If you’re a Christian, a Jew, or a Muslim, you probably shouldn’t read this book. Heck, if you’re a Hindu or an African tribal shaman, you should probably try to stay away from it as well. Basically, this book is an equal opportunity offender: If you believe in God or gods at all, this story will bother and scare you. It’s like an old Pkzip file that unzips in your mind, flooding your thoughts with disturbing notions that you can’t really easily delete. Definitely not a tale to be entered into lightly and unawares because it’s a very hard one to leave behind again.

That said, I find I quite liked it.

I’m a pretty obsessive compulsive guy, and Babylon 5 is my favorite show in the history of ever. I’m easily as obsessive over the show - though I like to think I’m a bit more enlightened about it - as diehard Trekies are about their shows. It’s sad, really.

Yesterday I gave an introduction and synopsis, today we'll get to what it all means.

OBSERVATIONS

I’ve got a thing for Russian Novels. I haven’t read as many of them as I’d like to have, but I really enjoy them for their singleminded lack of brevity. I love how they’ll take a concept or story and just keep on hammering at it until every possible permutation is driven home. I admire that level of completion, and I really have a thing for American-Written Russian Novels. That is, Novels written by Russian expatriates in America in the 20th century. I’ve read everything that Nabokov ever wrote in English, for instance. It’s important to remember, then, that Ayn Rand’s real name was Alisa Zonov’yevna Rosenbaum, from St. Petersburg in Tsarist Russia. This, therefore, is a Russian-American novel.