Kirjahaku

This book is intended for all those with an interest in New England Puritanism, American evangelicalism, the history of revivalism, or the history of pastoral ministry.

The four QUIZZER personnel are assigned to complete the preparation of a seed asteroid capable of translating into the ylem with a complement of 50,000 crew and settlers and set forth on a journey which will take them completely across the galaxy on a journey which will require roughly 4,500 years of shipboard time before coming to an end some 80,000 light years from Earth. QUIZZER's people learn that the autodocs routinely placed in combat vessels are capable of being modified to rejuvenate humans to their point of optimum point of physical maturity when the replacement of dead cells is exactly offset by the creation of replacement cells and all minor debris and poisons which may have accumulated over the years are purged. This moment of optimum maturity differs from person to person but it generally centers around 30 years.The treatment is not a zip-zap affair and requires roughly two days of induced sleep in the autodoc to restore a year of youth so in order to restore a 70 year-old to his 30 year-old persona requires nearly three months in an autodoc induced coma. This ability of an enhanced autodoc must be kept secret at all costs since releasing it to the public inevitably leads to the extinct of the human species. Even without the immortality idea the then current population of Earth hovered around the 69 billion mark and mass starvation was an ever-present threat. So QUIZZER's people were sent to a remote asteroid drifting in orbit around the galaxy some 80 light years distant where preliminary work is already in progress. They are in mufti and are ostensibly mid-grade navy officers who will be replaced once the ARK ROYAL is completed. As ever, this is not a routine 'presto-changeo' affair and there are plenty of surprises in store for the unwary reader. This is a story which is all too likely to occur but no one likes to think about it.

When I wrote this most Americans had neverheard of Vietnam, let alone of a village called Mai Lie (sic). We were blissfully unaware of the American corporate machinations which led to our CIA ousting of the democratically elected Iranian government whose only offense was to insist on raising the royalty on Iranian oil to more than fifty-five cents per 55 gallon barrel, i.e. from 1 penny per gallon to 2 pennies per gallon When the oil barons flatly refused to accept the change our government hacks stepped in and organized a coup to depose the Iranian government and install a more obedient one. Most Americans had only vague ideas of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, etc. Despite the Evidence of World Wars I and II and Korea we had this quaint little idea that wars could be sanitized. With soldiers killing only soldiers. Our leaders had yet to dream up terms such as "disinformation" or "treat with extreme prejudice". How about "washboarding", or perhaps "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "collateral damage"? Predictably, events conspired to disillusion us and our government reverted to the tried and true doctrine of exercising maximum brutality in its behavior. "If they won't play nice we'll show them what ugly is " Couple this with an arrogant bureaucracy and throw in incompetent leaders and the results are foreordained. My little tale has become altogether plausible. I debated even presenting it in among the corpus of my fiction but I felt the tale was interesting in its own right and fully six decades ahead of its time. The physics in the tale are quaint, but the psychologies of the principal actors are all too familiar. I hope you will like the novel even as you hate it. G.W.H.