Moore's decision to include long excerpts from the journals of voyagers and missionaries at times makes for dense and challenging reading. She seems to have succumbed to the research rapture as she combed through these long-ago accounts.

For me, the instant came from happening upon David Collier's comic about the Canadian high jumper Ethel Catherwood. I couldn't stop thinking and wondering about her, and so I began to read about her Olympic teammates. From there I started thinking about sports novels, and sports, and women athletes, and reading more. I kept in mind Daniel Orozco’s admonition to avoid what he termed "research rapture," in a Story Prize post, wherein "one lingers in the pleasures of story research in order to put off the actual writing of the story."

Kamiya should know. He's in command of a lot of S.F. facts. Indeed, in the course of writing this book he found himself caught up in a writing process misadventure known among writers as research rapture.

The author seems determined to put down on paper every single fact he has gathered in his seven years of preparation. (Historical novelists call this ''research rapture.'')