Giving up.

When is it too late to give up on a novel? I picked up a well-reviewed sci-fi epic (I'll leave it anonymous), and was intimidated at it's 900 page length... but you know, it might be worth it. I love a good epic.

After 100 pages, I was thinking that it was pretty slow going.
After 300 pages, I was getting a bit frustrated
After 600 pages, I finally gave up and threw it across the room.

The guy just kept on introducing new characters one after another - or a new world, or a new species... and he'd spend 15 pages obsessively detailing said person, world, or creature, only to have it have NO impact on the narrative.

I'm not kidding, around page 500, the following happened: A world was introduced with over 20 pages of description of it's landscape, how it came to be, it's governing system. Then we met a guy on the world. We learned what he's been doing for the past 2 years. We meet his family. We get to know his son's academic history. After 40 pages into this, I realize the ENTIRE chapter is set up to give us a "common man's reaction' to what happened in the PREVIOUS chapter.

Or how about this - a murder mystery set up in the first 50 pages - with well over 200 pages dedicated to the obsessive minutae in solving this case - which turns out to have had NO relevance to the core storyline and only served to introduce another character, the angry GIRLFRIEND of the accused murderer, who figures later into the story... but the mystery had nothing to do with her other than to impoverish her. She could/should have been ANYBODY. We should have met her with a minor backstory and just started there.

For every single situation, there is too much detail that has no relevance to the story, and then for such careful attention to detail, there are huge plot points just thrown away.

I stopped reading at the 2/3 mark, when after eliding over 20 pages describing the evolution of some other damn species, I decided to skip to the end. Turns out, this isn't the end - it's a setup for a second book.

WHY would I suffer this meandering prose even a moment longer if my only reward would be to buy another thousand pages of drivel from this cretin?

Who could have given this a good review? WHO???? AND WHY???