New metric - page to plot ratio

[threemonkeys]

Recent slow reading conditions led me to end up with three books on the go at once. As usual, a kind of Darwinian selection takes place and I end up spending most of my reading time on the most interesting. I came as a little bit of a surprise that the winner in the evolution stakes would be a big fat alternate history novel by Harry Turtledove. I should probably have avoided the genre for a while, but Homeward Bound proved surprisingly easy to read. All the more surprising because when I look back on it, hardly anything major happened in the book. Lots of action but not much plot.

Harry has a pretty simple formula - make it different, but keep it familiar. He does this in two ways. The first is by picking real* history and using it as a base. In this case he uses the western cultural takeover of China in the 19th century as his model for a human visit to an alien planet. The second thing he does is make his characters seem real and normal - he has a real skill for making his characters just seem like normal folks in all their shapes, sizes and flavours.

If you add all these things together, you get a fun read. But like the Chinese food found in cliché, it isn't very filling - I'm hungry again.

*well not real real history, coz I'm pretty sure there is no such thing. I mean the sort of history recorded by historians in real books.