review:
The premise of this book felt interesting, so I picked it up at bargain prices from the second-hand section. The blurb said aliens exist, and there have been mass extinction events occuring at the same time across multiple planets. All of this ties to some scientific notion of determining the existence of god. The story itself is more interesting than some science facts being thrown around or a thin wrapper on some existing notion of "... but it MUST be god!". Instead, I really liked that this is actual fiction, and the arguments made are based in that fiction, but also allow us to use and feel them - and that is the intriguing part because god and religion are so uncomfortable to discuss for most people. The book raises some interesting thoughts - what is a god for example - where it is an entity who has control or influence over the development of the universe and is a being as any other. However, the people (Earth) in the story still think of the being as something that is personally aware and intersted in them. I liked that the book shows the human side of it without anything over the top or dramatic (well, there's a cancer story) and having the aliens be reflections of different facets of human thought processes. Clever writing and remarkable restraint.,