Paul M. Cray

Peter loves to write a doorstop

Peter F Hamilton has entered the chat.

I suppose there are a lot of characters who need have some kind of payoff!

I love the Baroque Cycle so much, but always laugh at the six or seven different codas that would make Tolkien blush.

He got a reported half-million advance for the book, so I'm guessing he didn't have to do anything else if he didn't want to. It sold reasonably well--not SC or Cryptonomicon, but well from what I saw.

That was in the days before virtual books and one had to make do with what there was to be had. I remember reading it in the Sun on Drury Lane and thinking this is encumbering

Unlike Quicksilver :)

Or, you know, an ending?

It so clearly seemed to be setting up a sequel, so why didn't he write one? Didn't sell well enough?

It read to me like another set up for an MMORPG, that section could have done with a plot

Diamond Age is the worst offender. After that, he mostly wraps things up neatly enough.

Stephenson’s issue with wrapping up books is legendary. I think it was @cstross.bsky.social who referred to the “Neal Stephenson Patent ‘and-then-weird-shit-happens-which-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-rest-of-the-plot’ Ending”.

"Seveneves" just seemed too unwieldy in physical form

I thought you read everything of his irrespective of quality?

Story of Britain post 2010 in so many different areas

It is short though

Me too. One of the most satisfying endings he's ever written, in fact. Plausible? No so much, but I knew that from the first pages.

Polostan, so far, is hard work.

Overfull bookshelves, Seattle, Washington, 2026 February 14

I *think* it's behind the books on one of the shelves

I do want to read it. And I have a study now with a chair to read it in!

He has the opportunity to not read any more than he already has

Contemporary Science Fiction and The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics This book seeks to create a new means of interrogating the direction in which contemporary science fiction is progressing.In the late 1950s, Hugh Everett III su…

Looks amazing! www.bloomsbury.com/us/contempor...

You now have the opportunity to only read the first half. I envy you.

I think there's definitely a lot of underexploited possibilities around language (and many other matters) in space opera universes. Which is why I must write a trilogy exploring them...

Would like to see a TV series set in that sort of universe. ST, SW and DW aren't for different reasons

For ‘no reason?’

I mean, there might have been one. Maybe.

So, why do the non-Terran humans even *talk*? I mean, of course, Marc W. Miller couldn't have known that in 1977!

A complicating factor, of course, now, is that origin groups of the Vilani, Zhodani and other minor human races were taken from the Earth by the Ancients ~300k BP. So, they were presumably H. sapiens. But, I understand, that modern (C21st) anthropologists think language evolved ~70k BP

They also had articles on things like Vilani (the language) with tables for generating names, but surely there ought to be lots of Vilani languages!

I recall an article from "The Journal of The Travellers' Aid Society" on Galanglic, which at least was *trying* to gesture towards doing the right thing, but even at 15 left me slightly unconvinced

Absolutely. Like they really *are* speaking English in "Game of Thrones"/ASoI&F. I know it's George making a joke about LotR, but how is it supposed to work?

I am one of the few who really liked the last third aside from the very strange idea that the Eves’ descendents’ language would remain static for 5000 years. Absurd.