Sean Randall reviewed Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Review of 'Calculating God' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Isn't in a truly fascinating thing? TO think. The me that first read this book isn't the me that I am now.
what was going on in my life when I first read this book, I wonder? if you asked me when I'd read it, I couldn't have told you. Not remotely. Before I started using Goodreads of course - at a time when I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house, and years before I met my partner and went to college.
I am confident that I only read this book once or twice. I feel fairly certain that this was the first or second of Sawyer's full-length novels I ever read, and therefore I'd have only read it at the most twice, as was my habit back then.
Looking back at me then is hard, but the easiest things to swallow are the facts. it was …
Isn't in a truly fascinating thing? TO think. The me that first read this book isn't the me that I am now.
what was going on in my life when I first read this book, I wonder? if you asked me when I'd read it, I couldn't have told you. Not remotely. Before I started using Goodreads of course - at a time when I spent a lot of time at my grandparents house, and years before I met my partner and went to college.
I am confident that I only read this book once or twice. I feel fairly certain that this was the first or second of Sawyer's full-length novels I ever read, and therefore I'd have only read it at the most twice, as was my habit back then.
Looking back at me then is hard, but the easiest things to swallow are the facts. it was the 24th of June 2003 when I last made an annotation in the electronic, text-file based copy of this book I would've by necessity used to read. That would've been removing the bookmark (can you believe I used to physically modify the content of the file to denote my current place? How barbaric!), before reading the last bit. The timestamp is almost 10 in the morning. Is that too early for the summer holidays? Surely so. It was a whole year before my GCSEs - I would have been 15 years and 6 months or so old.
What else of the then me lingers in the me of now?
Well, not much of that period, I must admit. I can remember the Human Genome Project being concluded, Iraq of course, and something about SARS. But as to what else I was doing for any of it? I really - impossibly can't say.
I remember thrilling to it as a sci-fi story. Aliens! Visiting earth! spiriting people away to visit God! Crazy stuff.
Of course, I still felt some of that today. I still don't believe in God, certainly not the benevolent custodian of Heaven. I must confess, a reread of this book in the now has truly made me question evolution, not at all in whether it has been happening, but in how things got started. Sawyer does posit some very interesting arguments about the properties of the universe, and those were totally over my teenage head. The scene where Tom says goodbye to Ricky didn't even register to me at that age. Today, reading it whilst my daughter slept metres away, brought a lump to my throat.
Yet 13 years on, and 17 after publication it's still an incredibly gripping read not for what happens in the story perhaps, but for what people are thinking and feeling along the way. A true masterpiece of the genre, whatever age you read it at.
