There are some writers who are as warm and comfortable as a favourite sweater on a raw day in November. You open their books with the same sense of relief you'd feel when enveloped in the folds of the sweater that's keeping the bite of a fall rain out of your bones. Not only do these writers know how to write well, the way they write convinces you that they believe there is nothing they'd rather be doing than telling you this particular story.

You can tell by the way they write that not only do they believe in everything they have written, every word has come directly from their heart. Yet, in spite of their passionate beliefs, you know they have an open mind and would be willing to listen to someone with a convincing argument on the other side. They know opinions should not be shaped by beliefs alone, but need to be substantiated by facts. Otherwise you are left with nothing but a knee-jerk, emotional response that borders on the fanatical.

It doesn't hurt if you agree with the opinions they are expressing in the first place, as admittedly a great deal of the comfort you derive from their writing is seeing the things you believe in being articulated rationally. It's one thing to find them on the op-editorial page of a newspaper, but another thing altogether to find them within the pages of a well-written novel. They're aren't very many people out there who can write a book and make the story be about moral and political choices without it becoming polemic and tedious, but Spider Robinson is one of them.

Spider is your atypical aging hippie in some ways (many years ago he even wrote a story about Paul McCartney figuring out a way of bringing John Lennon back to life, because the music just hadn't been as good without him). He lives in British Columbia on Canada's west coast, and his writing continues to espouse the hope that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. instilled in some members of his generation. Whether the story is set in a bar on a distant planet peopled with beings from all over the galaxy, or in the more familiar territory of present day Earth, his books are populated by people who believe in the potential of a better world.

This continues to hold true for his most recent release, Very Hard Choices, published by Simon & Schuster Canada. Set in contemporary British Columbia, the book sets us down into the life of aging hippie and newspaper columnist, Russell Walker. After his wife had died from cancer, Russell just wanted to hide out from the world, but events had conspired against him.