I was up until 1:00am last night reading Thoughts of God, by Michael Kanaly. This is an unusual book. It describes itself as a 'metaphysical novel of murder.'
It's about a serial killer and the vigilante that hunts him, and in that regard, it's a good story; about average, I'd say. Sprinkled through-out the book, though, are literally, "thoughts of God," and what I can only describe as scenes from other planets both future and past. It seems God's purpose in creation is to run a grand experiment... but I don't want to give too much away.
I was disappointed somewhat with the ending, as it seems a bit rushed, but overall, this is a good book. It will raise subjects that the average person doesn't think about much.
I picked it up mainly because of this quote at the beginning of the book:
When we start thinking too much of ourselves, of our vaulted achievements here on this Earth, I believe we should consider the following: That the Milky Way galaxy, of which our own sun is but a tiny speck, contains roughly 250 billion stars; and that within an area of roughly 97.8 billion light years, which comprises what we humans can currently conceive of as the totality of the universe, there are by conservative estimates 100 billion other galaxies. It is a vastness which is truly incomprehensible. — Argument For Humility, Donald Shelby
In one scene, an alien of reptilian ancestry has crash-landed on another world. He is the only one of his crew that has survived. He has a lot of time to think about the circumstances that led to his predicament:
It had been a foolish war from the beginning, as most were. The filament beings were so different from his own species that the two races had virtually nothing in common. They did not compete for resources or for planets. Indeed, they could not breathe the same air or eat the same foods...
The war itself, he now understood, was an economic ploy by the Home World government — a misguided, deranged effort to bolster support for a space-based defense system. The war had begun after a long, involved media campaign by the military, playing on the public's innate fear of the filament creatures. It was unquestionably a campaign of racial hatred directed at what the military perceived as a "soft target..."
Article comments
1 - Martian Anthropologist
From above:
Yes, the media campaign had been subtle at first, but it had quickly gained momentum, feeding on fear, until everyone on the Home World hated the aliens, and had become convinced that an attack by them was both inevitable and imminent. Of course, as events unfolded, it became obvious that this was a complete, fabricated lie. But somehow the people had been convinced. Even he himself had been convinced.
What does that remind you of?
2 - Temple Stark
war of the worlds, the song.
3 - Martian Anthropologist
lol.