Gah. Reads like a game of Exquisite Corpse. And not in a good way.
Drat. I keep eyeing the paperback.
Also, the Firefox spellchecker thinks “eying” is the only correct spelling of that word. That’s news to me.
I was deeply disappointed by Olympos — the more so because I’d really liked Ilium, and had made a point of buying Olympos in hardcover shortly after it came out, only to find that it screwed up just about everything I thought was good in the first book.
When it’s painfully obvious that all the physics in your novel’s world are derived from a single skimming of The Elegant Universe, there’s a problem.