Category Archives: review

“2012” by Ryuho Okawa

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The end of the world? Not if Ryuho Okawa has anything to say about it! And he has quite a bit to say, as usual. Although this time most of the talking is done by the spirits of Montezuma and Quetzalcoatl. That’s how they appear in this book, at least.

The book 2012 is one of two I recently discovered on Smashwords. I tend to buy any books from Happy Science, although I have had a couple disappointments, even they have been interesting at least.  Happy Science is a Japanese new religion. Technically it is a cult, in the same way as Christianity, a religion centered on one man who is believed to be divine. Unlike Jesus Christ, Japanese author Ryuho Okawa is neither dead nor resurrected, but he obviously has some other qualities to inspire his followers. Like having written over 800 books in less than 30 years. This is one of them.

The book is a bit overpriced compared to its length. This seems to be a trend now that IRH press has taken over publishing the English versions themselves rather than licensing them to overseas spiritual publishers. Perhaps they feel that people should be expected to pay this much for books by a god? Or perhaps they just are unfamiliar with the price level in the English-speaking market. This is quite possible. I know from my own homeland, Norway, that book prices here are several times higher than in America, so much so that I prefer buying Norwegian books in English translations. Perhaps the same is true for Japan? Japanese anime certainly is expensive compared to American cartoons, so that may explain it. Anyway, prepare your wallets, I paid around 15 bucks for some 25000 words. Of course, being Norwegian, I don’t have a problem paying 15 dollars for a book, but your economy may vary.

Now for the book itself. It is sold as non-fiction, but I think some will disagree.

***

There is a prophecy that the world will end in 2012, more exactly on December 22. This is because the end of the Mayan calendar happens at this time. That seems a pretty flimsy excuse for ending the world. The world of the Mayans has already ended, so to speak, when their kingdom dissolved shortly after the year 900, even though their descendants still live in the area. The Aztec empire was to some extent inspired by the Mayans who preceded them. The Aztecs lived further north, in today’s Mexico.

Earlier this year, a calendar was found that included the next cycle, showing that Mayans did not actually expect the world to end this year after all. But the book I review was written in 2011, so this information is lacking.

Ryuho Okawa may be considered the greatest god on Earth, but even gods can’t know everything when they are incarnate. So he used his powers as the world’s greatest spiritual medium to place a general call to the spirit world, asking for whichever spirit was most involved with the 2012 prophecy. He then acted as host for the spirit, while his assistants interviewed it. They got quite a surprise. The spirit was that of the last Aztec king, Montezuma. But more worrying, he claimed to now be the guardian spirit of Barack Obama, and planned to use him to fulfill the Mayan curse in December 2012.

The book includes the full interview with the spirit of Montezuma. He does not seem all that impressive to me, and probably not to the Japanese either. He insisted that he did not want revenge on the Caucasians or the Christians, he just wanted to get the karma back to the middle by ending their dominance. He spent a good deal of his time talking about aliens and an expected alien invasion, but the connection between this and what he said before about ending the Christian calendar was pretty vague. All in all, for a great statesman he did not seem all that enlightened.

The more the contrast to the second interview in the book, where Okawa summons Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god, whom Montezuma had mentioned a couple times. Montezuma believed that Quetzalcoatl was actually Jesus Christ. Now, a while after the previous interview, Quetzalcoatl had contacted Okawa saying that he wanted to give a message. This happens from time to time. So Okawa let the spirit of Quetzalcoatl enter his body and let his assistants interview him.

This was a very different and somewhat hair-raising read. The spirit of Quetzalcoatl appears far more intelligent, coherent and spiritual. First, he confirmed that he was Jesus, but did not make an issue of it. In fact, he seemed surprised that he had lived a long life without being killed this time.

(In the lore of Happy Science, there are ten 9-dimensional spirits or Saviors, of which Amor (Jesus Christ) is one and El Cantare (Ryuho Okawa) another, but due to the vast spiritual power of these beings they can only pack up to 1/5 of their consciousness into one mortal body at a time. They can however send less, and there is also a difference of how “core” the personality is that they incarnate. Okawa is the very core of El Cantare, the most exact representation of his being and the most powerful. Jesus Christ was supposedly something similar for Amor. Still, it seems to have baffled everyone that Jesus would send even a fringe incarnation to Meso-America without telling his good friend Ryuho Okawa. There is no mention of this in The Golden Laws, which details the appearance of the Great Spirits in human history. Then again, Japanese generally don’t consider Latin America and Africa “human history”, more like pre-history I guess. Actually Quetzalcoatl took them to task for that.)

Quetzalcoatl does not consider the aliens much of a problem. His worry is something else entirely: Japan is about to get destroyed by a human army, and Okawa’s life is in danger. It is of the utmost importance that Okawa completes his message to the world before he dies and gets it to Latin America, where it will survive after the fall of Japan. Quetzalcoatl scolds Okawa’s disciples for their lack of devotion, saying that they treat Happy Science as a business and don’t see the importance of saving souls. He also takes the religion to task for its focus on material progress. God does not particularly care about material progress, says Quetzalcoatl: People are often more likely to seek salvation in hard times. Civilizations rise and fall because that is the way they were designed to work. To the gods, this is comparable to a washing machine, that shakes things up and down to get rid of the dirt. So there are good times and hard times, you cannot escape that. You need to save the souls, that is the purpose of religion, not to run a successful business.

Quetzalcoatl also states that the failure of the Happiness Realization Party to win political influence in Japan was due to the poor quality of Okawa’s disciples, they are 20 years behind the curve and it may be too late to save the country now. Thus his invitation to bring Happy Science to Latin America, where he will watch over it after Okawa is gone. You are only thinking about Japan, he scolds the Happy Science staff: We are trying to save souls in countries you don’t even know the name of!

Okawa seems taken aback after the end of the interview. Still, the afterword of the book states once again that the future will be bright if you believe in him and improve your mind. As humans, we have the divine ability to create, and together we can create a better future.

But it does not escape my notice that he has just this summer released a movie in Japan detailing the invasion by a superior Asian military power, and how in that case the nation can only be saved by spiritual means. I look forward to seeing it. Is this the legacy of Quetzalcoatl?

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

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It is rather bigger than a mobile phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its AMOLED screen is much clearer and more vivid than ordinary screens, although this picture taken with flash does not really show either of them at their best.

Yesterday during the lunch break I went to buy the Galaxy Tab 7.7, in my humble opinion the best tablet / datapad available at this time. On my way, however, I thought of the poor starving children in Africa, and turned aside. I was almost back at the office when I realized that Samsung almost certainly does a lot more for Africa than I ever would even if I tried. Which I don’t, at least in an economic sense.

Today I actually bought this thing. It is sleek and lightweight, even though it has a back plate of light metal instead of the plastic that Samsung normally uses. Samsung has taken some flak for the “cheap feeling” of their plastic chassis, even though it certainly withstands more falls than even the Gorilla glass used in the front. I honestly don’t see their or most gadgets surviving any treatment that would break the usual lightweight and durable plastic. But this is their showcase product, it seems, so they threw in the metal plate. Luckily it is thin enough to add very little to the weight. Compared to the original 7″ Galaxy Tab, the 7.7 is noticeably lighter and very comfortable to hold for reading.

The crowning piece however is the display, using the AMOLED technology which delivers unparalleled vivid colors and the blackest blackness available in any screen today. It also seems to be gentle on the battery. The resolution is 1280×800, which may seem like a modest upgrade from the 1024×600 used in all their 7″ tablets, yet is the same as their 10.1″ Galaxy 2 and with a better display. The new iPad (3) has it beat on screen resolution, but is (at least for now) not available in one-handed size.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is definitely one-handed most of the time for reading. It is not too heavy to hold in one hand, although you will need another hand to actually use it for anything more than reading books. It is incidentally a beautiful e-book reader, the black of the letters very black and the sepia of the pages very sepia. Well, that is how I like them. Your pages may vary.

I generally use the tablet in portrait mode, although if you use it to watch movies or look at pictures you will probably hold it in both hands in landscape mode. Because of this preference, I use SwiftKey 3 instead of SwiftKey Tablet 3 as my keyboard. It is not free, but very affordable. (Actually I use the 3 Beta today, but by the time you read this the final version is on sale. If you read this the first week, it is at half price, but it is well worth the price of a couple hamburgers anyway.) SwiftKey Tablet is made for typing with two hands, and has the keyboard split with half on the left side and half on the right. This is an abomination in my sight and looks just unnatural. Then again I have used QWERTY keyboards since I was 6 or so, so it is almost up there with potty training when it comes to ingrained attitudes.

The tablet comes with Samsung’s own TouchWiz shell on top of Android “Honeycomb”. To be honest, I don’t see this as much of an improvement. Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is better than any of the two, and if I feel extremely energetic one day I may root the tablet and install unadorned ICS on it. For the most part, however, I don’t spend a lot of time in the operating system, but mostly use it to start the apps I use regularly.

The apps I use regularly are not the ones that come pre-installed from Samsung, although I do use the ones that come from Google. The “improvements” from Samsung are as usual nothing of the sort, in my opinion. I would rather they did not waste any of the tablet’s 16 GB on this, but I am not all humans in the world. Still, I think we can agree that Samsung comes at this market from the hardware side. Their software does not have the power to rouse men’s heart that Apple’s has.

Be that as it may, I soon downloaded my usual apps and got “productive”. If this is your first time using a tablet after you are familiar with smartphones, you may be looking for the menu key, either in hardware or on the screen. There does not really exist such a thing in Android 3, but clicking on the status display bar in the lower right will reveal the setup choice for the phone as such, while individual programs usually have a visible menu symbol in a corner, typically the upper right (although Spotify uses the upper left). Legacy apps from smartphones may have a menu symbol in the lower left row along with the back, home and task manager soft keys. And some few legacy apps may not work properly if at all, but this is rare.

One thing that did not work properly was connecting to an old SparkLAN WX-6615 wireless router at work. At a distance of two fairly thin walls, it was easily good enough for the Galaxy Note and an older, cheaper LG phone, not to mention two laptops I have tested it with. But the 7.7 timed out loading even fairly simple web pages, and had to try multiple times to get new email. So that was a bit of a letdown.  It really made me wonder whether I have got another “Monday machine” – remember, generally it is the customer who does quality control beyond turning the machine on to see that it boots up – or whether the Galaxy Tab 7.7 generally has worse Wi-Fi receptivity than anything that has been made the last five years. That seems unlikely for a high-end product designed to show off Samsung as the new hi-tech leader of the world.

I switched to 3G from my phone provider (the model comes with room for a SIM card) and it worked beautifully. But when I switched back to Wi-Fi, the problems returned. Next I enabled ad-hoc wireless hotspot on the LG and placed it mere inches from the tablet. This time it had no problem connecting and loading. And then when I turned off the hotspot on the LG, the tablet automatically remembered the wireless router and reconnected to it, without stopping by 3G. And now it loaded web pages quickly, even playing YouTube with only a short buffering. Clearly the problem is not with the Wi-Fi hardware, then. I don’t know whether this problem will happen with another Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, or even with another SparkLAN WX-6615, not to mention other Wi-Fi sources. But it is definitely worth mentioning, in case someone searches for a similar problem in the future.

Because I totally write this to inform and entertain, not to show off my living in the zeroth world or anything. That’s not something I am proud of. It is accidental, not essential, as the ancients would say. Of course, the ancients did not have as many gadgets as we have. That may be why some of them became wise eventually.

Sims 3 Showtime review

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Greetings! Magnus the Magus returns to amaze and amuse you all! The Sims 3 Showtime expansion, not so much. Though it is not bad – just bare.

Showtime is the sixth expansion pack for The Sims 3, and came out in March this year. I recommend waiting until you get it for half price, because it has only half as much content as the earlier expansion packs.

The expansion has one unique feature, though. If you feel you need this, there is only one way to get it: The “Simport”. With this new feature, you can send your performer sim to a friend’s computer and have him perform at a stage there, then return home with unique awards and rewards. In fact, you can have a tour of four friends before returning home. I am sure this is cute if you have friends who also play The Sims 3 and are not afraid to admit it. It is pretty limited though, and it is not obvious why you or your friends would want to play a performer sim in the first place.

The name of the game, “Showtime”, is a pun on the ability to show off your sim, but also refers to the show business careers that come with the pack, all three and a half of them. Wait, wasn’t show business the point of that earlier expansion, Late Night? Yes, and the three new self-employed careers or “professions” could have been included in Late Night except they use the self-employment game mechanics from Ambitions. So the self-employment system is basically duplicated in this pack, but with far fewer careers than in Ambitions. Thus the “half content at full price” accusation, which seems quite exact to me.

That said, the new careers are definitely new and original. You can rise to stardom as an acrobat, a singer or a magician. (No points for guessing which one I picked for my self-sim!) You are free to perform for tips in parks and street corners, and this will give you valuable work experience. Singers can also deliver sing-o-grams, which is amusing but (once in a blue moon) can set your sim on fire fatally. Then again, the other two careers are not entirely safe either.

In all fairness, the careers are pretty good, with great flexibility, the ability to design your own scene layout with various affordable lights and effects, and a genuine sense of accomplishment when the high-society arenas start asking you instead of the other way around. The income at level 10 is definitely something to write home about, even a single performance a week can feed a large family in luxury. It is up to you whether you want to control your sim on the scene or let them do what they want, but as usual they are not the brightest candles on the candelabra so you can generally maximize their career by giving a helping hand.

Still – 3 careers plus the ability to moonlight as a DJ? Not a full expansion pack. There are no new across-the-board gameplay improvements either, except the ability to post to your sim wall (like Facebook wall) if you are logged in. I don’t log in, as I don’t use The Sims 3 as a Facebook replacement, and I doubt many outside EA’s test lab do. Anyway, this dubious ability is added to your game for free regardless of whether you buy the expansion, if you run the game updater after March this year.

There is one more thing, though: The genie. The Dusty Old Lamp from Sims 2: Freetime is back, and this time the genie can be socialized with and supposedly even married. So the game expansion at least upholds the tradition of adding one more “supernatural” sim type in each expansion. If you have a thing for genies (perhaps as the result of a certain old TV series) this may tip the scales.

Overall though, I get the impression that EA’s creative team died or retired barely halfway through the production of this expansion, and the bosses decided to honor their memory by publishing the expansion with only the three finished and one unfinished career.

 

Mouravieff is interesting

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"Space is amazing, isn't it?"

Remember the time when books were amazing?

Generally I don’t read much at home. After all, I have my computer at home, and it tends to take priority. My sims need to live too! Besides, there is the writing, and Google+. OK, I have Google+ on the smartphone too, but responding is easier with a physical keyboard. (Sorry, SwiftKey.)

So for me to actually read a book at home, the book had better be good. These days, most of what I read is non-fiction, or at least it is supposed to be. This is also the case with Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis, part 1: The Exoteric Cycle. I have written about it once before, when I started reading it. I am still reading it, off and on.

Mouravieff keeps kind of close to the edge of craziness, in a manner of speaking. If you get him wrong, you are likely to go very wrong indeed. To me he makes sense, as long as I read him with good will. But I can see how someone unfamiliar with esoteric teachings, someone with a tendency to take things literally and assign the same meaning to words regardless of context, might tumble into the abyss; for the book is like a house built on the edge of a precipice, itself not falling in but posing a danger to the unwary. Or that is how I see it at this time.

Perhaps providentially, I read his explanation about the “ray of creation” not many days after I read Schuon discuss the Christian concept of the Trinity. Mouravieff adheres to Orthodox Christianity, but he interprets it esoterically, or more exactly as a vehicle of esoteric knowledge that has been hidden for most even among the religious, but hidden in plain sight. It is this esoteric science he tries to restore to view. I wonder how well he succeeds, given that his greatest fans seems to be a UFO cult, at least if one judges from publicity on Google.

To Mouravieff, God is the center of creation, as well as being beyond it. God beyond being comes up with the idea, then God as the Trinity manifests and begins to radiate the universe, more or less, according to Mouravieff. He also seems to think that eternity is limited and perpendicular to time.

But one of the most interesting concepts is that there is a law of nature – “the law of seven” – that is placed in creation to make sure time becomes circular, or as close to this as possible. (The cycles of time will eventually run out, says Mouravieff.) As this law operates on all levels below the Divine, it will cause any straight line of action to deviate eventually, and at some point go in the opposite direction of what it did originally. For instance, Christianity persecuting and killing pagans, when some time had passed after it used to be the other way around. After a while, the deviation will eventually bring you back on the original track for a while, but then you deviate again, running in circles. This is a result of the cyclical nature of time itself.

If you want to make progress, you have to add an impulse at the right time and angle to counteract the deviation and get back on the original track. This is not easy to arrange. Remember, you cannot see yourself deviate. To your own eyes, your road seems to go straight ahead. It is the circular nature of the universe itself that fools you.

So how do you get around this trap? How do you actually accomplish anything? I don’t know yet, because in the meantime Mouravieff has gone on to talk about the Cosmic Octave and the galaxies and star systems as the cosmic body of Christ, or was it the body of the cosmic Christ? And the sun as a representation of the Divine. I am sure at some point the answer is revealed, either in this book or the next. I think it may be time to order that one soon. After all, the first seems to be one of the books I may actually finish … some day.

Mouravieff, first impressions

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A few days ago I got a packet from Amazon.com: Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis: Exoteric Cycle, the first of three volumes in his life work Gnosis. The next two, which I have not ordered (yet at least) are named Mesoteric Cycle and Esoteric Cycle. Exoteric refers to the outward form of religion, Esoteric to its inward and hidden meaning. I have not seen the word Mesoteric anywhere else, but it would presumably lie in between the two, as its name implies, as well as its number in the trilogy.

Even the 5 start reviews freely admit that Mouravieff is a bit apart from consensus reality, if you know what I mean – it can be hard for the casual observer to say whether the man was out and out crazy. So I expected a challenging read. To my pleasant surprise, the beginning was quite sane, or at least quite similar to my own understanding. Here’s from the start of the actual book (after several levels of introduction):

“Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed by external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed. Today like yesterday, and tomorrow like today, he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere. Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed and still absent from himself.”

Isn’t that the sad truth? It certainly fits my observations. Even people who are smarter than me are easily pulled along by this “machine”, or the maelstrom of physical life. By experience we know that various physical goods (like food and shelter) makes life a lot more comfortable very quickly. So it is oh so easy to assume that accumulating worldly goods is the fast lane to happiness. But the faster we run this race, the less time we have to check whether it really works. It doesn’t.

There is an article going the rounds over on Google+ from time to time, “Top five regrets of the dying” as recorded by a nurse doing palliative care. There is nothing new and surprising in this article, it is exactly what you would expect. Not more sex and bungee jumping, but less time in the office, more time with friends, and more honesty, courage and simple happiness.

Instead of getting terminal cancer, I recommend reading the article. Also, at least the first chapters of Gnosis. The effect is somewhat similar. In one word: Sobering.

“Probiotics for the soul”

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“A disciple of God is always a disciple of God!” St Teresa would have agreed with this, I am sure. So would I, but it is harder to live it. The way of perfection is pretty narrow! Or I may be too big.

Finished St Teresa’s book The Way of Perfection. There is a certain irony in this, that I would read a book with that title. When I was a teenager, a main reason why I chose the particular Church I did was its references to the Bible verses about perfection. I argued that no one could be perfect, but the Bible argued otherwise. And yet, here I am. I’d like this to not be the home stretch of my life, but at the very least decades are gone, and I am still far from perfect.

Reading this book has not made me perfect either. But I think it has helped me a little, or at least preserved me a little from going in the other direction. Throughout the spring (from February) I have been reading a little bit most days on the commute bus to work. I currently think of it as “probiotic for the soul”. (Obviously probiotics have been on my mind the last few days!) Just like you supposedly can keep your body’s inner life healthy through regular intake of certain friendly lifeforms, so I think a regular intake of wholesome words can help the soul maintain its inner working. These words must be living, so that they have the ability to grow and work inside us.

The Bible, which I read a lot more when I was young, is well known among Christians to be “God’s living Word”. Jesus compares the Word with seeds that were sown, and there is also mention of the Christians (well, disciples as they were known at the time) being conceived through this seed. When Jesus is called the Word of God, this is an extreme honor: The Jews honor the Torah, as God’s Word, above all the prophets, even Moses who brought it to them.

In one of my unfinished pieces of fiction, the protagonist arrives in an alternate world where his hosts have a library where most books are of the form “Commentaries Vol 20 on the Commentaries Vol 19 on the Book of Light.” Trying to read one of them, it is way too deep for him, and he says so. His host asks him to first read the Book of Light. He opens it and finds that it is a collection of fairly simple-looking songs, a very easy read. His host says: “Where is a river deepest, at its wellspring or as it approaches the sea?”

Much of the Way of Perfection is dedicated to teaching the reader how to pray the Paternoster, the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in Heaven”) the way it was meant to be prayed. The saint draws out deep spiritual meanings and their implications for our life, over the course of many chapters. In the end, the short and simple prayer becomes such an awe-inspiring commitment that I have to reflect on myself before even starting to pray it. I don’t think this is a heresy, either. I think this depth, this awesome commitment, lies implicit in the original. The details may be colored by Roman Catholicism to some degree, but overall it is a universal truth. (Ironically perhaps, “Catholic” originally means nearly the same as “universal”.)

The divine Light differs from electromagnetic light just in this, that it is alive, able to grow and able to produce fruit. Ordinary light passes only in through our eyes, but the heavenly Light should shine out from our eyes, if all goes well, and indeed make us glow all over. But it is not visible to all, even in a figurative sense. (And to very few, in a literal sense. I am normally not one of them, and am quite happy with that.)

The Book of Revelation (“apocalypse”) is not at all my favorite in the Bible, but it has a great mental image: “The city wall’s foundations were decorated with every kind of jewel. The first foundation was jasper, the second was sapphire, the third was chalcedony, and the fourth was emerald. The fifth was sardonyx, the sixth was carnelian, the seventh was chrysolite, and the eighth was beryl. The ninth was topaz, the tenth was chrysoprase, the eleventh was jacinth, and the twelfth was amethyst.” (Revelation 21, verses 19-20.) The stones have different color and in some cases different transparency. The city was said to be illuminated by the Light of the Lamb, so I imagine this light shining out in different directions taking on different hues depending on the gemstone.

So this revelation that shines through St Teresa, it might have had a different color if it shone through someone else, and it may be colored by the particular nature of the Roman Catholic Church; but it is a living Light, I believe. If I tried to explain it again to someone else who had not read the book, it would take on some of my color, and it would no doubt be less luminous because I am less transparent. But because it is living, this light might once again grow and multiply in the person who received it, and shine more brightly from them (in time) than it did from me. This is what I mean by saying that the Light is alive and can grow. It is the nature of the Light itself to be like this; the souls in which it grows are not the source of the Light, but carriers of it, and it is the Light itself that grows in them.

This is what I believe. But because I am such an opaque stone, with shadows and fault lines within, you would be wise to also check elsewhere, and listen to your heart. People who are filled with love for others are particularly worth listening to, but even those will have a color, so they may be more or less visible to different people depending on the color of the recipient.

Anyway, I recommend the book warmly, whether you are a Catholic or not. The first part of the book talks about how to live as a nun, and obviously some of us are not nuns. ^_^ But it is still inspiring. And its lengthy exposition of the Lord’s Prayer should be of interest to all Christians, and may even be inspiring to others who seek the Heavenly things.

But if you have no interest in what is eternal and closer to Heaven / God / the Light, then you should not read this book. It is written in a familiar tone as if from a loving older sister. To bare one’s heart like this is a matter of trust, and it would be indecent to take such a trust and misuse it. I fear that the harm that comes from this would outweigh any hope that her seriousness might help you. This is not a book of evangelism, but one that speaks to those who are within God’s family, who are hoping to dare call upon the Eternal One as “our Father”.

It may be too early to read it again yet, for when it is so recent, I tend to just skim. I kind of miss it, though. There are many good books, but to me there was something so very safe about this book. It was indeed as if I had found a collection of letters from an older sister I had never known, who had gone through much of this life before me and left me advice. When I read St Teresa, I lament that I did not know of her when I was young. But the truth is probably that I would not have been ready for it then, and might instead have become immunized, thinking ever after that “I know this” while not truly knowing it. Hopefully there will be at least less of this now!

 

Book review: The Mission

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Book cover

 

This is a more complete review of Shaun F. Messick’s book, Worlds Without End: The Mission. A shorter review was posted on Goodreads, where I first was made aware of the book.

While I don’t read much SF anymore, I used to read them before, and occasionally still do if they are recommended or seem particularly interesting.  I liked the idea of worlds without end, which is in fact some of the appeal of the genre. Good Science Fiction should ideally convey a sense of awe, of majesty and grandeur. This certainly does not happen with every book, but at least it looked like an attempt. Besides, it was cheap.

Unfortunately, this book is cheap in more ways than one. The authors seems to have been too cheap to use a professional editor, which shows in many ways. In fact, I believe a professional editor would have said “Nice first draft” or words to that extent, sending the author back to the computer for a thorough rewriter. But what is more baffling is that the author has not even got three older relatives to read through it, otherwise it would not have been published with numerous spelling errors of the kind that are not redlined by word processors (for example, “window pains”). For the love of your reputation, such as it is, get some old English teacher to read through your book before you publish it, OK?

Occasionally I have met Mormons, members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, wandering around trying to push their add-on Holy Scripture. The author of this book is one of them. You may have wondered what they are like off-duty. This book will not give the answer to that. It is studded with references to how the Book of Mormon is the Truth, and how people who earnestly pray to God about the Book of Mormon will know in their heart that it is the Truth, and various quotes from Mormon Holy Scripture. It is, in short, Mormons! In space!

This is actually one of the more charming traits of the book.  It also has some actual drama starting a bit before the middle, drama that is neither predictable nor seemingly random. After a cringeworthy amateurish start, the book does pick up speed. It looks like the author may after all have a complex plot that is under his control. This may well be true. Unfortunately, we won’t know until the next book comes out – and I, for one, am not likely to find out even then, unless the book is free and I am more bored than I have been in decades. You see, the end… isn’t there. It looks like the author, while writing one of the chapters, realized that he had hit the word count necessary for a novel. He hastily wraps up the chapter, with rather more brevity than usual, and stops writing.

Let me say this again: The book has no ending. It is basically like the first part of a bigger book, which someone has cut in two (or more?), but had the decency to cut between two chapters. Perhaps the author does this to ensure that the readers buy the next book. But there is an even easier solution: Don’t buy this one.

It is a sad fact of life that we don’t all excel at everything. Most of us aren’t very good at writing novels. Messick is one of this majority, but despite this he has gone off and published a book without the necessary professional assistance.  This is kind of like cutting your own hair: A few people can pull this off, but if you don’t, you may want to get some assistance before going out in public.

Now that we have established that it is a lousy book, let us zoom in on the fact that it is a lousy sci-fi book. It is set in the relatively near future, and the tech level seems mostly realistic. So far, so good. But the science is weak, so weak that it is showed aside without so much as “by your leave” whenever religion decides it wants the space for itself. Evidently the Mormon religion establishes that there are other inhabited planets, as shown from the (uniquely Mormon) Scripture quotes that explains why there are two planets populated by humans 22 light years from Earth. Not only are they human, they are indistinguishable from humans on Earth, except that the population on one of the planets have a “god gene” that makes them stronger, healthier and with psychic powers.

I don’t know enough Mormon theology to say whether it would be blasphemy to make the space people green or furry or otherwise distinguishable from Earth humans. I kind of hope not, given the pretty wide variation there is among Earth humans. But I am pretty sure even theology does not demand that they use the Latin alphabet (something that is described repeatedly and in detail in this book). Or that their architecture looks like ours did a couple centuries ago. On a world with two moons, and with different continents.

There is, I sincerely believe, a pretty broad line between “Mormon” and “moron”. The alphabet thing crossed that. This was just dumb. I hope for the sake of the author’s high school teacher that he or she has passed on in peace or left for some non-English-speaking country before this book was let loose on the public.

I generously awarded this book two stars out of five. That may sound a lot after the carnage of this review. But let us face it, the supply of books about Mormons in space is very low, and Shaun Messick has courageously set out to fulfill the demand. The book is also without the now almost mandatory sex scenes which other authors seem to insert randomly. I appreciate that. If you are a Mormon who would normally feel bad about reading SF, this is your chance. Certainly that deserves some credit. You may want to delay reading it until the ending is out, though.

 

Good reads indeed

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"Religion is simple"

“Religion is simple.” That is one of the hardest parts about it.

I have been reading Fire Within at a slow pace, usually only on the bus to work in the morning, although sometimes at other times a little. Finished it now. Probably won’t read it again immediately, but if I live a while, I definitely want to read it again.

Fr Thomas Dubay makes a convincing case that infused prayer leading to union with God and heroic virtue is not only possible, but the natural destination of any Christian. He proves with many references that the life and teaching of the two Carmelites, St Teresa and St John of the Cross, were in full accordance with the Bible and the fundamental doctrine of the Church. (As one would expect with them being canonized, I guess. The point was more that this was what Christians are really called to.)

At this point the reader will probably want to know the details, and the “recipe” as it were, to see if it is possible for them. Fr Dubay has written several books on this topic so that may be one way to go. But he stresses that this is not in the least a matter of technique. It is a matter of loving God. Different people will have different experiences (and some may not have much experiences at all), as God deals with each soul according to His will and its needs. Apart from some basics, there really isn’t anything one can do except pray, shut up when God shows up, and spend the rest of one’s time resisting temptations as best one can, do good and above all be obedient. Obedience is better than sacrifice, even the sacrifice of time spent in prayer.

Well, that’s what I took away from it. It seems quite far apart from my mundane life, but it does make some temptations easier some of the time, so that’s something. Now downloaded (free gift) The Life of St Teresa of Jesus by St Teresa. I wonder how far I get into that. I gave up on her Interior Castle once I got noticeable ahead of my own life. It felt kind of like peeping on her love life, in a manner of speaking, so intimate was she with the Lord. I suspect the same may happen again.

City of Heroes Freedom

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A mastermind doing the Midnighter arc in Steel Canyon! Once unthinkable, this is a quite ordinary sight now. Whether you become a hero or a villain now depends on your own moral choices, not what powers you have. The spiral swirls around Happy Scientist is his time warping powers, a new powerset in CoH Freedom.

Regular readers will probably remember the name City of Heroes – it is one of the few computer games I still play, and I played it probably every week (holidays and vacations included) for over 7 years, from it was in closed beta and until this summer. With the announcement that the game was going to change drastically, I started to lose interest. It seems I was mistaken though.

I must admit I was skeptical when NCSoft announced that the 7 year old online superhero game was going to become free to play, under the name City of Heroes: Freedom. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as the saying goes: Somebody always pays, and in any kind of commerce, that somebody is always the customer.

The transition has recently begun, starting with us regular subscribers. We are now called VIP players. When we logged on after the new major update, we could pretty much continue doing whatever we had done before. One little-used newbie city zone has been taken for use as a new tutorial. On the other hand, a new level 20+ zone has been opened. And we now have a brand new server. Just in case 12 character slots on 13 English-language servers were not enough… The point of the new server is that when the free players arrive, we will have an exclusive gathering place for the “elite”, making us feel exclusive. And of course, it is a new start, where every character is new for a few weeks.

In addition to the usual content, we get part of our payment converted into “points”, which can be used to buy such things as rare auras or costume pieces. Perhaps the most controversial decision was to let one of the two new power sets only be available for points. Since subscribers get points as part of the package, they can buy this Beam Rifle power without pulling out their credit card again – if they don’t prefer spending the points on other goodies. But usually all main powers are directly opened to subscribers. This is also the case with the other power set in this issue, Time Manipulation.

While little has changed for the subscribers – we have a new server and some new shiny stuff – the big winners are the former subscribers who for various reasons have wandered off. These have now “Premium” status. Their accounts are activated again for free. All their characters are mothballed, but they can play a number of them depending on how long they were customers. They keep rewards and mini-expansions they bought before. They can’t play as Incarnates, wielding even more power than usual heroes, but that is beyond what was recently the endgame anyway. There is certainly a lot to come back to – the game keeps growing. And you can still buy the new extras.

The third group is those who haven’t played before and don’t plan to subscribe. They get to make only two characters  in total (unless they pay for more character slots), and won’t have shiny stuff (unless they pay for it). But it is “Free to play. Forever.” as the slogan says. Obviously it is not actually forever. Eternity is forever. But if you want to hang out with us heroes (or the despicable villains, but then you wouldn’t be reading this website, right?) for free, you can do it now. Enjoy your flight – or your superspeed, if you so desire!