God's Fire

Rating:
Summary: Sander's New One: More Great Science Fiction
Review: The name Thomas J. Sanders must be included in any list of the best Science Fiction writers of our day.

His newest offering is God's Fire, following closely on the heels of The God Chip Conspiracy, his brilliant debut novel of last year. God's Fire's cast of zany but brilliant characters are actually the ancestors of the heroes of The God Chip Conspiracy, and this story is set in the same universe, but 120 years earlier. No matter though, since time in a Sanders novel sometimes turns around and meets itself coming, and both books can be read as complete stories, and in the order you choose.

In God's Fire, we learn more about the development of the God Chip and its first recipients: Joy, a high-tech love doll and CHESTER, the Complete Human Environment Simulation for Tacticel Emergency Response. Our hero, Galileo Newton Goddard, destined from the moment his name was typed on a birth certificate to become the world's greatest scientist, is the creator of the God Chip. Caught in a squeeze play between the forces or irrationality and love, he confronts the ultimate technological dilemna: Can a man find true love and happiness with a machine?

Sander's penchant for mixing complex scientific thought, philosophical allusions and illusions, with a folksy way of storytelling and an almost bizarre but impressive imagination, make every page of God's Fire a work of science fiction art. You'll be guessing all the way through where it will go next.

If you could merge, or clone perhaps, Asimov and Vonnegut, and sprinkle in some cellular matter from Heinlein, you could aptly name the offspring of that mix Thomas J. Sanders.

I enthusiastically recommend God's Fire to all readers, and especially to science fiction lovers.