06.29.07
Posted in reviews at 12:09 pm by Administrator
Truth be told, there aren’t too many creationist novels out there that I know about. The Days of Peleg by Jon Saboe is the only one I can remember actually reading that bases its story in the pre Abraham period of Genesis. That being said, the story is excellent. For those sick of suspending disbelief in favor of monkey to man nonsense, The Days of Peleg provides a refreshing relief, an oasis in a desert of secular superstition. It’s also a nice complement to the creationist nonfiction material, since it takes charts and graphs and scattered genealogies, and molds a narrative around them, painting a story that draws them all together.
The Days of Peleg centers itself on the man in the title, Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided. It is over a hundred years after the “Great Awakening,” and the secular city/state Peleg hails from selects him for an expedition to chart the unknown continents. The world depicted is in stark contrast to primitive picture created by evolutionists, and the sophistication of the ancients is revealed in every chapter, based on real world archeological evidence from around the globe. But in his adventures, Peleg finds not only resourcefulness, but also an array of beliefs. As a believer in objective knowledge, he continually attempts to sift out the fact from the myth while mapping the distribution of the human race after the “Great Awakening.”" Anyone who has studied OOPArts should be pleased with the story, with its many expected and unexpected tributes to the archeological field, but creationists will be particularly happy with how it is all weaved into the framework of the first chapters of Genesis.
The tale is epic and globe spanning, and the style used by the author allows for many perspectives. Peleg is of course the primary point of view character, but the narrative often spans multiple perspectives. It took me some getting used to, since I usually read books that have a “strict” third person style, but the switches between characters works well for what the book set out to do. My primary gripe is that the text contains its share of typos; specifically the types that go unnoticed by a computer spell-check. Despite that, I could still tell what was meant, and the rest of the book flows quite nicely. Saboe’s writing style is such that I couldn’t get bored. Everything flowed well enough that I hardly ever checked to see how many pages were left in the chapter (I have a habit of doing that to see how much further to a break point). Another minor point is that certain portions and themes of the story require huge amounts of speculation, but that was necessary for storytelling purposes, and for the most part cannot be said to be impossible. Many of these speculations get the mind wondering if something like that really could have taken place, however. Saying what in particular I’m referring to would spoil the story, though. Finally, certain sequences of events might be a little out of order, but that depends on which model you choose to use. It did get me to rethink some aspects of my model.
The story has a great deal of variety, and some characters will probably get you by surprise. One character I was expecting (hoping) to make a showing, and I wasn’t disappointed. In all, the more than six hundred pages, including appendixes, were well worth the twenty dollars. The book was thoroughly enjoyable, yet it is certainly not meant for creationists or even Christians alone. The research and reasoning that went into the whole package is something that anyone should appreciate. At the very least, it is a fun adventure that can be enjoyed just as much as a good science fiction or historical fiction novel.
The Days of Peleg homesite: http://www.daysofpeleg.com/
[edit: There is now a new edition available that has had the typos fixed. See comments.]
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05.28.07
Posted in reviews at 11:31 am by Administrator
Well, I recently saw a movie that I feel I must share on here. The movie was Déjà Vu starring Denzel Washington, and it’s one of those time travel themes that have wasted many hours of my life. Anyway, the following contains *spoilers*, so read at your own peril.
The plot of Déjà Vu is of the kind that starts off with the feel that the story could be a run of the mill detective thriller. ATF Agent Doug, played by Washington, is investigating a ferry explosion in New Orleans and quickly determines that it was an act of terrorism. Yet in the course of his investigation, some abnormalities begin to appear in the investigation. The most striking is the find that one woman’s body was found washed up on shore with burn marks and shrapnel wounds, despite it having been two hours prior to the explosion. While I originally hypothesized that she had somehow been warped back two hours (boy I have a hyperactive imagination), the woman really did turn out to be murdered earlier than the explosion. Doug went on to check out her history in a bid to find the bomber, since only the bomber would have known to fake her manner of death in that way. Yet in his investigation, he does end up finding strange things, such as the woman calling the ATF office before the explosion asking for Doug and an odd recording on the woman’s messaging machine. Most interesting of all is the sentence made out of magnet on the refrigerator, “You can save her.”
After this point, Doug is recruited by another government agency due to his keen deductive abilities. They show him a device that is able to view into the past, but with the catch that it is always exactly something like four days and sixteen hours behind the present. It’s basically a second chance to see what happened back in the past from any angle, but the viewers would have to be sure to be looking in the right spot when something happens, since they can only record what is on screen. I enjoyed the concept, although I’m sure that the equal distance time displacement idea has been around for a while.
Yet being able to view the past does not necessarily open up a string of paradoxes. Instead, that comes about when things start getting sent back to the past. When Doug attempts to send a note to himself in the past so that he can stop the attack, the message ends up being intercepted by his partner. This in turn leads to his partner’s death at the hands of the terrorist, and he really had been in the original timeline. In a nutshell, in tampering with the past, they ensured that things would turn out the way they did. In fact, because Doug’s partner had put bullet holes in the bomber’s car, the bomber now had no choice but to steal the car of the woman he would eventually murder. This is actually the type of time travel theme I prefer, since I think it deals the best with the time travel paradoxes.
Once the bomber was captured, however, things began to take a bad turn. For one thing, the bad guy was portrayed as a fanatical Christian and American patriot. Next, during the interrogation he was almost echoing what I had been writing elsewhere just this past week. Now that was kinda weird. What was the terrorist saying? Basically that one cannot change destiny/fate, and that any attempts to do so will only serve to bring it about. (For the record, while I agree with his statement there, I do not in any way condone the use of violence. Christians are commanded to fight in a war of the spirit and not a war of the flesh, as per Ephesians 6: 12.) Now, the Christian bashing out of the way, the movie went on to defy the laws of cause and effect. Doug ends up traveling back in time himself, and although the movie continues along the path that everything Doug does actually occurred in his original timeline, he ends up rendering it all pointless by taking away the motivation for time travel in the first place. He saves not only the ferry, but the woman as well, thus changing the course of time and making it so he will have no reason to go back in time, which in turn ensures that the day will not be saved, despite the happy ending. This part of why I don’t write time travel stories. The Time Machine did it a lot better….
On a final note, the Bible does actually ensure that at least some aspects of the future are unchangeable. Perhaps sometime later I may delve into that, Lord willing.
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