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The Icosameron

Author: Giacomo Casanova

Finally, one to avoid: Yes, that Casanova. The famous libertine was also an author, who somehow found time between his innumerable conquests to write this 1,700-page novel. It's another hollow Earth saga in which a brother and sister join an Arctic expedition, get caught in a maelstrom, and are sucked right through to the interior of the Earth. Here, on the underside of the crust, they encounter a world of 80 kingdoms and ten republics inhabited by millions of tiny, multi-coloured humans. Casanova goes into great detail about the different realms and the peoples and the technologies and their language and sex and on and on. Okay, a science fiction novel by Casanova is a curiosity, but life's too short to wade through all of this verbosity.