Art, you doing okay, big guy?
I get it, though: “small” things can be “massive,” in a technical sense. It would mean they are dense, since there’s a lot of matter stuffed into a noticeably small space (volume). But people don’t use “massive” in that sense when they’re reading a fictional narrative, even when it’s hard sci-fi. We’re not expecting a physics term to show itself in a normal, non-technical sentence. And how would the narrator know it’s “massive” (dense) just looking at it for the first time? What did Kubrick do to you?
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I suppose “sturdily built” or “a thick slab of a table” would work better. I don’t know — most written fiction today just annoys me too much.
I’m actually really enjoying the book. It’s all very humanist and western, but Clark knows how to tell a compelling story without flowery language getting in the way.