History, Politics And Current Affairs

A collaborative novel between Neal Stephenson and somebody who writes historical novels. The central idea is amusing, magic dies out once objective data becomes widely agreed, specifically photographic evidence of an eclipse in the 1850s.

The rest of the story varies between cutesy pseudo documents from a research project, begorrah Irish from a 17th century witch in London, and some mildly amusing time travel shennanigans.

Lesser Stephenson. (actually a hate read as of half way through)

Somewhere in this 740 pages of leisurely writing and execrable reading there is a good story of about 300 pages. The last 100 pages are at least a climax of sorts although an important deus ex machina is needed to resolve one important plot element. I had to reread that bit a day later because I had quite literally forgotten how they'd solved it (it broke the internal logic of the story by the way).

Thoroughly unrecommended.