A Wellsian sequel to "Gulliver's Travels" and a unique piece of SF literature all of its own. It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slavesthe finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work. But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms. In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large. Mankind discovers itself at the center of scale. Lilliptians are12 times smaller than us but there are those 12 times smaller than them, and12 times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also. Adam Roberts has written both a rip roaring 19th century adventure, a love story, and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe."