Artistic License Geography / Literature

• Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code also fails in this area. When leaving the Louvre, the main characters head to the American embassy, realize they can't get there, and head for Gare Saint-Lazare. To get from the Louvre to where they start making their detour, they would already have passed the American embassy. Teabing parks on the House Guard Parade, so he can see the Parliament and Temple Church. In reality, from that position, he would be able to see neither. Several buildings block the view, and there are no parks to look across, as claimed in the book. Brown also claims the church of Saint-Sulpice lies on the Paris meridian; as a sign in the actual church helpfully points out, it doesn't.
• The Dresden Files early books were pretty bad on Chicago geography. Particularly notable was when Harry had a meeting in the massive parking lot outside Wrigley Field (in reality, it has about twenty spaces). He also moves the University of Chicago from Hyde Park (on the south side) to Lincoln Park (on the north side). Possibly he mixed up U of C with DePaul. Later on, after author Jim Butcher actually visited Chicago (and got info from fans who live there), he got better about it. This is lampshaded in the Tabletop RPG core book. The section on City Creation features, "For instance, let's say the local baseball stadium suddenly gains a parking lot..." Harry, who's reading over the notes for accuracy's sake, sardonically laughs about it.
• In A Grimm Quest: They refer to the town Keriagon's car got left in as "Agate". None of the three Agates closest to Las Vegas have theme parks.
• Left Behind:
  • In the first novel, Buck is forced to make his way from Chicago to New York after the Rapture causes all manner of destruction. The timeline described is ridiculous, with Buck taking far longer using chartered planes and such to travel the distance than he would have simply by driving back roads. It culminates in a 20-mile bike ride along 13-mile long Manhattan.
  • One of the later books describes huge ships on the River Jordan, which is actually very shallow and could not accommodate ships of any kind.
• Rick Riordan:
  • Based on Heroes of Olympus, Riordan seems to think Mt. Diablo is like some kind of lowland Yosemite mixed with the Australian outback when truthfully it's just a gentle rolling brown hill with hardly any foliage on it. Anyone who actually looked at Mt. Diablo at even Google Maps could tell you the top is NOT a depression with eucalyptus trees, but rather a visitors' center, and there really aren't any cliffs like described. And while it is a Plot Point, there are not enough—or any—eucalyptus trees surrounding the mountain, certainly not enough to be overpowering. Early morning in the middle of winter might not be freezing, but it's cold. And the Golden Brown Berkeley hills are just that, golden brown — during summer. They do, in fact, get green(ish) in the winter.
  • The Lightning Thief has a scene where Percy jumps from the top of the Gateway Arch into the Mississippi River. Considering that the Arch is a hundred yards or more from the river under ordinary circumstances, with some wide concrete walkways, a huge 64-step grand staircase, and a road in between, he'd need a hang glider to do that in real life. (See this photo◊ for reference.) Even during flood season, the closest the river has ever been to the Arch is halfway up the staircase. Adaptations have tried to rectify this. In the graphic novel, Grover catches him with the flying shoes, but is only able to carry him a short distance, enough to get him over the water. In the Disney+ series, Poseidon summons a waterspout to grab Percy and pull him into the river.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • The Cullens settled in Forks, Washington because while their vampirism makes their skin sparkle in sunlight, the town's constant rainy and overcast weather means there isn't enough sunshine for that to happen. While Forks does get a lot of rainfall compared to most of western Washington, it's similar to the rest of the region in that summers are highly sunny affairs with minimal cloud cover from July to September. Unless the Cullens lie low or vacate the town during those months, they would've been found out already.
  • Bella and Edward have their honeymoon on an island off "the west coast of Brazil". Unlike the country's other three cardinal directions, the west side of Brazil lacks a coastline entirely.
  • Seattle's Lake Union is referred to as "Union Lake". Additionally, the shady part of town that Bella visits in the last book is vaguely reminiscent of Aurora Avenue but doesn't come close enough to any real part of the city to be believable.
  • The entire state of Washington appears to be significantly scaled down, as drives from Forks to places like Seattle and Port Angeles are described as taking far shorter than they would in real life. A drive from there to Alaska is also described as taking 16 hours, which is simply not possible on land.
• Arthur Conan Doyle:
  • Sherlock Holmes lives on 221B Baker Street, but when the first stories were written, house numbers on Baker Street only went up to 100. Doyle probably did this deliberately to avoid attracting unwanted attention to the owner of a real address, which was warranted; after Baker Street was extended, the owner of that address (Abbey National Building Society) had to employ a full-time secretary to answer mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes for many years.^note The address now officially belongs to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, despite it being between numbers 237 and 241.
  • In The Terror of Blue John Gap, the narrator at one point travels from the eponymous cave (which is a source of the semi-precious stone Blue John) to Castleton in Derbyshire, some 14 miles away. In reality, Blue John is found only in the vicinity of Castleton, a roughly 3-mile radius. Maybe this one is also Artistic License – Geology.
• Rudyard Kipling: "On the road to Mandalay where the flying fishes play, and the sun comes up like thunder out of China 'cross the bay." The poem is set in Burma, as various references make clear. Burma has no seacoast of any kind facing China. It could be chalked up to Poetic License: Kipling was very well-traveled and knew geography very well; the bit about "thunder from China" is a simile (parsed "the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay"), and specifying a bay makes it clear that he's talking about the east-facing coastline of the Gulf of Martaban. Specifically in Rangoon, which is also home to the "old Moulmein Pagoda" mentioned in the first line. So...
• Andrew Holleran admitted that he had written the part of Dancer from the Dance set in Washington, D.C., before ever setting foot in D.C. I could tell. Not only was the park scene improbable, but also, another scene described the garish commercial signage of a neighborhood whose only nonresidential land use is a country club.
• Damon Knight's novella "Rule Golden" contains the line "England is only about 400 miles long, from Land's End to John o'Groats." While the first half of this sentence is roughly true, John o'Groats is not in England. Scotland adds another 4–500 miles to the length of Britain.
• The hero of a Heian Japanese tale somehow manages to be shipwrecked on the Persian coast while traveling from Japan to China.
• The Jack Prelutsky poem New York is in North Carolina is essentially one big lampshading of this trope.
• Invoked in The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles when the main character is told a Masonic parable of the King of France who got lost riding in the woods and suddenly found himself in Scotland. He proceeds to comment on the intelligence of a King who fails to notice his horse swimming across the Channel.
• John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath has a particularly egregious example of this in the form of the main character's home town of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. In the book, the Joads are driven from Sallisaw due to the Dust Bowl ruining the land. The problem? Sallisaw is located in the eastern half of Oklahoma, commonly referred to as green country. It never experienced the Dust Bowl.
• The Guns of the South has a scene where Robert E. Lee and his staff survey the heart of Washington D.C. from a nearby hill; in the author's notes, Harry Turtledove admits that this is impossible, remarking "Sometimes geography has to bend to suit the author's wishes."
  • There's also the fact that he invents a South Carolina town out of the blue for the time-travelers to come from; it could have been handwaved if it was just them, but the fact that one of the main characters is also from the town becomes an important plot point.
• Stephen King did this on purpose in The Dark Tower series. In the foreword for The Waste Lands, he notes that his New York readers will notice that he has taken "certain geographical liberties" with the city. In the later books, when he writes himself into the story, he distorts the geography of Maine (where he lives) because he doesn't want people harassing him in his home. The former becomes a plot point later on when Eddie finds out that Co-op City, where he's from, is in a different part of New York City on Keystone Earth than it is in the version of Earth he's from.
  • He discusses this trope when talking about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He points out that Sergio Leone apparently thought Oklahoma City is about half an hour by train from Chicago. A quick look at a map of the United States will show how unlikely that is to be the case. For reference, it's more than a 2-hour trip by plane.
• In Burning Water by Mercedes Lackey, a modern horror/fantasy novel, an ancient god is claiming sacrifices in Dallas, Texas. One victim is found on a rock at Bachman Lake Park. The hero of the story, a paranormal investigator, is examining the crime scene with a local police detective. Their conversation is pretty standard for the genre—bloodstains, time of death, witnesses, &c. What's missing from their exchange are the times when they would not be able to hear each other due to the jet airliners landing at and taking off every five minutes from the adjacent Love Field airport.
• Beatrice Sparks' Go Ask Alice is laughable for many reasons, but when our heroine tells us she's in Coos Bay, Oregon and then proceeds to describe hippie stores that only existed in San Francisco and closed long before she got there, one begins to wonder if the drugs she's taken have confused her that much or given her Time Travel powers.
• The chemistry of Hal Clement's Iceworld may be solid enough; the Inland Northwest geography he describes is rather less so. It starts in chapter 2, where he places the Lightning Creek trail on the wrong side of the valley (it's on the east side, since the creek runs up against the hillside on the west), requiring the characters to cross the creek when they turn east (in June, it's still in full spring flood, and crossing is best done another day's travel upstream) and proceed through a Douglas Fir forest (it's actually Ponderosa) that is remarkably mud- and snow-free. A character proceeds to map the area from a mountaintop, noting that Snowshoe Peak is visible "between east and south", that parts of Lake Pend Oreille are visible (this is true of only three peaks in the eastern Lightning Creek drainage, and all three are very nearly due west of Snowshoe Peak), and that mountains are visible in every direction except west (oops, all three have mountains to the west). By chapter 7, it's clear he's making terrain up as he needs it: the hills are a thousand feet taller than they actually are, the slopes lessened so that a character can reasonably climb straight up-slope, and the trees are removed from the ridgelines for improved visibility (and plot-relevant reasons later on); directions to reach a highly-secret middle-of-nowhere location place it solidly in the middle of the well-traveled Bull River valley. The climax of the story involves a fast-spreading crown fire of the sort only seen in late August of especially dry years but happens in late June when the forest is much too wet to burn.
• Given a Hand Wave in Young Wizards by Diane Duane in an "Admonition to the Reader" before her fourth book, "A Wizard Abroad". She explains that the book geography of Ireland isn't necessarily the same in real life.
• The cover of Atlanta Nights features a lovely photograph of a beach sunset with palm trees in the foreground. Atlanta is several hundred miles away from the nearest coastline. This is intentional.
• In World War Z, Arthur Sinclair — director of DeStRes — describes his justification for agricultural land seizures in a way that does not reflect the actual capabilities of the area. Sinclair calls the land used by cattle ranchers in the west as "prime potential farmland" — however, in the West, cattle are run on dry rangeland that has insufficient irrigation to raise crops. In the fuel-starved area (which the western strip of the US was described as) it would only be harder, not easier, to irrigate those areas. Using cattle to convert grass into protein is actually the efficient use of the land.
• Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival takes place in a Europe that is, even for a medieval writer, chaotically mixed up. People can, for example, ride (fairly easily) from Spain to Wales.
• While Norma Khouri's Forbidden Love is already fishy due to its incredibly inaccurate portrayal of Jordanian society, the fact that a supposedly "researched" Misery Lit book states stuff as inaccurate as Jordan sharing a border with Kuwait ^note (for the record: Jordan is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south and east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north, and Israel and Palestine to the west, while Kuwait only shares borders with Iraq and Saudi Arabia), fake "fanciful" depictions of Amman, and false statements about Jordanian law as a whole make this even worse.
• Fifty Shades of Grey:
  • Anastasia Steele drives south from Vancouver, Washington to Portland, Oregon to get to Seattle, Washington (which is north of Vancouver, Washington).
  • In Fifty Shades Darker, Christian Grey says the following after disappearing for about eight hours:
    "I heard the TFR was lifted a while back and I wanted to take a look. Well, it’s fortunate that we did. We were flying low, about two hundred feet AGL when the instrument panel lit up. We had a fire in the tail—I had no choice but to cut all the electronics and land.” He shakes his head. “I set her down by Silver Lake, got Ros out, and managed to put the fire out.”
    • A TFR is a Temporary Flight Restriction. There were no Temporary Flight Restrictions on Mount St. Helens for all of 2011, when this book is set. There were none for all of 2009, either, when E.L. James wrote the fanfic Master of the Universe. The last time that there was a TFR in effect around Mount St. Helens was in 2008… three years before the timeline of the book.
    • According to the FAA, the minimum safe altitude for helicopters in a congested area —cities, towns, settlements, or open-air gathering places — is an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft. Grey said that his altitude—his AGL—was about 200 feet. In addition to Mount St. Helens being 37 miles from Longview, Washington, 43 miles from Vancouver, Washington, and 51 miles from Portland, Oregon—thus making this a congested area—guess what the highest obstacle in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens is? Mount Adams, which is about thirty-four miles east of Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens is 8,635 feet high. Mount Adams is 12,277 feet high. If Grey didn't want to smash into the largest active volcano in Washington state, he should have been — at a minimum — 13,277 feet up.
    • Silver Lake has three hiking trails running through it, one of which is right next to the area where Grey allegedly landed and encircles the entire park. Grey and Ros could have started at one end and gone all the way to the other; they were, at most, three miles away from help. And the GPS on their phones, which Grey mentions, should have told them this. Silver Lake is also adjacent to a state highway, an interstate highway, and a 475-acre campground, and has two Visitor's Centers within walking distance.
    • The Forest Learning Center is on Highway 504, inside the blast zone of the volcano, and is operated by a two forest-related organizations (a timber company and a big game conservation group) and the State Department of Transportation. It also has daily helicopter tours that leave every half hour for several hours straight, meaning that one of the tour helicopter pilots should have seen the private helicopter on fire and relayed that information to every pilot and ranger in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens.
• The Chemical Garden Trilogy:
  • Apparently, among other things, World War III caused the ice caps to melt and now everything but America is underwater. However, Manhattan and America's coastline are somehow completely fine. Furthermore, all of the countries and continents are rubble, destroyed during the war. Rhine mentions that all that's left are tiny uninhabitable islands and the continent of North America. All of this destruction has absolutely no ill effects on the ecosystem, weather, sea level, or anything else in America. Sever hints at this not being entirely true, however.
  • Antarctica is also included as a casualty. Antarctica. The one place where a nuke would be completely unnecessary under any and all circumstances.
• Max claims in The Final Warning that "every last freaking, gol-danged thing" in Antarctica is white. In reality, exposed rock is visible along many areas of the coastline, and the ice tends to appear rose- or emerald-colored rather than white.
• In Betrayal In Death, Cornwall, in the UK, is repeatedly referred to as north of London. It is in South-West England, with Cornwall being the most southern and western county in the whole of England.
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: The reservoir held up by Davis Dam is named "Lake Mohave"; "Lake Mojave", which is how the lake is named in the book, is something completely different in Real Life.
• Near the start of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron miss the Hogwarts Express and decide to use Ron's father's flying car to follow the train to Hogsmeade. Later on, they are told that they were seen by several Muggles in various places — including "Flying around the Post Office Tower". A few minutes with Google Maps shows that all tracks from King's Cross initially head towards the northwest, while the Post Office Tower (now known as the BT Tower) is southwest of King's Cross, inadvertently implying that Harry and Rob decided to waste some time buzzing around a building in the opposite direction of where they were desperately trying to go.
• Return of the Wolf Man: Talbot is identified as having lived in "Wales, England". Throughout the rest of the novel the names of the two countries are used more or less interchangeably.
• Animorphs: Cassie is trapped on a commercial jet while the group is trying to retrieve a piece of Yeerk ship wreckage. The plane is headed to Sydney, Australia and Cassie bails out over the Northern Territories to escape controllers. But a plane going to Sydney from the western U.S where the series is set wouldn’t go anywhere near the Northern Territory, which is hundreds of miles northwest of Sydney.
• János vitéz (John the Valiant) starts out with the protagonist being a Hungarian shepherd. When he joins the army, which is on its way to France to fight off the attacking Turks, he goes through, in this order, "Tatar Country"^note the Mongols that invaded Hungary in 1241 were misnamed as Tatars, Italy, Poland and India before arriving in France. The poem even spells out that India and France share a border. The later chapters are set in entirely fictional locations.
• Hover Car Racer: Based on the lengths of the race courses, Tasmania is less than a quarter of the scale it is in real life (which would also explain how the entire island being bought by the International Race School would be plausible in any way).
• In The Mister, Albania gets portrayed as being a rather primitive country, with Alessia being amazed by all the modern shops in Britain and calling a credit card "magic". Albania actually does have shops no different from ones in Western Europe. It's even weirder considering Alessia says she's from Kukës, which isn't some backwater rural village but a small city; it's a popular tourist destination (with an international airport) and just Googling pictures of the place will demonstrate it absolutely has modern supermarkets and convenience stores. Credit cards are also used in the country (although a lot of places only accept cash, so it's recommended to not rely only on credit cards while travelling).
• The Hike primarily takes place on the Svelle Trail and Blafjell Mountain; while these are real locations in Norway, Lucy Clarke stated in an author's note that she intentionally fictionalised them (including shifting the locations) for the purposes of the story.

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