Monday 9 July 2012

Too Much Science Fiction?

On the way home from two great weeks in Europe I bought a Peter F Hamilton novel in Heathrow to read on the plane. It tidily vacuumed up the rest of our loose British change, relieving my pocket of a considerable burden. But the book itself was far, far heavier! Wait, let me measure it: over four centimetres thick; 745 pages; I estimate well over 200,000 words. It's taken me nearly a week of dedicated reading to get within a stone's throw of the ending. It has about five separate plot strands, and very few explanations about what's going on.


How can someone write something like this? Has Peter Hamilton actually cloned himself, like some of the characters in his novel, to team-write this colossus?


I only found out that it's Part II of a series after I settled down with it on the Boeing 777 at 32,000 feet over Iceland.

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