The Cross-Time Engineer (Adventures of Conrad Stargard, volume 1) by Leo Frankowski

[james_davis_nicoll]

A Polish engineer is transported into the past, ten years before the first Mongol invasion of Poland. Luckily for him, his allies include the book's author.

The Cross-Time Engineer  (Adventures of Conrad Stargard, volume 1) by Leo Frankowski 

Comments

[bunsen_h]

I was annoyed that the author knew a lot less chemistry than he thought he did, but didn't bother to have someone check. Narrator mentions that he could draw a picture of the "sodium nitrate molecule", I respond that sodium nitrate doesn't have molecules. Narrator comes up with a clever scheme to use a counter-current process for washing fleeces, which isn't a bad idea. But instead of making soap ("a mixture of ash and fat") and using it to launder, he figures that the fleeces already have lots of oil/fat, and can just be laundered in a strong hot lye solution. This would be very bad for the wool; it would chew up the proteins. Soap is the product of a chemical reaction between lye and oil/fat, not a mixture of them.

But what made me give up on the series, and resolve to never touch any of his books ever again, was the rape scene and its aftermath.

[jbwoodford]

Despite having a friend who was really into the first few, I managed to avoid reading them. Leaving aside his horrific ideas on gender roles, it's the bad science in his stuff that would jar me out of WSOD. I don't remember the title (and can't be arsed to look it up now), but IIRC he had a novel set on a world that's what was left of a very large gas giant after its sun went supernova. All the volatiles went away, and what was left zone-refined as it solidified from an undifferentiated melt. So all the high-melting point metals were the crust, and the core was a glob of metallic mercury.

While this is kind of a cool image, the idea that the lower-melting point elements didn't vaporize from the melt, or form intermetallic compounds with some of the other elements as they solidified, is less than realistic. IIRC the world had no volatiles--again, superficially reasonable, but someone forgot how much carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen can dissolve in molten metals. I was not impressed.

[bunsen_h]

I hadn't heard about this one, and your description made me curious enough to look it up. A Boy And His Tank, FWIW.

I don't think it would work the way he thinks it would. Assuming that the entire planet was liquefied, yes, the mercury would have vaporized, and under the circumstances I think it would have escaped. Carbon has a pretty high boiling point, so I wouldn't expect it to go away if a number of other elements remained. I agree with you that a variety of intermetallic solutions would form, as well as solutions with things like carbon. High-melting but high-density substances wouldn't just sit as a crust on top; they'd sink. I'd expect convection to mix things up, just as here on Earth.