Tolle Lege!.

This author really likes educating his reader about science and the moving parts that go into making up possible theories about the world from justified true beliefs and lays the ground work for explaining how science really works while telling a passable sci-fi story.

One also gets a peek into the angst that defined the 1970s and how at times we thought there would never be a future. The Russians are still the Russians in the future he describes and are a super power to be reckoned with. Oh yeah, he did something that Time Magazine used to always do in the 50s, he used the expression while describing someone as "Mediterranean looking" and "swarthy looking". With Time they would always say that when describing an Italian because they just didn't seem to like Italians (for whatever reason, I have no idea why). In this case for this author, I'll just say that we are always victims of the world we are thrown into and sometimes we are that world, but fortunately, we move ahead.

This book does propose one of my all time favorite theories regarding religion. According to a possible interpretation, all previous religious beliefs with their accompanying superstitions were enabled by aliens so that humanity would progress at a snails pace and not be a threat to the aliens when they return in the future. That explanation just cracked me up.

I once was talking with a neighbors and one had mentioned that Mars might have a fossil of a fish on it's surface. The other neighbor had mentioned that would be impossible, but I wanted to illustrate that science is always underdetermined by the facts, that there is always more theories possible than the known facts and one always bump up to the Quine Duhem thesis and not know it. This book with its alternate theories could fully explain the phenomenon of a fish on Mars.