I’ve already nailed my colors to the mast when it comes to Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight. I think it’s a marvellous book, and one that should be considered as a single volume. Reading Charles Stross’s The Merchant Princes and looking back at John Wright’s The Golden Age and Scott Westerfeld’s Succession – all long novels cut up and published as shorter books – it becomes very clear that the real casualty is the opportunity for these books to make a major impact, to potentially break out their authors.

As singleton volumes containing parts of longer stories these books lose the chance to real knock out their audience. As long books containing all of the story involved, though, they often are knockouts. Kudos, therefore, to the Science Fiction Book Club, who have published the definitive versions of the Wright and Westerfeld books, and seem likely to do the same for the Wolfe. I will stress here, though, that I’m not particularly criticising the publishers who suggest cutting books up like this. There are sound business reasons for doing so, and I certainly understand it. But, there is a cost.

I have not, I confess here and now, made it from first page to last of the tome – set of tomes actually – that Andrew Leonard refers to as Mt Stephenson in his review of Neal Stephenson’s latest novel. In fact, although I was knocked out by Cryptonomicon, I was frozen, motionless, by about page 100 of Quicksilver, unable to proceed and not sure how interested I was in the attempt. I think, to a point, I was like a rabbit stuck in the middle of the road, transfixed by the sheer mass of paper headed my way. Given the way my time is, I know I’ll now never read the three books, but I was interested to compare Leonard’s Salon piece with John Clute’s views on the monumental blockhead obdurate wrongness of the book. I don’t know who’s right, but the difference of opinion is interesting, and Clute is pretty clever guy.