I approached this book believing in evolution but doubting the precise mechanism by which it is claimed to work (natural selection). My objection is based on the fact that evolution has never been simulated in a computer. It’s supposed to be an automatic, non-conscious process, and yet we can’t replicate it artificially. Why? Time to learn from the experts.

Well, I didn’t get an answer to my question. I was delighted to read that Dawkins had taken it upon himself to attempt to simulate evolution on his little 64K computer (this was the 1980s, remember). He claims to have created insect-like creatures that he terms “biomorphs.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain the argorithms that he used to achieve that. I am left to wonder how much of his results were more akin to faces in the cloud than to actual complexity that gives an organism a definite survival edge. Certainly, Dawkins’s program has never been superceded by a better one that shows the principle of natural selection operating on a bigger scale.

Nevertheless, evolution happens; no question about it. Dawkins provides brilliant and very engaging accounts of the development of the eye and echolocation in bats. He expertly debunks creationist objections, explaining how cumulative selection works – nothing like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and creating a Rolls Royce by random chance.

The book unfortunately begins to falter about halfway through and continues plunging to the finish (at least for the lay reader), as it tackles the finer points of evolutionary theory, delving into obscure areas with the titles punctuationism, Lamarckism and taxonomy. He can be long-winded at times, and needlessly arrogant. I could stand the arrogance if he really was as right as he thinks he is, but when he strays out of his field of expertise into metaphysics, he’s completely inept. He has no concept of time other than as a forward-moving arrow, and so, when he thinks of the idea of God, he can only describe him/it as a highly complex organism needing a creator of its own. You can’t tackle metaphysics without delving into philosophy. Dawkins’s unexamined assumption of “materialism” doesn’t cut it.

In the end, I gained some valuable knowledge about evolution, but my main contention was only reinforced. How can you say natural selection is an unconscious process when the organisms doing the the evolving are conscious?

And what is consciousness? The Blind Watchmaker would have benefitted from a chapter on consciousness, discussing the theories on what it is, specifically whether it is an emergent product of evolution, or a metaphysical precursor to the evolutionary process. For reasons that are too lengthy to go into here, I side with the latter. Unfortunately, one may specialise in evolutionary biology, while knowing little or nothing about psychology and metaphysics. This lays the basis for making hugely wrong conclusions, when diverse fields of enquiry overlap. Nevertheless, The Blind Watchmaker is recommended reading.

God Is Not Great is extremely useful as a catalogue of religious atrocity. Atheists will undoubtedly nod their approval of Hitchens’ presentation throughout the book. Only the most utterly brainwashed Christian or Muslim could failed to be embarrassed at the crimes done in the name of their respective religions. But the astute believer will respond, “You can’t judge a religion itself by the behaviour of its followers.” Is there merit to this objection? To an extent, yes. Hitchens appears to be making an ad hominem argument. I think Hitchens would argue that the sheer extent of the bad behaviour testifies to the destructive nature of the idea itself. These are not mere isolated occurances of evil, but appear to be stimulated by the ideas themselves. As the subtitle of the book says: “How religion poisons everything.”

This is true, but but the key question, which Hitchens does not really tackle is this: is the poison really within religion itself, or is it within people? Hitchens’s stance reminds me of the way that people have tried to condemn violent films and videogames as stimulating violent behaviour, when the truth is that the aggressive tendencies already exist within us, which is why we enjoy those kinds of entertainments. Same with pornography. Porn is bad, it is argued, becuase it stimulates sexual thoughts. No. Sexual thoughts exists, as comedian Bill Hicks put it, because of “having a dick.” Hence we have porn. Likewise, Hitchens argues, religion is bad because it turns people bad. On the contrary, the badness and the stupidity are a part of the human makeup. Religion is merely the tool that is used to express that badness and stupidity. The real accusation must be levelled at the selfish ambitions of those who reign at the top of all religious power structures. And the blame also lies at the stupidity of the common man for failing to see when he is being conned. I would put it like this: “People are stupid, therefore religion succeeds,” rather than “Religion poisons everything.”

Hitchens insists on dropping the capital “G” from the word God throughout the book, which is disappointing to me. I’m no fan of religion, but there is philosophical merit to the idea of God, whether understood deistically or pantheistically. There is nothing poisonous about metaphysics. My personal favourite term for the creative agent of the universe is the Infinite, and I always spell it with a capital “I”, purely in reference to its metaphysical nature. And I do not think of the Infinite as a transcendental entity, like the monotheistic religions.

The most disappointing aspect of the book was the slightly hypocritical note on which it closes. After earlier praising pluralism and free speech, Hitchens finishes by saying that we need a new Enlightenment and religion must be excluded from all discussion. How tyrannical of him to decide that for us all. Organised religion might one day die of its own accord, but I doubt that will bring an end to organised stupidity and intolerance. Those unfortunate human traits will simply find a new means of expression.

Hitchens’ critique of religion is, for the most part, valid. It just doesn’t quite reach the heart of the matter. God Is Not Great is a very useful book. An important catalogue of the misuse of religion throughout history.

The chief focus of Dune Messiah is Paul’s struggle against several enemies who have conspired to destroy him. Frank Herbert’s mythology is so intricate that you can never tell from what angle the attack will come. The first suspect is in the form of his old friend Duncan Idaho, who had been slain but is now resurrected as a “ghola” – essentially a whole new person in Idaho’s skin, containing whispers of the previous man. But how do you attack a man who can see into the future? With the aid of a “steersman” – a creature with prescience, ordinarily used to steer starships safely through the void, because seeing the future means that you can avoid disaster. Paul is immersed in a battle of wits involving not only the ordinary skills of cunning, but prescience versus prescience. You might imagine it would be easy for the reader to get lost in such a complex tapestry, but the book is immensely readable. To cap it all, Herbert comes up with a genuinely unpredicatable and satisfying twist in the tail.

As with reading the first volume, I was in awe of Herbert’s mythmaking ability. I had the sense that I was only being shown a tiny portion of a whole universe, entirely imaginary, but so well thought out as to be almost tangible. Dune Messiah is only half the size of Dune, but is a worthy sequel. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, Children of Dune.

But this is not pornographic fiction. It’s a tale of considerable depth about morality. Why do we do what we do? Alex asks the unaskable question:

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don’t go into the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good that’s because they like it … But what I do I do because I like to do.

Notice the unfamiliar words in the above quote. The entire novel is written in this futuristic juvenile slang. It makes the first couple of pages hard reading, but you quickly get into the swing of assuming the natural meanings of the many strange words on display. Bezoomny = mad; creech = scream; droog = friend. There’s a dictionary at the back of the book, but you won’t need to refer to it.

The really interesting part of the book happens after Alex gets caught by the police and tossed in prison for several years. He gets selected for the Ludovico Technique, a new program designed to turn criminals into good people with astonishing rapidity and reintegrate them into society. For Alex, this means drastically early release from prison, but at what cost?

This begs the question: if one is forced to be good, is this really good? I was reminded of the Christian worldview I used to hold, where I looked forward to a future in heaven where I would not only be free from sin, but I would be unable to sin. But if a person does not have the ability to choose between good and evil, how can good be called good? It is simply action, having no ethical value whatsoever. Is there any virtue in anything, if there is no risk of choosing the opposite path? A person becomes a clockwork orange, his choices imposed upon him. The book is divided into three parts, each one beginning with the telling words “What’s it going to be then, eh?” emphasising the importance of having a will of your own.

Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of this novel is, for the most part, very faithful to the book, even to the point of his script mirroring some of the dialogue word-for-word. Both are worth tackling, especially for the philosophically minded. How many religionists have dared to ask: “Why should there be good only?” No, it is assumed that good is right and natural, whereas evil is wrong and unnatural. But the one has no substance without the existence and threat of the other. What’s it going to be then, eh?

Power is the ultimate goal here, and it’s right there that I question the wisdom of the book’s premise. Power to what end? As an end in itself? Do I want power? Of course. I won’t deny it. But to me, power is merely an aid to survival. Too little of it and I may end up homeless, scrounging for food. But too much, and I create other hazards for myself, such as maintaining my empire against the plots of my enemies. The book presupposes that power is what we’re after. Power, power, power, and there’s never enough of it to be satisfied. And everything about your humanity should be sacrificed in the quest for it. Any principles you cling to are worthless and should be discarded at every opportunity for the accumulation of more power. No one should be trusted. Relationships should always be viewed with suspicion, and no one allowed to get too close. In fact, your friends are mere pawns to be manipulated at will to do your bidding. I pride myself on seeing through much of the nonsense that masquerades as ethics in the world, but it’s hard to see how you could embrace a philosophy like this and not end up feeling very alone and empty.

Don’t get me wrong. This was an immensely useful read. It gave me a sense of awareness about how some morally vacuous individuals might attempt to manipulate me. It also provided great insight into the arena of politics. Admittedly, there were also many genuinely useful insights in the book – principles a sensible person could use to improve his life. Some of the useful laws could be summarised as “act, don’t react.” Control of the emotions is paramount, as is focusing on long-term goals rather than hot-headed short-term satisfaction; diplomacy, acting always with full awareness of how your actions will be interpreted by the parties concerned.

Each law is presented with detailed historical examples of its usage. This helps makes the laws memorable, but it should also be noted that a few incidental examples don’t necessarily make these principles concrete, as they could just as easily be flukes. The first ten laws are:

• Never outshine the master.
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies.
• Conceal your intentions.
• Always say less than necessary.
• So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.
• Court attention at all costs.
• Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.
• Make other people come to you; use bait if necessary.
• Win through your actions, never through argument.
• Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.

In light of my own personal “following” on YouTube, and my book on spirituality, Reality Check, I was highly amused by law 27: “Play on people’s need to believe to create a cultlike following.” Doing such a thing is utterly abhorrent to me. Greene is essentially justifying the turning of oneself into a cult leader. Of course, in his view, speaking the truth is not considered important at all. He emphasises the value of spouting vague flowery nonsense that makes your audience feel good.

Ultimately, there is a fundamental hypocrisy in this book. If the author truly believes in the 48 laws of power, why on earth would he share them with us? Isn’t that giving your power away? Staying at the top of your game involves being the smartest, not giving your opponents the tools to outwit you.

The 48 Laws of Power is a very useful book, but one to be read with a large pinch of salt.

The volume contains around 800 pages, divided into three parts: (1) the ancient Greek philosophers, (2) philosophy under the triumph of Christianity, and (3) philosophy from the Renaissance to the present (mid-twentieth century). I confess that after about two hundred pages I was feeling quite fatigued, and I had to wonder just how much I was taking in. If you asked me right now to tell you one significant assertion by Empedocles or Protagoras, I would be lost. It’s impossible for the brain to hold this amount of information. But the real value in reading, I realised, was the ability to compare my own personal philsophy with the assertions of past philosophers. I found my own belief in a universe of perpetual flux mirrored in Heraclitus, and my belief in an underlying non-duality of all things reflected in Parmenides.

Following philosophy all through the Christian era was fascinating, in light of my Christian past. I came to realise that Christianity truly is a spent force in the world. Despite pockets of contemporary success, especially in the USA, its influence is nothing compared to centuries past. What we see today is more like a last gasp. Under the pressure of science, there is simply no going back to a universally Christian civilisation. As a general history of Christianity, Russell’s book is incomplete. The same is true of the Greek era. This was the one weakness in the volume, and created an additional difficulty for me in understanding some of what I was reading. Although I have to wonder just how big this book would have ended up, if the author had chosen to be more thorough in his telling of history. So perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

Regardless of how much or how little I can recall, I now have an overall picture of the history of philosophy. Some of the questions asked by philosophers were of great importance; others were intellectual dead-ends, issues of mere syntax. Oftentimes, a philosopher was overly influenced by his culture. Sometimes the success of a philosophy was determined more by political considerations, than pure logic. Ultimately, I came away with a sense of confidence about my own beliefs, since I found nothing to refute them within Russell’s work. And while I love philosophy, an awareness of such of high level of differing ideology through the ages can only make one wonder how far we might yet be from the truth in our present.

“Chaos” is a term that Carroll uses as a substitute for what a philosopher might call God, or what I, in my own personal vocabulary call the Infinite. Chaos is the ground zero of everything that exists. It is a useful term, because it removes any notion that the Infinite is a personal being, or is in any way sypmathetic to the human condition. “Gnosis” is the term used to describe a state of no-mind gained through the use of trance. “Kia” denotes the basis of consciousness, the essence of which is will and perception. These are just some of the terms employed in the IOT’s lexicon.

This book really hit the spot, in terms of what a reader like myself hopes to obtain from reading a magical text: fresh insights and new angles that I might be able to integrate into my own personal understanding of the universe. The book was a treasure trove in this regard. It was especially exciting in light of my own experiments in psychokinesis. Carroll’s system not only accommodates such phemonena, but mirrors the very techniques I’ve already discovered trough trial and error, and suggests avenues for improvement. Those who pursue psychic abilities from a purely scientific perspective are missing out, in my opinion.

So often a magical text is concerned with personal development and influencing others – what the LaVeyan system calls “lesser magic.” Refreshingly, Carroll is chiefly preoccupied with “greater magic” – acts of a genuinely paranormal nature. He describes a interesting technique using personal “sigils” – where a desire is written down in words, and the words are then visually reconstructed into a “glyph of desire.” I have nothing to say, presently, on whether such a technique works, but it certainly was interesting.

I was by no means in agreement with everything that Carroll asserts, especially in regard to reincarnation. There was the bold assertion that a magician could carry his life forward into a new body, by means of a particular visualisation at the moment of his death. Unless Carroll himself has all the memories of a past life and can demonstrate this, how on earth could such a claim be proven?

Nevertheless, this was a thoroughly engrossing read, full of insight. I finished it wanting to read it all over again.

Now, you either love this sort of a mindfuck or you don’t. I’m a great believer (for philosophical reasons that I won’t go into just now) that there is more to the universe than material reality. This charming fiction provides a mathematical basis for such a notion. It behoves us to try and conceptualise a fouth dimension which sees into the third in much the same way that the third can see into the second. It’s impossible to wrap your head around, just as in the story it’s impossible for the square, once returned to Flatland, to describe his experience to his companions, or even to accurately remember it. I’m someone who has an appreciation for things of a magical or psychic nature, so I know that there’s something to the idea that Abbott presents, although I would hasten to add that his presentation is an approximation, not a factual description, of a higher reality than the physical dimension.

Concurrent with a discourse on dimensionality, the story also provides a satirical commentary on social customs of the Victorian era in which it was written, especially as it concerns the abuses of religious authority in preventing the free speech of those who think different. Although this book is classified as fiction, because it is first and foremost a story, I believe that a reader seeking entertainment will find much less pleasure in it than the philosopher-at-heart. To the latter, I thoroughly recommend this little volume.

With the exception of the first volume, the rest of the Starstormers saga has been fairly mediocre, including this final episode. That said, I found myself always captivated by the characters, if not the stories themselves. I think children, who are much more forgiving of plot-holes and unoriginality, will have a great fondness for the saga. It was my own childhood memories of volume 1 that led me to take this nostalgia trip in the first place, and I’m glad I did. I can’t help thinking it might have made a great little children’s TV series, given a chance.

Volcano provides decisive closure to the saga. Farewell, Starstormers. It’s been fun.

See also:

• Starstormers
• Starstormers 2: Sunburst
• Starstormers 3: Catfang
• Starstormers 4: Evil Eye

Sarah Clark is a fourteen-year-old girl who feels like a bit of a misfit; her English teacher, Daniel Carr, is thirty-eight and is married with a daughter. Recognising Sarah’s intelligence, he pays her special attention, loaning her books. They spend lunch-times together, having private discussions, alone in his classroom. Then one day he makes a move on her, and she accepts. A passionate secret love affair develops, where they both can’t get enough of each other. On Mr. Carr’s side, there is a lot of conflicting emotion: the fear of Sarah’s naivety getting them caught, the guilt over what they are doing, the fear of losing his wife and daughter. Disturbingly, the sexual relationship between Daniel and Sarah becomes violent at times, but they both seem addicted to each other regardless. Central to the book’s theme is the metaphor of “the beast with two backs” – when two people become like one organism, and cannot be satisfied when apart, no matter how badly they treat each other. Recognising the destructive nature of their relationship, Mr Carr breaks it off, resigns from his job, and moves himself and his family to another town far away. Sarah is heartbroken.

All this takes place in a few chapters at the beginning of the book. The majority of the story concerns Sarah in her early twenties. She has become excessively sexually promiscuous, having hundreds of previous lovers in an attempt to recapture what she lost with Daniel. But no one will do. Then, out of nowhere, he reappears in her life, divorced and available. And both of them still want each other. This time the relationship becomes even more destructive and violent than before. But the two seem powerless to resist. Caught in the crossfire is Sarah’s longsuffering best friend Jamie, who has been besotted with Sarah since she was a girl.

What I got from this book was a portrait of a completely self-absorbed woman – one whose view of sex is intirely about me, me, me. Everyone exists to serve her. She even seduces Jamie, despite the fact that he is a husband and father. All around her is the emotional wreckage of the people she has vampirically drained. And central to her “psychosis” is that age-old bullshit story of finding “The One” – the idea that there’s one special person you’re meant to be with and no one else will do, and to be alone is to be incomplete. The thing is, what I’m seeing in the story is not what the author intended. By all appearances, the author defends the idea of finding The One. She just wants to replace the romantic stereotype of this age-old tale with something raw and animalistic. Frankly, I’m not convinced. In the real world, people enter sexual relationships, and for a while it’s exciting, even obsessional, but after time the sex becomes familiar. Love isn’t this monstrous thing that drains so much from people that it almost kills them. What planet are you on, Maguire?

The genuine insight of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is absent here. All I see is a piece of pretentious melodrama with added shock value. This was the story of a self-absorbed little tart with delusions of profundity. Emily Maguire attempts to out-Nabokov Nabokov, but hasn’t got what it takes.

Interestingly, Cayce was a devout Christian throughout his life, which is hard to marry with his use of astrology, given Christianity’s condemnation of magic. It is claimed that he had no education in this art, which is hard to believe, since his language mimics the general practice of astrology, which is, in my opinion, a rather flawed magical art.

The book begins, very interestingly, with a chapter entitled “The Universal Mind,” which is concerned with where Cayce obtains his information. The idea is that there is a sea of consciousness, of which our individual minds are just an aspect. Cayce’s trances allowed a greater flow of information from the Universal Mind than his normal waking consciousness would be able to process. I resonate very much with this way of thinking, and I was eager to know more.

Unfortunately, after a few chapters of this nature, the book changes tack, and concerns itself with raising Cayce on a pedestal rather than teaching anything useful about psychic abilities. I quickly grew bored reading case after case of supposedly accurate psychic readings. All the while, the sceptic in me was making note of the fact that, while the author Doris Agee had access to “The Cayce Files,” she chose to relay the stories to using aliases, which makes any verification of facts impossible.

When reincarnation was mentioned, Cayce’s readings always fell into a pattern that I see so often with frauds. Have you ever noticed that when a psychic talks about somebody’s past life, that life is always special: he either lived in Atlantis, or he was an Egyptian priest, or he was present with Jesus at the cruxificion, and so on. Statistically speaking, why would your past life be any more special than your present? But it always is. And that’s very telling, isn’t it?

The clincher came when Cayce offered some prophecy about the world’s future, that great “earth changes” would take place between 1958 and 1998, including the destruction of Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. FAIL.

I get frustrated when reading books about psychic matters, because it’s hard to tell the genuine information from the fraudulent. All things considered, I have to categorise Edgar Cayce in the latter group. What a waste of time.

The volume is divided into several parts: The Ancient World, covering the emergence of homo sapiens, the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, etc. The Middle Ages, covering the Fall of Rome, the expansion of Christianity, Islam, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, the Aztecs and Incas, etc. Each subsequent part then takes a century at a time, beginning with the fifteenth and covering the discovery of the New World, the printing press, the Renaissance, the War of the Roses.

The book is roughly A4 in size, and each topic is presented attractively over two facing pages, featuring an brief overview, an illustrated exposition of key events, and a chronology. The presentation makes it feel like a school library book, perhaps aimed at a junior high level, but it’s perfectly useful for higher ages nonetheless.

Overall, this is an excellent presentation, and perfect for someone who doesn’t have the time to read a mammoth tome. My only criticism is that it’s not quite comprehensive enough. A section on the Crusades is notable by its absence.

Conspiracy buffs have ideas about a secret Illuminati manipulating the world from the shadows for hundreds or thousands of years. As someone who once flirted with that scene, I can’t help but think that if only those people would take a more thorough look at the forces which have moved the world over the centuries, they would see that their theories fall apart. The conspiracy scene seems to thrive on filling the void left behind from a poor education. That’s why it’s so important to read a book like this.

I used to be an avid fan of Stephen King in my teens and twenties, but somewhere along the line I got tired of all the huge tomes of 700 plus pages. There’s nothing worse than plodding through a massive book only to discover that it ends up as nothing more than an average story, as is often the case. But Rage is of special interest to me, because it’s the one book that Stephen King ended up withdrawing from publication. Notoriety like that inststantly piques my curiosity.

The subject matter of this 150-page novella concerns a high school boy, Charles Decker, who shoots two teachers in his school then holds his classmates hostage. School shootings, as we know, occasionally happen in real life, Columbine being the most famous example. Unfortunately, after one such real-life incident, the perpetrator was found to have a copy of Rage in his locker. King, and his publishers, agreed that it was best to remove the book from sale indefinitely.

The novel is written in the first person and Decker is the protagonist. At no point is the reader asked to rationalise Decker’s actions, only to take a peek inside his head at the mitigating circumstances that might lead a person to do what Decker did. One prominent theme of the novel is the abuse that adults to do children – specifically parents and teachers. This abuse is sometimes unconscious and even well-intentioned in a warped sort of way. Decker tells of an occasion when he was younger and his mother forced him to attend a birthday party dressed up in his Sunday best, when he knew that all the other kids would be in casual clothes and he would look foolish. But no amount of protesting would change her mind. He also recounts the story of going camping with his dad and his dad’s drinking buddies, where he overheard his father talking about how he would slit his mother’s nose open if he ever caught her in adultery.

The story is set in a time period when the education system allowed teachers to get away with way too much. I went to school at a time when the system was starting to emerge out of this, to put teachers on a shorter leash. I could tell you some stories. I recall my junior high mathematics teacher walking up behind me and whacking me across the back of the head hard. I was stunned; didn’t see it coming. All I had done to deserve this was skip a line of my sums because I had been smart enough to work it out in my head. I recall botching a question on my biology examination. Afterwards, in class, the teacher was going over the paper, and he decided to bring the whole class to fits of laughter as he described how “some moron” had answered question 5. Then there was my high school PE teacher, the man who made me hate PE. Do the slightest thing wrong and you were ordered to do ten push-ups in front of everyone. He took perverse pleasure if you were overweight like me and couldn’t do the exercise properly. I get a little angry even now, thinking back. I didn’t know it then, but these were adults who brought their anger issues and perverse character traits into work with them and took them out on the children in their care.

So I instantly empathised with Charlie Decker’s stories. Rage is about what happens when the abuse gets to the point where the abused person says, “Enough.” But this is not a tale about a boy losing himself in violence; it’s a strangely controlled explosion. Once Decker has his classmates in isolation, he begins something that he calls “getting it on” – a thing that appears to mean getting to the heart of the matter, stripping away the bullshit and being properly honest with each other.

He begins by recounting tales from his childhood, and soon his classmates are joining in, supplying stories of their own. A strange rapport ensues between captor and captives. Meanwhile the police are gathering outside, wondering about what Decker’s demands will be. But the class have come to realise that Decker has no intention of harming them. Most of them sense that something important is happening; they are all undergoing a transition, where pent up emotions can finally be released and healed.

This was not an easy book to read, because it was filled with so much pain. But identification with that pain made it impossible to leave the story unfinished. The plot suffers a little bit from melodrama in a couple of places, but for something written by one so young, it is surprisingly honest about life. The danger, I suppose, is in identifying so much with Charlie Decker that the reader justifies his actions and turns them into something heroic. But in the story, even Charlie admits that he’s losing his mind.

A sober and insightful story about human nature. There is more worth in these 150 pages than in many a novel four times the size. Well worth hunting for a second-hand copy.

We begin with a woman, Molly, waking up in the middle of the night, witness to a bizarre torrent of luminous rain. She quickly learns that this is happening everywhere in the world, and she fears that it is the precursor to something more dreadful. A Lovecraftian apocalypse ensues, filled with otherworldly flora and fauna, and events so bizarre that reality itself appears to be coming apart at the seams. While many of the happenings seem more occult than extraterrestrial, our protagonist makes much of the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote about how the technology of a sufficiently advanced alien culture would be indistinguishable from magic.

As an author myself, there are certain well-known missteps in storytelling that are best avoided. Koontz, to my astonishment, blunders right into them. The first one applies to science fiction and fantasy, where liberties are frequently taken with the laws of physics: any story that fails to establish its own rules about what is possible and impossible is going to be devoid of suspense, because literally anything can happen at any moment to help or hinder the protagonist. In the worst examples of this (and this is the second storytelling blunder), some unexpected happening occurs to get the protagonist out of a tough spot, rather than the protagonist using his own ingenuity. And would you believe it? Good grief, Koontz relies on this very thing. In fact, the heroes walk their way through most of the book, protected by some unseen otherworldly force.

The protagonists are typical Koontz archetypes that he has used over and over again in his books: impossibly noble-minded pure-of-heart characters with ne’er a perverse thought crossing their minds, tainted only by some dark event in their pasts that they have had to overcome. Who but the most self-deluded can relate to these melodramatic caricatures of human beings? Furthermore, the characters glide through through their extreme circumstances with barely a dent to their sanity. It’s like reading Lovecraft with all the madness removed; it doesn’t work.

The book is just over three hundred pages long. It should have been less than two hundred. As it stands, the prose is utterly dripping with unnecessary flowery metaphors and pretentious twaddle. Here’s an example from the beginning of chapter forty:

The mystery of evil is too deep to be illuminated by the light of reason, and likewise the basement of the church, while no more than twelve feet in depth, presented to Molly a blackness as perfect as that you might find gazing outward to the starless void beyond the farthest edge of the universe.

Please! It’s one thing to write artistically; quite another to try and show off. At times, I found myself speed-reading through Koontz’s metaphorical rambles. Oddly, I don’t recall any of his other books being quite so heavy in this regard.

[SPOILER ALERT!] I don’t normally do spoilers, but this one’s too juicy to pass up. Reviews of this book promised a surprise ending. You’ll never guess what it is. After telling a story that looks like the Devil unleashing the kingdom of hell upon Earth (while the author attempts to convince us its an ET invasion), the big reveal in the final pages is … oh, it really was the Devil after all! And so, an already sub-standard War of the Worlds retelling takes a final nose-dive into pseudo-Christian quackery.

In fairness, I experienced a certain degree of enjoyment reading this book, but frankly, a writer of Koontz’s experience ought to know better than to indulge in all the things I’ve mentioned. The fans deserve more. These days, he appears to be little more than a hack writer, churning out book after book, sometimes two per year, using the same old tired formula. Well, this is one reader exiting the Koontz train. No more, thank you.

Radin is currently Laboratory Director at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, California, and has been involved in parapsychological research at various universities for over two decades. At Stanford Research Institute he was part of the then classified US Government “Stargate” program, which investigated psychic phenomena. I would say his credential are in order. But the real question is, does his book come up with the goods?

In my opinion, this is the book to read on psychic phenomena, for both the open-minded skeptic and the psychic dabbler seeking a little more confidence. God knows, the world is awash with “psychic” frauds; it’s about time we had a book by a believer who is prepared to be rigorous and dispassionate with the empirical data.

Pitting my own conversations with skeptics against the historical information in this book, I can only conclude that when the skeptic says, “There’s no evidence,” this is more of a blind materialistic assumption than a statement of fact based on informed opinion. Across the 20th century, there is a wealth of statistical information in favour of the reality of psychic phenomena. The trouble with validating psychic phenomena seems to stem more from the fact that the observed effects are not large enough for many people to make the necessary paradigm shift regarding how the universe works. There is still an unfortunate philosophical materialism in the minds of scientists, which hasn’t yet been eroded by the assertions of quantum physics.

The majority of skeptics mischaracterise psychic abilities as “magic powers,” and when no magic (to their preconceived standard) is forthcoming, everything psychic is then characterised as ridiculous. But the real focus of this book is not power of any kind, but the deepening of our understanding of the nature of the relationship between mind and matter, something that is by no means well understood – except in the faulty presuppositions of the materialists, who suppose the mind to be nothing more than a product of the physical brain, and ultimately an illusion.

The book includes much data on intuition, telepathy, psychokinesis, presentiment. You won’t find anything on levitating objects, but you will find curious statistics on the outcomes of dice throws. There are some startling experiments on random number generators and their correlation to major world events like 9/11. At times the book is a little monotonous, simply giving example after example, but such repetition is justified in a topic as controversial as this.

Those interested in learning psychic abilities will not find any instruction sets in here. That’s not the focus of the book. Radin’s aim is clearly to effect some change for the better in a scientific community that is still stuck in the wrong paradigm. Entangled Minds is an important work. I can’t comprehend how any rational-minded skeptic could fail to be impressed with Radin’s handling of the topic.