Fiction: From Below by Darcy Coates. The thing was like 400 pages and didn’t need to be more than 300 if I’m being generous. As one reviewer said, “There’s silt. We get it.” The dual storylines jumped all over the place and though they were obviously connected (ship that will sink in the past to divers in the present exploring said wreck), they couldn’t have felt more disconnected or unrelated. Characters were utterly stupid yet supposed to be highly trained in their fields.

But my biggest pet peeve that lands it here: complete lack of research and also editor failures. I don’t expect an author to become an expert on a subject to write a novel about characters who are involved in that subject, but if get facts wrong that are a basic google search aaway, you have failed.

I’m a scuba diver, I’ve been diving for twenty six years. No one calls their BC by it’s full name, it’s a BC. BCD stands for Buoyancy Compensator Device. Beyond your instructor in your preliminary certification classes saying once “this is the Buoyancy Compensator Device, BCD, which everyone calls their BC…” that full term is never used. A veteran diver, about three hundred pages into the book, calls it a Buoyancy Compensator.

Then at first I was impressed because the first time it was mentioned, the tank was referred to as “air.” Which is what we call it, because that’s what it is.

Every time after that i was “Oxygen.” It’s not oxygen. Oxygen refers to 100% oxygen, as in a medical setting. We do not take down tanks of 100% oxygen on our dives. That would be incredibly stupid, as oxygen becomes toxic at depth, as well as other factors and it’s not even what we breathe on land, why would we take it down underwater with us? The air we breathe on land just walking around is not 100% oxygen, it’s roughly 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases. We call it air, because that’s what it is.

(There are Nitrox blends, which is an enriched air, so it contains approximately 32% or 36% oxygen, and less nitrogen, but that’s a specialty mix and another story; the tl:dr version is you take in less nitrogen, therefore longer dive times and shorter surface einverevalas are required. But you don’t go as deep because more oxygen = potential for oxygen toxicity at depth). In fact when you do incredibly deep dives, the technical stuff beyond recreational limits, the Navy-level stuff, some oil-rig stuff, basically the pro-level stuff, you’re actually breathing a tri-mix, a common blend being 21% oxygen, 35% helium and 44% nitrogen; oxygen is higher than normal air but it’s tempered and balanced by the helium and nitrogen mixes). None of these apply to this book, I just find them fascinating and all this info is available on Wikipedia.

Those all that personally just ticked me off because I know better being a scuba diver, but also knowing that it was literally a simple google search and a Wikipedia article away.

Non-Fiction: Rabid by Bill Wasik. The guy managed to make RABIES, which is inherently terrifying and interesting with it’s 99% mortality rate boring. Also the book was 90% filler, the padding level was just obscene. He quoted The Office at one point. His tone was awful and annoying and he played very fast and loose with facts.

A portion of a review I found puts it perfectly: “One of those pop-science books that falls so short in simple factual accuracy sometimes that I’d call it pseudo-pop science, and makes me sceptical of any other facts the writer presents.”

Honorable Mention (also fiction): All the Murmuring Bones by A.G. Slatter. It’s poorly written, with flat, boring characters and an ill-defined world, but that’s pretty run the mill bad. It’s an honorable mention for that plus the original complete bait and switch and completely misrepresented in its original advertising, which I now note has been changed and the blurb on Goodreads is far closer to what it actually was.