Tuesday’s Book


It has taken three days, now, to get a usable surge of energy, i.e., to feel a bit better. And, I haven’t read any more books since Tuesday.
Normally I read only one novel at a time. I might have 8, 10 or 12 non-fiction books going at once but only one novel and I’m about 180 pages into the current one: Quicksilver.
Tuesday, though, I could hardly keep my head off the pillow and Quicksilver is just too heavy to hold up where a pillow attached set of eyes could read it. So, I grabbed a small paper back instead. One I figured I could read in a day, even a sick day: Card’s Seventh Son.


Both books are historical fiction with Quicksilver covering a period about 100 years earlier then Seventh Son. And both are forms of speculative fiction.
Now, it is not 100% obvious that Quicksilver belongs in this category but the ageless Enoch Root is an early and strong assertion by Stephenson that it does fit. I do hope Stephenson answers the puzzle of Root somewhere in this or the next two volumes.
Right from the opening pages there is no question about Seventh Son’s fitting in and Card tells us:

This isn’t really “alternate history” in the sense that if someone had made a different choice all of history might really have been changed. Here, the “change” is that the magic people believed in actually works