Calculating God, by Robert J. Sawyer

There's nothing like a good sci-fi book to get your mind racing. When I first spotted this one in a bookstore, I asked myself if it was going to be good. Reading the back cover and all the accolades this author has received (a Nebula award for The Terminal Man plus several other Nebula and Hugo nominations), I thought it was worth a try. Now that I've finished it, I can say it was definitely worth reading. It's well written, extremely stimulating, interesting for the scientific and theological speculations and rewarding in terms of entertainment value as well.

The book starts out with a humorous tone and after the first few pages you begin to wonder if it's going to be all tongue-in-cheek. It is not. It's pretty much hard sci-fi and delightful at that.

Calculating God is not about a bunch of people doing theological math, whatever that may be. It's about the possibility of existence of a super-being that laid out rules for the universe to set it in motion and interferes with it only sporadically. The story begins with the arrival of aliens on Earth. One of them shows up at the Royal Ontario Museum and says to the security guard at the entrance: "Take me to your paleontologist."

What follows is the development of a tight relationship between this alien entity and the paleontologist, who's a terminal case of lung cancer. Their experience together takes you on a exciting trip through the fields of theology, cosmology, paleontology, exobiology and several other ologies. There's a lot of science in this sci-fi and, in part, that's what makes it so good. More than just focusing on fact and speculation, however, the author does a great job constructing plausible characters full of humanity, something that any of us can understand, and that serves to anchor the story in the realm of the believable.

In spite of quite a bit of "tooting the author's horn" in the back cover and the bio on the last page, the book comes through with its promise and indicates that Robert J. Sawyer may be one of the best candidates to carry the torch of those sacred monsters like Isaac Asimov.