The moment the willing suspension of disbelief died

So I am reading something, what I won't say just now, and I'm
soldiering on despite the fact that it's thick enough to make my wrists
hurt and there are one or two unfortunate flubs, like the moonless world
world whose climate is more stable than Earth's due to its lack of a
moon. Right now the models say "no big Moon, annoyingly variable
obliquity" [1] but heck, maybe the models changed or humans got there
in a period when obliquity was nearly zero. I'm not a bad guy, I'll
play along with the joke.

The moment the author lost me was the part where a character
describes a sudden-onset ice age and how he and the other survivors
_barely managed to outrun the resulting glaciers_.

God, just typing that make my brain hurt. It's like a urinary
tract infection in my head. It burns! It burns!

A fast glacier might cover a meter per day. Many people, and in
fact at this point I am tempted to say "everyone save parapalegics and the
comatose", can run somewhat fast than one meter per day. I mean, your
Standard Wheelchair-Bound Granny (metric) can move at about a kilometer
per hour over smooth ground, so in one day, given eights hours of frenzied
wheeling, she should be able to cover about eight thousand times as much
distance as a glacier. An able bodied person might cover about fifty
thousand times as much distance as the glacier over a eight hours (Even
more if they run).

I am not necessarily expecting John Schilling's "vacuum pockets"
to show up but if they do I will not be too surprised.

So, anyone else run into one moment in a recent book that just
totally and utterly destroyed any chance you had to suspend your disbelief?

James Nicoll

1: Eccentricities of Planets in Binary Systems, by Takeda & Rasio
says that a companion star with an orbit inclined to the plane of
the ecliptic of a planet can cause some crazy behavior in the
planet, like an orbital eccentricity that varies from nil to lots
in only a few million years.

Large planets and brown dwarfs in inclined orbits can have a similar
effect and at large distances too. This may make even binaries more
interesting as potential abodes of life than I'd like, because we
know from trinary systems that companion stars do no have to orbit
in the same plane, so probably companion stars and planets don't
have to, either.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
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