Robert J. Sawyer, Pakistan, Synchronicity and Last Minute Changes

Robert J. Sawyer, winner (and multiple times nominee) of Hugo and Nebula awards, has become one of my favorite science fiction authors recently. I was reading one of his novels "Flashback" last week, and noticed a small mistake where it said:

"Islamabad, Pakistan (autotranslated from the original Arabic): In my vision, I have two arms-but today, I have only one (I am a veteran of the India-Pakistan ground war)."

The above sentence implied that Arabic (and not Urdu) is the language spoken in Pakistan, which comes as no surprise as a lot of Americans think we are part of the Middle Eastern Arab nations (I've been called a towel-head in jest more than once before I corrected their misconceptions).

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