tsuwm: his characters are approximately one-dimentional and his stories lack any spark.

Yeah, tsuwm, I checked out the book MARTIAN KNIGHTLIFE from the library partly because of the scantily clad female on the cover and partly because I was curious to see what James P. Hogan's science fiction was like. Now due to jheem and your pans I can't bring myself to read it. Thanks.

But I feel a kinship with this man, particularly with the thoughts behind this quote...

" Every human society possesses its own cultural myths that help hold it together. Darwinian fixations on competitions notwithstanding, humans are at heart a cooperative animal, and a commonly shared structure of beliefs in fundamental truths provides the social glue that binds a culture. The beliefs don't have to be true to be effective. Every culture believes itself to be unique in that its own beliefs are true, of course, and it appears that ours is little different. Well, yes, we do claim to be different in that we attempt to check out what we believe against reality. But as we have seen, [In his book] it turns out to be all-too-easy to proclaim the verdict as being what we "know" it ought to be, or would have it be, rather than what reality actually says, laying the idealized scientific paradigm open to the charge that some cynics have made of Christianity and socialism: A good idea: somebody should try it sometime." ______________________JAMES P HOGAN

Now Faldage, tsuwm, jheem, Fallable, of troy, etaoin, WW, AnnaStrop, Jackie, and anyone else interested in the subject; if you have any disagreement with Hogan's statement above , please let us try to resolve it now so that we can then proceed in concert with this important discussion.