also for copy protection purposes: the game would ask you to enter a certain word on a certain line on a certain page to keep playing.
In certain countries such as Japan, the game 'Gran Turismo 4' came with a booklet a couple hundred pages long, that was filled with expertise from professional drivers describing basic racing strategies, and car dynamics and so on.
Speaking of 'Gran Turismo'', the creator of the game was a former professional driver himself, who just won 1st place in his class of sports cars.
Astro Boy: Omega Factor for the GBA sets itself up as prime Adaptation Distillation through this trope, including as many characters from the original works as narratively possible, along with an extended character biography section, which includes information about their first appearances, and sensical justifications for any changes that have been made for appearance in the game.
The 90's Windows game Odell Down Under has surprisingly detailed information on a number of aquatic species found in the Great Barrier Reef. Every time you start a game or a new round in a game there's an info screen which gives you details about the fish you're playing as. The whole point of the game, in fact, is to keep your fish alive by having it eat what it actually eats, avoid predators, and get cleaned by cleaner fish. The sharks didn't always need cleaner fish however, thanks to the remoras that live on sharks and eat their parasites. There was even an in-game fish encyclopedia on the title screen that gave detail on other lifeforms you couldn't play as like plankton and algae.
Jigsaw, a time-travel Interactive Fiction game, includes extensive footnotes regarding the history (and Artistic License) involved. Several of the puzzles require or strongly encourage detailed knowledge of the Enigma machine, the works of Marcel Proust, and how to fly a B-29 bomber.
Deus Ex knew its paranoid conspiracies. Not only was it chock full of every conceivable conspiracy theory from MJ-12 to the Illuminati to aliens at Area 51, but it was also crammed full of real philosophical concepts and ideals, from Santayana to Nietzsche. Visit the AI in Morgan Everett's base if you need a small example of the research involved.
The Call of Duty series tends to focus on real historical military operations. Even the entirely fictional Modern Warfare inserted some historical realism by using real buildings and structures featured in a level set in Pripyat, in the Chernobyl evacuation zone, and factoring them into the gameplay. After sniping Imran Zakhaev from the top floor of the Pripyat hotel which had been infiltrated in the previous level, the player and his spotter must move through the abandoned city's cultural center and streets, at the end going from the public swimming pool to the Pripyat Ferris wheel where they'll have to hold out until the helicopter's arrival.
The Pripyat mission actually shows either a rather glaring Did Not Do the Research, or possibly relied on the Rule of Cool to permit reorganizing the city. In the mission, you rappel out of the back of the hotel, run down some streets, down some alleys, through some buildings, through some coutyards, through some more buildings, and out through the pool on the way to the iconic ferris wheel. In the real Pripyat you can remove every step after rappelling out of the back of the hotel... Because you're there. Okay, you have a short little walk across the park, maybe a hundred yards, top. Ironically, their effort to show their work by including every landmark made it less accurate.
Actually it is pretty accurate; when you fly away in the helicopter at the end of the mission, you pass right by the burning hotel building, which is very close to the ferris wheel. The reason you have to go through all the buildings and courtyards is because there's stuff in the way and you're trying to lose the hordes of Russian mercenaries trying to kill you, so you have to take the detour.
On the subject of Pripyat, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl team definitely did the research (including several trips to the exclusion zone). Overlay the map of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant from the game and the real one from Google Earth, for instance. Also, Pripyat is * almost* dead on. Other locations (Agroprom, for instance) are uncanny. Seeing photographs of the building that Agroprom is based on is chilling. Even the faded mural on a side wall is the same as in game
The Xenosaga games have vast in-game databases that are updated with both real world and fictional information on matters biographical, historical and scientific.
More importantly, nearly all of the technobabble in Xenosaga is real or at least researched - you couldn't really use the EPR paradox for FTL communication, but how many RPGs would even suggest you could?
Eternal Sonata has, between chapters, historical accounts of Chopin's life, with real life photographs of scenery in the background.
Silicon Knights redid a level in Eternal Darkness because they found out that stained glass didn't exist in the time period it took place in.
Fallout 1, particularly, features this trope, as well as lampshading the setting's resident mutants; many are specifically assumed to be artificial. Sufficient (and rewarding) exploration reveals a detailed and clear description of how a mutagenic artificial virus designed to combat biological warfare interferes with the anaphase stage of cell division; this is, in many ways, the single most unrealistic and fantastic element of this plot point, but the game clearly takes its biology very seriously. Well, up to a point.
This was also the game that began its manual with three pages on the precise effects, graded by the scale of the bomb, of a nuclear detonation. Biology wasn't the only thing Fallout took seriously.
When Bethesda Studios took over the production of Fallout 3, they based it in Washington, DC. Their studios are based in a suburb of Washington, DC (Bethesda, Maryland; yes, we know, not a very creative name). This is why the landscape is so detailed: they know the area. Gamers based in the DC metro area noticed and praised Bethesda for it.
This◊ is a map of the real Washington, D.C. subway system. This is a map of the Fallout 3 version. The game wasn't meant to be perfect in its representation of D.C. (the real National Mall is much, much larger than the in-game version, for example, and there's a practical explanation for that), but Bethesda nailed little details beautifully, right down to the architectural styles of random buildings. Please pay a visit to D.C. and then go back to play the game. Scenery Porn.
Actually, Bethesda was founded in Bethesda MD, but has since moved to Rockville MD. The attention to detail isn't just in the map, take a look at the western horizon in the game. Those gently rolling mountains don't just look like the Appalachian and Blue Ridge...
He formed the Legion by uniting several tribes and forming them into a militaristic government and state.
He compares his conquests in Arizona to the historical Caesar's conquest of Gaul, and his return to conquer the NCR to the crossing of the Rubicon.
The Legion not only all speak Latin, but also pronounce it correctly, using only hard Cs and pronouncing Vs as Ws. All but the most educated people west of the Colorado continue to call Caesar "See-zer," but the Legionaries use the historically accurate "Kai-zar."
The Legion uses historical Roman Legion ranks and organization, not just the more famous centurions and their centuries, but also more obscure ranks, such as the decanus, commander of the eight-man contubernium.
They also portrayed the Frumentarii, Roman 'military intelligence', an organization very rarely mentioned in fiction or popular books about Imperial Rome and usually known only by people interested in ancient history. Sure, the Frumentarii in game are much more sinister than their real-life counterparts (who were more intelligence analysts and tax collectors than secret police) but then again, they had to fit a 'tribal' nature of Ceasar's Legion.
They use the denarius silver coin as their currency, as well as the golden aureus, which is worth 25 denarii in-game, just as it was in ancient Rome.
They practice historical punishments such as crucifixion and decimation.
The makers of Gabriel Knight appear to love research more than life itself. While the information is both useful and interesting, you'll be very glad that the game has provided you with a tape recorder that allows you to play back all the conversations that Gabriel has had with various Voodoo experts.
Developers of Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars contacted MIT students for input on the propagation of Tiberium, and even have a mocked-up scientific paper on the subject.
The original Age of Empires allowed you to click on any unit, piece of rock, shrub etc - then expand into an encyclopediac background history of said unit/rock/shrub. From a longboat to an elm tree, every item was meticulously mapped out in depth.
Similarly, its successor Age of Mythology has a massive encyclopaedia dedicated to the mythological creatures. Right down to listing not just the names of the original Valkyries, but what each name meant.
World in Conflict does a frankly superb job of depicting downtown Seattle circa 1989. This would be expected if Massive Entertainment was one of the multiple developers based in the area, but they're Swedish. They even play with it by having the invading Soviets blow up the Kingdome, which was demolished in reality a few years before the game's release.
In The Conduit, there was a crapload of research to find all of the conspiracy theories that were used to tie the story together.
Infinity: The Quest for Earth features newtonian flight physics (no Space Friction here!) and includes, within it's procedurally generated 200-400 billion stars, the several dozen thousand that we know of, in an accurate position. However, it does occasionally fail physics forever in that it ignores most of the effect of relativity, notably time dilatation when approaching the speed of light. However, this probably constitutes an Acceptable Breaks from Reality, as there is probably no way to simulate time dilatation without making everyone else move in slo-mo - and if you introduce various people, all moving at the speed of light in their frame of reference, it's probably impossible to accurately represent it to everyone involved.
Dwarf Fortress is probably the only game in existence for which a geology textbook is a good substitute for a strategy guide. The steps for creating alloys and certain types of glass are also 100% accurate, and most existing abstractions are temporary or deliberate.
If you look at the game files, it actually accounts for the specific heat of rocks and metals. (Some of which are actually wrong as of the current version, but will be fixed with the next release.) Talk about science!
Temperature has been implemented. Toady is now working on developing a magic system and making your livestock require food, and has indicated a longer-term goal of fixing the economy mechanics to account for things like supply/demand and inflation.
The person who made Hymmnos for Ar tonelico put some seriously extreme effort at making a language. See here.
By the end of the Wii survival horror game Cursed Mountain, you'll probably know all about the Tibetan afterlife.
The shipwreck-diving game Sea Rogue has a manual which lists hundreds of shipwrecks ranging from Viking boats from circa 1000 AD to the Titanic. The developers themselves include a disclaimer that this is not, and cannot be, all completely accurate information, but it is very impressive.
Brothers in Arms series, the games show off an incredible amount of historical documents in their extras section, on-site photo of rural France areas (and comparision between their own in-game buildings and their real life counterparts). The military advisor for Gearbox Software is a retired veteran general.
Europa Universalis (the third one at least) is both played straight and subverted. Go to Europe, and you find an amazingly accurate map of 1400s Europe, complete with a plethora of Holy Roman Empire one-province minor nations. Go to Asia, and you find a Japan that is not only consistently unified from 1399 to 1821, but lumped into an "East Asian" (whatever that means) culture group with China and Korea. You can tell why it's called Europa Universalis.
Even in Europe, though, there are errors - Hungary is included in the "West Slavic" culture group, and a few things are changed for balance reasons.
Spider-Man Web of Shadows showed a bit too much work. At one point, Wolverine suspects Spider-Man is an imposter. During the following boss fight, he stops periodically to ask trivia questions. Said trivia questions are very obscure references to continuity...which can lead to problems since your answers will effect the Karma Meter.
Obligatory film link here. And when Spidey says "That's not in my online wiki entry." he isn't even lying. As per typing this, his parent's names*
Richard and Mary
are not in the Spider-Man article.
Tatsunoko Vs Capcom does a lot of research in regards to the material of Tatsunoko, which is a given, considering that the people who worked were fans of the shows.
Epic Mickey is built on this. The secondary protagonist hasn't had a film appearance in 70 years (neither has one of the villains, Dr. XXX), your allies the Gremlins haven't even been in a finished Disney film, and even things as insignificant as the barrels are based on Disney history.
LEGO Batman does a lot of it, the Bat Computer has a lot of information on it, showing facts about the Rogues Gallery and even facts about Villains you don't even know about, such as Penguin's father dying from pneumonia on a rainy day, and Penguin's mom forced him to carry an umbrella.
Touhou: The amount of mythology that ZUN is familiar with isn't generally apparent in the main games, where the emphasis is more on creating something fun. But in the side materials it can get a bit nuts, with plots based on obscure Shinto rituals (and now Bhuddism, too).
And the fandom takes this Up to Eleven, with doujinshi plots often hinging on or driven by more obscure pieces of the lore about the youkai characters.
Umineko no Naku Koro ni. OK, cabbala doesn't work exactly that way, but the author obviously did some research, as he uses some basic and not well-known concepts of magic (like, "a part equals the whole").
THQ are huge wrestling fans and they put in a staggering amount of work to get the storylines and angles as accurate as possible. No mercy faithfully recreated the McMahon\Helmsley era, Smackdown! had accurate depictions of everything from the draft to Booker T and Golddust, and Smackdown vs Raw? Well, the Legends Tour begins with Mohammed Hassan being detained at the airport, then goes on to make digs at the Montreal Screwjob, a recreation of the legendary Hell in a Cell with Mankind and The Undertaker, Stone Cold Steve Austin playing to the crowd, the list goes on.
In Halo 3, there is a cutscene near the end of the level "The Ark," where 343 Guilty Spark mentions how they are "218 light-years from the galactic core" (of the Milky Way). This adds up 262,144 light-years. The Milky Way is only 100,000 light-years in diameter. Nerds rejoiced.
Although it can be a bit of Well Duh statement, as if they were 1/2 the light-years closer to the Milky Way, they would be burnt up by the Halo Array.
Despite what the games would have you belive at first glance, the entire universe is well thought out, such as with the workings of all weapons, in the novels. In fact, I cannot think of one thing in the fiction that is technically not possible.
The Gigantic was an actual sister ship to the Titanic, along with William Thomas Stead and Morgan Robertson.
Sheldrake was, and is a real person, and is the creator of the pseudoscientific theory of Morphogenetic Fields.
Prosopagnosia is an actual neurological disability.
Ice-9 is, of course nonexistant, but was created in the 1963 Kurt Vonnegut novel, Cat's Cradle.
Not to mention the mystery of crystalised glycerine.
Portal 2: Valve did extensive period research to accurately recreate the look and feel of the 50's, 70's, and 80's-era Aperture Laboratories facilities deep beneath the modern Enrichment Center. They also initially located the facility in a real abandoned salt mine in Cleveland, Ohio, although the game itself mysteriously retcons this to be in Michigan. But the ultimate example is found in the Final Boss battle, where it is an important detail (that very nearly fell victim to Reality Is Unrealistic) that the portal gun's "shots" travel at the speed of light. Question: What's 1.4 seconds away at the speed of light? Answer: The Moon. Also, the amount of experimentation and research they put into deducing that smooth jazz is in fact the funniest type of music.
Age Of Mythology has an entire in game encyclopedia that has some pretty in depth descriptionf for all soldiers, buildings, heroes, monsters, trees, animals, technologies and pretty much everyhing that can be selected. Fictional characters and joke units have corresponding descriptions, but the rest are pretty accurate.
The team behind the Red Baron series did a considerable amount of research into World War One combat aviation, and it shows in the attention to detail given to the physics engine and the aircraft designs. They also included a great deal of supplementary information. Much of it is solely educational flavor, but a significant portion consists of tactics and maneuvers which are quite useful in-game.
At times, MOTHER 3 takes a little time out to justify some 'Reality Is Unrealistic' moments (which, in a game that is very much a Widget Series, is saying something), such as explaining that there are types of frog that can survive in desert climates, or that mole tunnels actually can be incredibly complex in real life (even encouraging the player to go and mole-watching sometime).
There's a PlayStation 2 game called Dogs's Life, where you play as a dog named Jake and can control other dogs. A focus point about the game was making sure the dogs act like dogs, instead of the cartoony dogs we're used to. The dogs are quite accurate both in design, size, and behavior. They trot like they should, move like they should, and generally act like dogs aside from a few Rule of Funny moments.
Shogun 2: Total War uses a woodblock printing art style all over the place. Creative Assembly had their artists study traditional techniques for over a year to get it right.
The two Buffy games on XBOX, the first in particular, are very accurate in capturing the look, feel and humor of the series. Numerous references and Call Backs\Call Forwards are used, as are most of the voice actors.
Two of the Kim Possible games for the Game Boy Advance; Drakken's Demise and especially Team Possible, play almost as lost episodes of the series. It starts with the same type of zany plot the show is famous for (a plot to steal Kim's photo album to lead her into a trap set by Monkey Fist, then the album taken by the Senors to a night club in space) and it goes uphill from there.
Several of xkcd's most popular strips are this trope. Good examples would be these Gravity Wells and Height. Given that the author is a math nerd and physics major, this should come as no surprise.
Vernon's fans also enter this territory, frequently responding to each new page of Digger with their own contributions of trivia on whatever the topic of today's page is, such as the authentic Balkan folklore behind the vampire squash and several parallels from various other cultures, historically-accurate dye substances that might be used to color skin for tattoos or leather, and alternative condiments should Digger carry out her threat to "eat my pickaxe... without salt".
The author of Get Medieval does this to an extrodinary extent with medieval history. During one of the interludes she even draws a picture of Sir Gerard in the actual formal wear he'd have during that period (complete with pointy-toed boots), then explains that she put him in more "conventional" medieval attire because if she drew him like that nobody would buy it.
Schlock Mercenary has in various occasions shown their work. Military tactics, futuristic concepts and even current space theories find their way into the comedic space opera. Not only that, but it also introduces some tactics (like the Very Dangerous Array) that would actually be very effective in real world (if we ever reach that level of technology).
Most notably, in one of his earlier arcs dealing with the Lunar States, he described the number of levels on a space elevator and the movement rates of the elevator itself and challenged readers to calculate the height of the structure. It worked.
Dylan Meconis, author of Family Man, does so much research for her comic that there's a page of notes accompanying the pages to prove it.
The Dreamer was pretty much started as a healthy outlet for the author's obsession with Revolutionary America.
Brat-Halla is actually quite well-researched... and goes out of its way to show it when it's not diverting from mythology because it would be funnier. This comic is a particularly extreme example, quoting verse 56 and part of Verse 55 of Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, seemingly just to show that they bothered to research Thor's death, and render it as accurately as the storyline it happens in allows.
Unlike many fangirls, when Gina Biggs began creating a webcomic set in Japan (Red String), it actually resembles modern-day Japan and not fangirl-fantasy Japan, showing very clearly that she took the time to know what she was doing.
Irregular Webcomic! is chock full of obscure scientific, literary, mythological or otherwise obscure knowledge that makes the puns work. Arguably it's more fun to read the annotations than to read the comic.
Lackadaisy Cats features authentic 1920s slang, fashion and technology. Also, Zoot Suits, but most of it's good.
The only noticeable historical inaccuracies are the aforementioned zoot suits and one cathedral-style tabletop radio. Both are acknowledged by the author, who mentioned that she might changed the radio to something more accurate before that page is published.
The author bases all the buildings in the comic off of buildings in her home town of St. Louis, which is also the setting of the comic. She also references lyrics from popular songs of the 1920s. She dates many things in the comic, such as characters' dates of birth, letters, and photographs, with painstaking detail.
Clint Hollingsworth knows tracking, and uses this knowledge as part of the premise for The Wandering Ones.
Terinu author Peta Hewitt is a practicing nurse, so any medical details in a hospital scene are either accurate or logical extrapolations. Not to mention she used to work in a children's ward, so her depiction of her eponymous troubled teen hero's psychology is well grounded also.
Kilgannon does this with A Miracle of Science. Discounting things that are obviously visual aides for the audience (like eye colour change when being possessed by Mars), the background work is obvious and he can't resist the temptation to rant about science a little bit (significantly more science ranting and explanation happens in the comments with each panel).
Hastings and Archer, creators of The Adventures of Dr. McNinja are very studious and take great care to research what the characters are dealing with. Everything from blood transfusions to submarine classes to in what part of the country you can find MTO setups. As if we need another reason to go gaga over this comic.
Two words: blood loss. The eponymous doctor backs out of a fight due to blood loss.
This is in the same part where Dr. McNinja's "doctor half" argues with Death over whether or not his injuries were actually fatal (although it's really just a ploy to allow his "ninja half" to sneak up behind Death).
Although they do freely ignore this information if it would be more entertaining.
Chris Hastings: My dad used to fly a jet like this one, and I asked him about what would really happen in a situation like this, but in the end, I still just went with what I thought would be coolest.
Freefall, while featuring a furry and a green blob alien as the protagonists, is nevertheless fairly hard sci fi, and has many references to real (well, often speculative) science and technology.
The Thrilling Adventures Of Lovelace And Babbage: Many of the jokes in this steampunk Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace spoof are based directly on the writings of Babbage and Lovelace and other historical documents.
Goodbye Chains sticks extremely closely to the details of the American wild west. The historical notes are evidence of the effort and research put into this work.
Paradigm Shift is set in Chicago, where the artist lived for many years. It shows.
Kin in Goblins describes a Yuan-Ti mating ritual in this strip, which is based on the way garter snakes mate in real life.
The Whiteboard: In this July Fourth strip, take a close look at Roger's shirt. "Red legs" is the nickname for US Artillery personnel, from the red stripe along the leg of their uniform pants during the American Civil War.
In Wapsi Square, when Paul Taylor decided to introduce a mysterious artifact on a sunken U-Boat, he actually made sure to choose a specific one for which the known details of its disappearance don't contradict the events of its disappearance in the comic. He also researched a bit of information about the interior of such subs and German WWII grenades.
Gunnerkrigg Court have more fine details than pages with "113" written somewhere, and does it right — all the time. To the point where fans regularly feel compelled to also do the research after the current page. Yes, this became another layer of entertainment in itself.
One chapter spends a few pages talking about historical fencing — in particular, the style of Johannes Liechtenauer, German knight and swordmaster of the 14th century. The source material for such a reference is so obscure that many modern studies of warfare in the period fail to take it into account.
Web Original
Diane Castle from Whateley Universe, writer of the Ayla stories, includes a lot of details that are related to things Ayla should know about. This includes everything from details on restaurants, to discussion of literature. Oh, and lots and lots of business information.
Oh brother. In the latest Aquerna novel, Anna needs to get her squirrels back into hibernation. Someone did a ton of research on which types of squirrels hibernate, and the biochemistry of hibernation, and synthesizing H.I.T., which turns out to be a real chemical that really has been tested and found to induce hibernation in squirrels. It's worked into the story without an infodump, but it's all there.
A number of the authors of the Whateley Universe have done this, from details of computer science to statistical algorithms to a discussion of the physics involved when a PK superboy punches a density-changer who has already gone super-dense.
Stuart Slade, author of The Salvation War and The Big One, is a military statistician and frequently throws in details about weapons, battle strategy, and injuries caused in the battle (occasionally going into High Octane Nightmare Fuel territory, such as the effects of Sarin gas).
Sometimes this veers into Reality Is Unrealistic territory, as after the USS Normandy (CG-60) incident in Pantheocide (Book 2 of The Salvation War) and the ensuing discussion, he admitted that "I was dancing on the extreme edge of what can be said about SPY-1 and AEGIS in public," referring to the real-life radar and naval combat systems respectively that were used in the story, to the point of handwaving certain statistics as being classified in-universe.
The description of the nuclear warhead on the Gryphon "Glickem" is practically Description Porn that could be mistaken for a blueprint for a nuclear device... good thing some key details are deliberately omitted.
How about the slight mention of the classified "aurora"?
Gametrailers has a tendency to go into insane amounts of research for their "Pop-Up Block" segments, which analyze trailers using context clues. For Assassin's Creed 2, for instance, they looked up the names of the masks several characters wore. In English, and the Italian. Would the average user need to know these facts? Probably not, but they're in there anyway.
One of the main characters of The Pains is an electrical engineer. The author uses the correct terminology, in the correct context. Think what you want about the insane "Mindpixel" ramblings later on, but Mr. Sundman's portrayal of circutriy is spot-on.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is surprisingly accurate, in its own twisted way, and if talking about a person on the Internet the page will be filled with fotenotes, images and links about that person's net drama. This is usually how they get out of legal trouble when threatened with a libel lawsuit. "Do you deny any of the information in this article?" "Well, no, but..." "Then you can't sue for libel. Good day, sir."
For all the flak The Other Wiki gets for its "anyone can edit" model, its guidelines call for either extensive footnotes or extensive "[citation needed]" tags. Their "good" and "featured" articles are prime examples of this trope - unless, of course, the article was promoted before the standards for quality articles became so strict.
A small group of people on NationStates (mostly comprised of members of NSD—though one does not necessarily mean the other) love to showcase their work in roleplay posts and especially designs. This is taken Up to Eleven in several designs, the Ur-example being the NakĂl, then surpassed by the Lince (it takes up most of that page). If you have time to read all that, I pity you.
The gamemaster ("Serris") of the forum based RP, Darwin's Soldiers apparently does his research when it comes to the sciences. Not to mention weaponry.
46524 This thread shows a lot of effort and research to show that Twilight, no matter what the fans say, and what happens in the book, a lot of the actions in the book are wrong and the Vampires in the series don't even qualify as Vampires, Our Vampires Are Different notwithstanding.
Orion's Arm, extensively, critics of the setting's assumtions are advised to bring a solid familiarity modern science.
Frequently in New York Magician. There's one arc that opens with a detailed account of firefighters fighting a gas fire. Instead of just "they pour water on it", Michel's narration notes the use of foam as a suppressor, and using water mainly to douse any flames that escape the foam. This does beg the question of why a financial guy would even know so much about firefighting, but one can presume he simply looked it up between the end of that story arc and writing it down.
The Transformers Wiki in general applies this by listing continuity errors within episodes, even pointing out obscure Mythology Gags. Very obscure.
Some roleplays such as We Are Our Avatars and The Massive Multi Fandom RPG show this trope at times. For the former's example, in the "Revenge of the Spark" arc, Arcadiarika used her knowledge of Power Rangers and Super Sentai by helping to confirm the power of the Zeo Crystals, finding out how the Morphing Grid works, and creating the Canon Foreigner Lunara Knight from Rescue Sentai Go Go Five's Beast Demon-Hunter Sieg's suit and giving it to CatherineGrayson. She then did it again during the foreshadowing of the "Rescuing the Rescuer" arc, introducing Demon King Golomois, a character who also originated from GoGoV*
Specifically, The Movie of the series, just like Beast Demon-Hunter Sieg
.
Hydronix has the knowledge of Quest 64, introducing characters from the game and sticking to their powers.
Derek the Bard does a lot of research about the books he reads.
Especially in regards to vampire mythology, as detailed in the Anita Blake video.
Explains the history of The Iliad in episode 20, as well as recommending other, more obscure classical Greek stories to Lupa) and reciting a passage from it.
Runs down the history of James Bond in episode 21.
And during Pulp Month, with regards to the medium itself and the history of the period.
Writer/creator "Curly" Jeffers is a known lover of trivia and academia.
Before every Death Battle the hosts Wiz and Boomstick give information about the characters that are going to fight; since the main point of the show is to decide the winners with research, this is very important.
the people behind Die Anstalt really know their psychological theories, from Gestaltzerfall to pathogenetic points of view to theta wave synchronization.
Western Animation
Avatar: The Last Airbender often does this in regards to the Asian culture behind the show, most prominently with the martial arts from which the Bending arts are derived. The staff actively took lessons in the various arts in order to get a better feel.
Also all the Asian script in the series actually says what the characters read. An expert in ancient Chinese calligraphy was part of the staff.
Transformers Animated has won over many of its detractors not only with a well-written plot and episodes, but also through lots of shout outs, small and large, That show that the writing and animation teams do in fact know and care a lot about the series' that came before.
Not to mention that they usually utilize a pretty accurate knowledge of Detroit streets and roadways, with a few exceptions when the story elements call for it (like the volcanic island in the middle of Lake Erie).
Kung Fu Panda was so well praised in China for getting their culture so dead on in a great movie that the Chinese government set up meetings that essentially asked "Why can't we make an animated film about China that good??"
In fact, one of their lead animators was a martial arts expert and eventually all the animators actually took kung fu courses to help them better draw the moves of the various characters and stay true (for the most part) to the different styles. Other research shows in the authentic Chinese landscape, art, and architecture.
For even more evidence of this, Exhibit A: The Art of Kung Fu Panda. You'll be blown away by the extreme attention to detail in absolutely everything. There's the landscape (example: the visual team looked to the works of traditional Chinese paintings for inspiration, and when designing the sugarloaf mountains in the Valley of Peace, they made sure to choose the right number of peaks to represent both openness and security, as well as emphasize mist because of the Chinese concept of beauty in emptiness). Then there's the architecture of the Jade Palace, where the roofs are not only properly designed to allow maximum light in any season and for rainwater runoff, but there are even dougongs, or interlocking wooden brackets, tucked up under the eaves that the audience will never even see. And there's the character designs, such as Tigress's stripes being incorporated into her costume, Mantis having a real Chinese robe design put on his carapace, and Viper's coils being tattooed with Chinese poetry. For added fun, listen to the directors' commentary where they wax eloquent on the color theory and symbolism of different parts of the film. All in all, it does seem to be crossing over into Doing It for the Art territory.
Freakazoid!'s "villain" Fanboy once drove the eponymous hero nuts with gobs of detailed information about Disney movies.
It's minor and the Critical Research Failure of the rest of the movie cancels it out, but in Pocahontas, the animators added the detail of using the Union Jack that was the English standard from 1606-1800: the modern one, but without the red stripe on the cross of St. Andrew. For those who don't know, the Saltire (St. Andrew's Cross) with the red St. George's Cross superimposed represent the union of Scotland and England. The second red cross added later represents Ireland (now just Northern Ireland).
Another small Disney moment: apparently, the animators watched chefs preparing food at a local Benihana to properly animate Long John Silver preparing food in a short animation in Treasure Planet. Disney may not always do perfect research, but when they do, they do it right.
The commentary for Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas claims a lot of this. From the rigging on the ships to the design of the lock and dam system, a lot of details were taken into consideration.
In Turtles Forever, several details about the continuities are thrown in. Such as the fact Mirage Leonardo's dialogue is peppered with actual dialog used in the first issue. There are a few other noteworthy examples, such as that thing that sniffed out the Turtles lair actually is from the old show, most of the other continuities also get a Shout Out, in the form of a hologram made by the Technodrome, showing almost every continuity, (yes, even the OVA's) with notable omissions being Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation due to Laird's issues with it and the various video games, as well as that, Tokka and Rahzar also make an appearance for a few seconds. While the 1987 Turtles personalities were exaggerated, though, the Mutagen's effects are still quite accurate, with a fly mutating to Hun [[spoiler:turning into, as he calls "Mutant Turtle FILTH!"
The Wild Thornberrys is actually a very insightfull series that puts great detail into describing the behaviors and facts of animals (female lions do most of the hunting, elephants can communicate through infrasonic rumbles, komodo dragons use their tongues to smell, basengi dogs cannot bark and are used by the tribal Pygmies of Africa to hunt more stealthly, emus are hunted by wedged tailed eagles, hippos have to keep themselves submerged in water during the day because they have no sweat glands and are also the most dangerous animals in Africa and not the cute, lazy bums as Eliza's friend, Shane, erroneously thought).
Not only did the show go out of its way to teach kids facts about animals, it also attempted to accurately depict the various peoples and cultures the family encountered around the world, such as the !Kung and Maasai of Africa in the episode "The !Kung and I" and the Incas of Peru in the episode "Nigel Knows Best". In one episode, Marianne and Debbie are puzzled to find the coastal town of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam deserted and shops closed. After a weary day of walking aimlessly around the town, three total strangers invite them into their house in the middle of night and are given flowers, food and gifts, to their confusion. In the end, it's revealed that it was a lunar new year called the Honor of Tet (or Tết Nguyęn Đán) where all first visitors after ten get food and gifts in hope that they bring the family good luck for the rest of the year.
Hell, they even put historical geography right in the freakin opening credits by pointing exactly where the family is on Earth right down to the local counties!
The Penguins of Madagascar actually delved into this a lot, usually brought up by Kowalski, the most intelligent penguin of the group and the most analytical. In one episode, a raccoon scares the usually fearless penguins into running away when he shouts "leopard seal!". Assuming they are adelie penguins, they are a common source of food to Leopard seals in the Antarctic. Another episode had the penguins betting against King Julien and his lackeys in a game of catch the flag, and fail every time. They finally get the upper hand when they realize the lemurs can move so quickly because lemurs travel by the tree-tops, rather than on land.
One monkey on the show uses sign language. The staff has consulted with sign-language experts to make sure that each sign and facial expression is accurate.
All Grown Up!, "Runaround Susie": Part of the plot, Susie participating in a language competition seems to be begging for As Long as It Sounds Foreign. To be fair, some of the words we hear do sound like such. But the overwhelming majority of them are correct.
Courage the Cowardly Dog has one episode where Murial suddenly de-ages into a 3-and-a-half-year-old girl from being sucked into a tornado. Courage's snarky computer tells him that the only way to turn her back to her original age was by throwing her into a tornado spinning in reverse. When courage asks if tornadoes do spin in reverse, the computer replies, "only in the Southern Hemisphere, you twit." While the de-aging powers of tornadoes is total fiction, the fact that tornadoes in the North and South Hemisphere spin in opposite directions (counterclockwise and clockwise, respectively) is generally true.
Somewhat surprisingly, South Park. For example, the episode "Le Petit Tourette" actually goes out of its way to point out excessive cursing is only one possible symptom of the disorder and shows characters with other tics. Episodes addressing controversial issues like politics and religion are also generally well-researched, as are their numerous parodies. Though of course, Rule of Funny can cancel anything out.
The episode where they go to Afghanistan correctly has most of the Afghani characters speaking Farsi (albeit with accents sound Iranian). But in keeping with the Rule of Funny, bin Laden speaks a random collection of insane gibberish and has the other characters lapse into English when the plot requires it (with Lampshade Hanging).
Say what you will about the old Mega Man TV show, they did a fairly good job at researching the games; most of the character designs, while changed quite a bit, at least kept most of the unique design aspects, and sometimes the entire design. Designs aren't where they stopped, Mega Man's name was "Rock" before he became, well, Mega Man; this fact is somewhat more wellknown nowadays, but it wasn't back then. Heck, it looks like they paid attention to the fingers of the characters, as in a Bad Future episode, a Mega Man fan actually does this, at about 0:09. People deride the show for being inaccurate, but that's incredibly far from the truth.
Gargoyles was very accurate and detailed in many of the mythologies it referenced, though it changes a lot. Scottish history is also heavily important to the show's backstory—Macbeth's flashbacks, for example, basically combine the historical king's real life with some elements of the famous play (mainly the Weird Sisters) and the show's own themes.
Barring, perhaps, the episode The Hound of Ulster. Good episode, and while not entirely inaccurate, anyone with a passing knowledge of Irish mythology will be scratching their heads.
Futurama may have the most highly educated writing staff on TV (there were at least 4 Ph.Ds on staff during the original run).
Metalocalypse's animation is often carefully synced to the music, with the chord positions and fingering of the guitar parts shown in some detail.
Especially before its original cancellation, Family Guy would often work in references to people, places, products and events that one could only truly appreciate if one was a native of Rhode Island or had lived there for a length of time.
On the other hand however, the show's never been too good on getting the shape of the state right on maps.
Surf's Up lists multiple surfing consultants in the credits. Who would have thought that a CGI film on surfing penguins would go the extra mile?
Some of the background animals in Almost Naked Animals include a furless tiger with faint stripes imprinted into his skin and a furless bear with black skin and whitish hair strands all over his body.
My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, for all its Funny Animal-laced nature, goes well out of its way to depict all the animal movements as realistically as possible. Even the ponies move like real horses, and pick things up with their mouths instead of their hooves as the ones from the show's predecessors did. For info on specific details, go to Tropes Q To Z and scroll down to the Shown Their Work bullet point.
Rather an Enforced Trope for Fireman Sam, seeing as it delivered An Aesop about fire safety or something related Once an Episode. If they deviated from reality at all it was only as a concession to the limits of their special effects and/or to provide a subtle PSA about what the viewer should do in that situation.
Radio
The Clan of the Fiery Cross radio serial put Superman against the Ku Klux Klan, with accurate portrayals of their beliefs and rituals. Exposing their rituals and practices to public scrutiny was actually the whole point of that serial — due to a man named Stetson Kennedy who was attempting to undermine the Klan by exposing their secrets.
The best part of the story? It worked.
Other
For a ride based off a movie that you've never seen and that Disney would like you to forget ever existed, Splash Mountain sure has a lot of shout outs to it. For one thing, the design of the mountain is actually based off of Chickapin Hill, the hill that Brer Fox lives in (seen in only a couple of shots). The story of the ride itself is actually based off of all three of the animated segments that feature Brer Rabbit, mixing moments between the three. And not only that, but they even include songs not based on the animated sequences into the queue music (such as All I Want and the title song. Hell, the queue even features Uncle Remus' chair for god's sake!
How NOT to Write a Novel specifically advises writers against showing too much of their work, and provides a Stylistic Suck example of a character of a novel interpreting everything around her in terms of varying, and massively inappropriate, layers of physics-based Technobabble.
The works of Kenneth Burke, literary theorist/philosopher/rhetorician/scholar/renaissance man, definitely apply. He decided that reading the entire New York Public Library would provide a much better education that attending college, and both the depth and breadth of his knowledge is obvious from his work.
