Paucity of TRP materials

[Henry Musikar]

> 
> 
> On Wed, 22 May 1996, Bruce Appelbaum wrote:
> 
> >      
> >      Finished GR?  I've been trying to read it since it came out
> >      in Bantam paperback 20+ years ago.  I pick it up every so
> >      often, read the same initial chapters, and usually manage to
> >      get another 20 or 30 pages into it.  I've gotten as far as
> >      the end of the first part.
> 
> I think that there's a hump in GR, that the first 300-350 pages are
> hard to get through.  At the time I first read it (which was the
> minute I could get my hands on it after publication), I thought that
> this was intentional, that TRP was almost weeding out readers who
> wouldn't wrestle with his science, his scatology, his humor, his
> everything that violated what we expect from novels.  And that once
> you got through that, and accepted what he was doing and the world
> he was creating in GR, it just took off.  Once you get over the
> hump, you start hitting passages of sheer narrative brilliance that,
> as long as you can keep the cerebral absurdity at a reasonable bay,
> can be read effortlessly.  Keep at it.
> 
> Steve Robinson
> 
> 
The "hump" is before brenschluss (is that the right word?). 
The sheer power/acceleration of liftoff is hard to integrate.
So's is reentry, but by then you're along for the ride..
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