Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 2

A Wrinkle In Time review

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is a little like its hero, Meg Murray. What at first appear to be its faults are actually virtues. It is a mixture of fantasy and science fiction, which should not work but in this case it does. The science fiction elements are very good, like the concept of Tessering and the wonderful alien Aunt Beast. The fantasy elements are equally good. There is a black Thing that is spreading evil throughout the universe and some planets, like Camazotz, have given up fighting. Others like Earth are still fighting, and Earth's greatest warriors are people like the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Leonardo DaVinci, Isaac Newton, Euclid, and before the book is over, Meg Murray. Fantasy and science fiction should not go well together but here they do.

Meg is a nerdy girl whose father has given her the pet names "Megatron" and "Megaparsec". She can recite the periodical table of elements and do square roots in her head, but don't ask her to tell you who wrote Boswell's Life Of Samuel Johnson. She has a younger brother who is even smarter than she is, who has decided not to learn to read until he attends Kindergarten because he doesn't want to give his teachers a hard time. She also has younger twin brothers, who are normal children.

Meg has begun to hate herself, and her father has been missing for a year. He is supposed to be on a dangerous, but secret, mission but the neighbors think he ran off with some woman, abandoning his family.

One day she meets a woman who claims to be able to take her to rescue her father, who is trapped on a distant planet, and her genius little brother and a new friend Calvin O'Keefe come with her on some of the most remarkable adventures you'll ever read.

This book hit a nerve with a lot of readers, not all of them young girls. It certainly hit a nerve with me when I read it as a kid, and revisiting the book at the age of sixty-plus I find that it holds up. Many things I enjoyed at that age do not.



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A Bad Movie Based On A Good Book

The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I first came across this story when watching the move The Terrornauts, which was (loosely) based on this book. The movie was just awful. However, just as bad books sometimes make good movies, sometimes lousy movies are based on good books. I got this for free from Project Gutenberg, and I have to say I enjoyed it. Not the best science fiction ever, but a decent effort with some pretty neat ideas.

The story begins when radio signals start coming from an asteroid that are clearly intelligent. The hero of the story recognizes the signals as matching some he heard in a recurring dream. He'd had that dream since he was a child, and details from the dream help him build a spacecraft to visit the asteroid. What he finds there suggests that the human race is being threatened by an unknown enemy, and he'll need to learn the secrets of the asteroid to save it.

Pretty good stuff, though dated. My one criticism is that Leinster introduces a Russian cosmonaut who is also sent to visit the asteroid, but he never gets there and he's forgotten (by the author, not the reader).



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The Rise And Fall Of D.O.D.O. review

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Some of the most enjoyable (if not the most ambitious) Neal Stephenson novels are ones he wrote in collaboration with another author. This would be a good example. The premise is that magic is a practical use of quantum mechanics that has worked for most of human history, but for a reason explained in the novel stopped working all at once back in the 1850's. A government project is set up to figure out why it stopped working and figure out a way to get it working again, at least on a limited basis. There is reason to believe that a hostile foreign power has already succeeded in doing this.

So what you have here is a novel with a fantasy premise written as if it is based on hard science. Not only that, but the authors succeed in keeping this premise interesting and believable for 752 pages.

The book is an epistolary novel, and the "epistles" include diary entries, email threads, Power Point presentations, etc. I've seen a few science fiction short stories done like this, but I think this may be the only S.F. novel to use this form.

There are quite a few female characters in the book (as witches must be female) and I would guess we have Nicole Galland to credit for making them as interesting and believable as they are.

The book is a great adventure story but Stephenson's sense of humor appears throughout. I can't give examples without spoiling the book, but there are some damned funny situations in this story.




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My Mini Cooper Its Part in My Breakdown review

My Mini Cooper Its Part in My Breakdown by James Ruppert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I own a 2013 Mini Cooper S (the last year with the big speedometer) and love it, so I'm interested in the original Mini and own a few books about it.

This book is entertaining, but if you really want to learn about the original Mini you can do better. The book is a mile wide and an inch deep. You'll learn a little something about every kind of Mini ever made and of all the cars that tried to compete with it, but that's it. You'll also learn about how the author restored his own Mini, which is the more worthwhile part of the book.

The author does not consider my 2013 model a proper Mini, which is his privilege.



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Train Wrecks and Transcendence

Train Wrecks & Transcendence: A Collision of Hardcore & Hare Krishna by Vic DiCara

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book was a real surprise for me. I had been active in ISKCON (the Hare Krishna movement) from 1977 to 79, and have written my own memoirs about those years. I have always been curious about what happened to the movement after I left, and lately I've been reading and reviewing novels, memoirs, etc. by ISKCON devotees and ex-devotees. I never regretted leaving the movement, but in the back of my mind I had wondered what my life would have been like if I had stayed, and I read those books in search of answers to that question.

So I read this book, and it came as a total surprise. I knew that there were good musicians in ISKCON, and I even had albums by some of them. When I found out that Boy George had been involved with ISKCON and had recorded the song Bow Down Mister it was surprising, but it made a kind of sense. The song wasn't that different from the ones George Harrison had done about Krishna.

None of this prepared me for the idea of Krishnacore. I had never heard of hardcore Punk before reading this book, and I only know what it sounds like from listening to You Tube videos. It sure doesn't sound like "My Sweet Lord". It isn't my taste, but what is surprising is how different from anything I would associate with ISKCON music it is. If you told me in 1979 that ISKCON would be encouraging people to perform this kind of music I would not have believed you. Heck, if you told me last year I would not have believed you.

The author describes a Hare Krishna movement that is both recognizable as the movement I had joined and very, very different. The problems he identifies in the book were there when I joined up. Definitely the misogyny was always there, which always bugged me. (Oddly enough, I had a really low opinion of women before I set foot in a temple, and it was the women of that temple who changed that. It wasn't like they were trying to do it, but they were so thoughtful and intelligent that they improved my opinion of their whole gender).

Half of the story is about touring as a punk band, sometimes with sannyasins tagging along, and the other half is about being a Krishna devotee in a temple. He knew some of the people I did, although by the time he met them they were all older and mellower. Tamal Krishna Goswami would be an example of someone who is different in the book than I remembered him. At one point he tells a band to make the guitars louder. Definitely not the TKG I had wanted to be my guru.

Clearly a lot of reforms had happened between when I left and when this story begins, but as the author notes the movement still has some serious issues to deal with. The movement wants to remain true to Srila Prabhupada's original teachings, but even that causes problems, as they discover when a translation of an important text suggests that what Prabhupada taught us about how we all wound up in the material world is wrong or at least disputed. It doesn't help that Prabhupada had conflicting opinions on many subjects, something I had noticed from the beginning of my own involvement in ISKCON.

I found the book to be well told and full of interesting incidents, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in ISKCON or punk rock music.



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Stranger In A Strange Land review

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Stranger is Heinlein’s most popular novel, by far. I remember in my High School Youth Fellowship at the Park Ridge Community Church there was a young man who was quite taken with it, and wanted us to have a water sharing ceremony. I was familiar with Heinlein’s juveniles at the time, but had not read Stranger and while I remember starting it a few times I did not read it all the way through until my Junior year in college.

It is not hard to see why someone in high school or college would be attracted to this story, especially a young man. Having said that, one of the book’s most important characters, Jubal Harshaw, is in his seventies, and now that I’m almost that old myself I can appreciate parts of the book that a younger reader would miss.

Heinlein’s heroes are typically Competent Men, and with Jubal Harshaw Heinlein cranks the concept of a Competent Man up to 11. Jubal is educated as both an M.D. and a lawyer, and is extremely good at both. On top of that, he is an author of popular fiction under many pen names, prompting someone who buys his stuff to comment that he is probably four out the six most popular authors in the world. If that wasn’t enough, he raised poisonous snakes as a young man, could have become a preacher if he had obeyed his parent’s wishes, and his old friends include the astrologer of the wife of the most powerful man in the world and a Japanese woman who was tattooed all over her body. He is also, we later learn, the only person who can think like a Martian without first learning the Martian language.

If you can believe in a character like Jubal Harshaw, you’ll have no trouble believing in what the Man from Mars can do. Maybe that was Heinlein’s idea in creating the character.

Make no mistake about it, this book is about a man who was raised entirely by Martians, a race of beings that are VERY different from humans. The premise is similar to Tarzan raised by the Great Apes, but Heinlein is a better writer than ERB and he does a better job of figuring out what someone raised by non humans would be like. ERB dodges the issue. He even has Tarzan teaching himself to shave by looking at picture books! Nothing quite so silly happens with Valentine Michael Smith.

Having said that, Smith’s upbringing is as strange as anything Tarzan ever had. The Martians don’t have sex, as such. After death they become Old Ones who still have an active role in Martian society. They build elaborate cities and abandon them when they become filled with too many memories. If they detect “wrongness” in something they can send it to somewhere in another dimension and it can’t be pulled back.

I have been rereading Heinlein novels and stories in an attempt to figure out what is good about them, with the idea that I may learn something that will help my own writing. Make no mistake about it, Heinlein is a great writer. There is much in his books that a high school English teacher would criticize, but even so if there is an afterlife for authors the greats like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, etc. would treat Heinlein as an equal. I am convinced of that.

What makes science fiction different from other kinds of literature is the ideas, and what the author does with them. Heinlein can do more with an idea than any author I know of. A typical author, given the notion to write about a human raised by Martians, wouldn’t do nearly as much with it as Heinlein does here. He wouldn’t bother to come up with a truly alien Martian race: they’d be humans with better technology and a few physical differences, but that’s about it. He’d show about as much imagination as ERB did with his Martians.

The other thing the Heinlein does that a lesser author would not is consider the legal complications of someone being raised by Martians. ERB’s Tarzan was an English Lord raised by Great Apes. Valentine Michael Smith is a Martian diplomat forced to learn the ways of humans. He is heir to a great fortune and may even have a legal claim to own Mars. This puts his life in danger, and it up to the Competent Men and Women in the story to keep him safe. Suffice it to say only a character like Jubal Harshaw is up to the task.

The main thing that Heinlein does that a lesser author might miss is to make the story about how the Man from Mars affects the humans he meets, and not just how they affect him. The final part of the story is Mike teaching humans the ways of Martians. This is the part of the story that appealed to all the high school and college students who read it in the sixties, largely because it endorsed free love in a big way.

Imagine ERB having Tarzan teach Jane the ways of the Great Apes. In some ways the Great Apes have more in common with humans than these Martians do.

But before Mike starts his own religion, we are introduced to the Fosterites, the latest thing in Earth religions. Heinlein went out of his way to create the craziest and funniest religion imaginable, then has Jubal Harshaw convince us that even the least plausible feature of that religion has a precedent in a religion that exists today.

There is humor throughout the book, though it isn’t a comedy. As an example, Michael gets a job in a carnival as a magician, where he uses his Martian powers to do real magic. The owner of the carnival lets him go after a trial period because he lacks showmanship. The carnival owner’s ideas on the subject of showmanship will greatly influence Michael’s new religion. He even uses Carny slang like marks, chumps, and blow-offs.

Heinlein was trained as an engineer and his stories are typically filled with engineering details of space stations, space suits, etc. that give the stories great verisimilitude even decades after they were written. This is not one of Heinlein’s hard science novels, but he describes the hospital bed of the future in enough detail that he basically invented the water bed. (The U.S. Patent Office agrees with this statement, and refused to grant someone else a patent on the water bed because of this description).

You may have heard that there is sexism in the book, but for when it was written it is about as progressive as a novel ever got. There is one remark about rape that people single out, but in context it isn’t that bad. One of Michael’s friends is working as a showgirl and she warns Michael not to use his powers against men who appear to want to ravish her. She would rather defuse the situation herself than have Michael make the man vanish. While explaining that to him she makes the unfortunate remark.

Many people criticize the fact that Michael has his first sex and the reader never finds out who he has it with. There are four possibilities. In a conventional story who the woman was would be important, but to Michael it would not be, so the reader doesn’t find out.

In summary, it isn’t a perfect book, but I would challenge any author to write a book with the themes this one has and do a better job. I don’t think any author is good enough to do that. I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in science fiction or religion.



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Ramesh Menon's Bhagavata Purana

The Bhagavata Purana by Ramesh Menon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I was active in ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) from 1977-79. I haven’t practiced the religion since I left, but I still find myself to be interested in its philosophy and scriptures, for what that’s worth.

I first encountered ISKCON writings in my college library, starting with Krishna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead and continuing with the Bhagavad Gita and other books. Their most impressive book, at least in size, was Srila Prabhupada’s translation of Srimad Bhagavatam. It took up several shelves and each volume contained both translated verses and elaborate (and to my young mind, repetitive) commentary. I found myself reading the verses and skipping most of the commentary, and found myself wishing for a translation that lacked that commentary and included the R rated details that I felt certain Srila Prabhupada was leaving out.

If Ramesh Menon’s translation of the Srimad Bhagavatam (AKA Bhagavata Purana) had been available back then it would have seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. I would have read it and probably never would have visited the Evanston Hare Krishna temple or done any of the foolish things described in my own memoir of those days. It may seem strange to say it, since those days did not end happily for me, but that would have been a shame.

The problem with this book is that it is not a simple, literal translation, but it is marketed as such. It bears the same relationship to the actual Bhagavata Purana as a Cecil B DeMille movie does to the Bible. DeMille’s movies are a sexed up version of their source material, and the more intelligent members of the movie going public understand that. If a sincere spiritual seeker took them as anything else, there are plenty of Bibles around where he can read the original story.

Menon’s book, on the other hand, pretends to be a literal translation, to the point where important passages are shown as untranslated Sanskrit passages before the translation. If he had just done that, I wouldn’t complain. The problem is, he adds stories he made up himself to the text, embellishes passages having anything to do with sex, and adds sex where it doesn’t exist in the original. He also does what I must conclude are mistranslations. For example, he refers to the BP as “the secret Purana”. Srila Prabhupada told us it was “the spotless Purana”, in other words without flaw. That translation makes a great deal more sense than Menon’s.

Another thing Menon does is refer to the cowherds Krishna grew up with as Gypsies. This is not accurate, even based on Menon's own translation. Krishna’s father Nanda is described as constantly giving away thousands of cows to the Brahmans, and not just cows but decorated cows, with horns plated with gold or silver. He must have had more money than Joel Osteen. He was no gypsy.

Where Menon adds sexual incidents is of course in the stories of the love of the gopis. In the original text (from Prabhupada’s translations and others) there is no mention of Krishna and the gopis actually having sexual intercourse. The BP is not shy about people having sex. There are many incidents in the BP as well as in the Mahabharata where something happens specifically because someone was having sex, and the text tells you as much. It isn’t described in any detail, but you are told without doubt that it happened. For example, in an early section of the book two great demons are born because a woman couldn’t wait a half hour to have sex.

My point is, Krishna’s loving exploits with the gopis are not described as including actual shagging. You’d never know that from reading Menon’s “translation”.

While I was not impressed with Srila Prabhupada’s extensive commentary back in 1977, I have since come around. The commentary is important and necessary. Someone might disagree with it, but at least it represents an actual tradition in Hinduism and isn’t something made up on the spot.

The BP expounds a philosophy with all of its stories, and Menon’s translation is so vague in places that you don’t get a clear idea of what that philosophy is. You can’t determine whether the BP says that the ultimate truth is personal or impersonal, or whether Krishna is the original form of God or merely an avatar of Vishnu.

I will not judge whether the philosophy of the BP is true or not. Having said that, books in general and scriptures especially deserve to be translated without distorting the intent of the original author, and this book in my opinion does not do that.




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Farmer in the Sky review

Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Today I learned from reading other reviews that this book got a Retro Hugo. It deserves that. It is as good as any of Heinlein's four other Hugo winners.

What makes this book work for me is the attention to details. Heinlein really thought through what being one of the colonists of Ganymede would be like. He worked out everything: how you'd get there, how you'd be chosen as a colonist, how you'd prepare the soil to grow anything, what kind of problems the colonists would have, what would be in short supply, what might motivate someone to be a colonist, etc. The colony of this novel seems incredibly real to me.

Others have pointed out that the science behind his description of Ganymede and the other moons is dated. The story was written before I was born, so that isn't too surprising. Heinlein did really well with what science was known at the time. He earns your willing suspension of disbelief.

The last part of the story seems tacked on, and perhaps it would have been a better book without it. That's really the only criticism I have.

The book features Boy Scouts and should be read by every Scout, even today. It will give them a lot to think about, as well as a gripping story.



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Monks in Manhattan review

Monks in Manhattan by Jnanagamya Dasa

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a remarkable, though flawed, book that deserves readers. What makes it remarkable is that it is one of only three novels about the Hare Krishna movement written by a devotee (current or former) in that movement. Even more remarkable, it is a love story. Devotees certainly fall in love, and non-devotees fall in love with devotees and thereby become devotees themselves, but telling a story like that is a challenge for any novelist.

Krishna devotees do not have sexual relations before marriage, and have a VERY limited amount of sex during marriage. At some point in that marriage they will have to split up and devote the remainder of their lives to perfecting their love for Krishna. I can attest that it is possible to want that kind of marriage as fervently as you might want the other kind, but how do you convince a reader of that?

It is clear early on that this novel won’t follow the normal romantic comedy plot (Boy meets Girl, Girl gets Boy into Pickle, etc.) and that there will be much discussion of Krishna along the way. Still, some of the conventions are followed. We get a “meet cute”, a heroine who is not who she pretends to be (and must keep this a secret from the hero), and a few other things.

I can appreciate this novel better than most because I was involved with the Hare Krishna movement in the late seventies. It was a much different movement back then from the one described in the novel (although I believe the novel describes the present day movement accurately). As a result of my own involvement, I have some observations on the novel, as well as some criticisms.

To start with an obvious criticism, the protagonist and the omniscient narrator (who are not the same person, as far as I can tell) both have an odd speech pattern where they make up nicknames for things. Manhattan becomes “Manhantinee”, human beings become “humus beans”, the subway is the “subworm”, museum becomes “mvsevm” and so on. You get a heavy dose of this at the beginning of the novel, but it eases up later on. The problem is, it’s annoying and adds nothing to the story. It just makes the earlier pages harder to read. Any editor would have fixed this.

Now some observations. There are many illustrations in the e-book, mostly head shots of devotees intended to represent characters in the story. This is kind of neat. Obviously a lot of people collaborated on this. It turns out that the story was intended to be the basis for a film, and that some trailers featuring these people were shot. They don't seem to be posted anywhere.

I learned things about the movement I didn’t learn in my almost three year involvement. For example, I learned that the Matchless Gifts storefront where the movement began still exists. (A few miles from my home is the very first franchised McDonald’s, preserved as a sort of shrine, so I guess it makes sense that Matchless Gifts should still be around). I also learned about the first Ratha Yatra parades in New York, which was interesting. I was involved in a couple of much later parades myself, in Chicago.

There are a lot of pop cultural references in the book, everything from Jane Austen novels to recent movies. When I was in the movement I had to give up novels, movies, and popular music. Some devotees made an exception for the movie Capricorn One, because it showed how the Moon landings could have been faked (which the more serious devotees believed at the time). The hero of this story reads and watches everything.

Another criticism: past life regression is an important part of the plot. While the author does explain that past life regression is not a mainstream Hare Krishna belief, it is used prominently in the story and I think it hurts it. According to Hindu scriptures people can sometimes remember previous lives but this is quite rare and doesn’t happen to ordinary people. A really great devotee might remember a past life, or even what role he had in the spiritual world, but in the novel the characters just get hypnotized and remember everything without effort. It would have been a better story if the characters had no proof of previous lives and had to at least sometimes think that their self denial might be pointless.

As C.S. Lewis has observed, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. There is too much certainty in this story. Reading about the heroine’s conversion is a bit like reading about a sinner converting to Christianity after the Rapture has already taken place. The heroine becomes Krishna conscious way too fast.

To be fair, other than the two main characters nobody takes this past life regression stuff too seriously.

There is uncertainty, but it is, interestingly, on the part of the hero, who is already committed to Krishna Consciousness. To him this means a life of celibacy. He has the shaved head of a brahmachari (celibate student), even though he works at a regular job. He has experienced married life before and is not certain that trying it a second time wouldn’t lead him astray. On the other hand, he wants the heroine to be Krishna Conscious and isn’t certain she could do it without him.

I can relate to the hero’s predicament, indirectly, as my own experience was the opposite of his. I fell very hard for a mataji (female devotee), but was not sure I could ever be the kind of devotee she would want as a husband. She had already been in the movement six years and was serving on the altar, and I still had real doubts about the movement philosophy and my ability to follow all the rules. Being a devotee was a serious business back then. You had to be qualified to be married, which for men meant that before you could take a wife you had to prove you didn’t need one. In fact, in the Evanston, Illinois temple we had several married couples who lived apart, the husband in the men's ashram and the wife in the women's ashram. In the novel the question of who is qualified to be married doesn’t even come up.

If the heroine wasn't convinced about having a previous life, what kind of doubts might she have had? To begin with, while preaching to her the protagonist makes some arguments against Science that aren’t that great. In his place I would have argued that Science knows very little about consciousness, or even why it exists. Instead of doing that the author argues that scientists teach that the universe was created from a void. (The Bible teaches that. Science does not).

The scriptures of the Hare Krishna movement describe the universe as having a flat Earth, a mountain that the Sun goes behind at night, and much else that is doubtful. Devotees don’t actually believe that the Earth is flat, but they have to make a serious effort to read their own scriptures and not come to the conclusion that those scriptures describe a flat Earth. With all the reading that the heroine was supposed to be doing she would have run into this.

These same scriptures also describe allegedly historical events that about as likely to have happened as any in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They tell a compelling story, and the philosophy behind the story is attractive, but it isn’t history. Most devotees have to struggle with that at least a little.

These were the kinds of things that I struggled with myself.

Another observation: the hero spends surprisingly little time in the company of other devotees. (Towards the end of the book this changes). In the 1970’s I lived outside the temple and had a regular job, but I had to spend as much time as possible with the devotees in the temple. I visited the temple daily, both in the early morning hours and in the evenings. The protagonist practices Bhakti Yoga at home for the most part, and spends much time with his own thoughts, but we are supposed to think of him as being serious about his practice.

Yet another: the protagonist has a spiritual name, which must have been given to him by a guru as part of his first spiritual initiation. He also chants the Gayatri mantra, which is given by a guru at second initiation. We don’t hear anything about his guru. We do hear about Srila Prabhupada, the founder of the movement, but this character is not old enough to have met Srila Prabhupada (who died in 1978) and I would expect his own guru to be more important in his life than he is in the story. Instead of wondering if he’s doing the right thing, I would have expected him to ask his guru.

It would be plausible for him not to take his guru’s advice, or to deliberately not ask for that advice, but the devotees I knew would have at least considered asking and would have felt guilty about it if they had not. The protagonist uses his own judgment more often than a serious devotee probably would. His guru isn't even a character in the story. When I was just starting to get serious about Krishna Consciousness the guru I had hoped to receive initiation from (Tamal Krishna Goswami) loomed very large in my life.

Having said all that, the novel does give you a pretty good idea of what it is like to be a Hare Krishna. I enjoyed being a devotee while it lasted and this book gives you a taste of why people are willing to give up so much to have that kind of life.



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Variable Star review

Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is about as close as you can come to a new novel by Heinlein. In some ways it's better than that. Heinlein is probably the most important of all science fiction authors. Few would say the best writer, but he did more to set the pattern for how science fiction should be done and what it was capable of doing than anyone. Having said that, Heinlein's last works were not his best. Even the most devoted Heinlein fan has to forgive much when reading them.

What Spider Robinson has given us here is the work of a disciple of Heinlein finishing what the master had begun. The end result has more profanity than a Heinlein story would have, but is otherwise very much in the mold of a Heinlein juvenile, though one with a rather dark ending.

There are many ideas from other Heinlein books here, including the concept of twin telepaths from Time for the Stars, many references to Nehemiah Scudder, a plot point from The Door Into Summer, and a lot of other stuff I might have missed. The story takes place in a different timeline than our own, one in which the September 11th attack led to the reign of the Prophet Nehemiah Scudder and in which the first Moon landing happened differently. Other than Scudder (who is only referred to) there are no characters from other Heinlein books.

As mentioned before, the book takes a dark turn towards the end. It is fairly light up until that point. The story puts the hero in a really hopeless spot and he gets out of it by what almost qualifies as a dei ex machina. Not exactly, but close enough. I didn't find that objectionable, but others might.

Other reviewers complained that the hero was just too talented and smart to be believable, but that is typical of Heinlein protagonists (and of science fiction in general).



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