Headscratchers / Small World (Tabitha King novel)

• When describing how the minimizer works to Dolly, Roger confidently explains that the minimizer can shrink anything he wants, as much as he wants. This implies there's not a specific size limit to the minimizer—it doesn't reduce everything to the same size, and Roger seems to need to adjust it in order to shrink items to scale. (In other words, when he shrinks both a car and a bouquet of flowers, the car and the flowers don't both end up three inches long; the flowers are proportionally smaller than the car.) It seems then that he would be able to make the same adjustments to make things larger, restoring them to their original size, or that it would simply be a matter of tinkering with the adjustment mechanism to allow it to go higher.
  • For that matter, it's never explained how objects in the background of the minimizer range of sight are not also shrunk: Roger shrinks a painting but not the wall behind it, and shrinks a tea set but not the pedestal on which it's displayed. This is handwaved in the book by Roger refusing to explain too much about the minimizer to Dolly to prevent her from shrinking things willy-nilly, but opens up some Fridge Horror: what if someone standing behind an object to be minimized got reduced without Roger's knowledge? They'd be lost somewhere on the floor, abandoned, disoriented, and probably doomed.
• The forced perspective to which Leyna is subjected when she's minimized is very inconsistent. Outside the Doll's White House, she's disoriented because the threads of a normal-sized bedsheet appears to be as thick as her wrist, while strands of carpet are like a forest of stumpy saplings, but inside the dollhouse, where everything is doll-sized, she's perfectly okay. This would be fine except that the majority of items in the dollhouse (the ones Roger hasn't created with the minimizer) are made from standard human-sized materials like cloth and wood, meaning that she should still see the threads as enormous and the woodgrain would look as if it came from a giant sequoia. This is made even more glaring when Leyna is gifted commercial doll clothes and notices at once that the seams look as if they're sewn together with thick wires, but mistakes the hand-sewn custom doll clothes created by Lucy for ordinary off-the-rack dresses. (Roger even handwaves the problem slightly with the possibility that Leyna might not be able to eat tiny portions of human-sized food because he doesn't know if the molecules are going to be too big to digest, while further noting that she seems to be coping okay with water.) Either Lucy's clothes and upholstery are created with microscopic threads, or we should all just roll with it because the book isn't intended as hard science fiction.