[jaap]

Yesterday I finished Jane Jensen latest novel :"Dante's Equation".
(http://www.janejensen.com/index0.html)
For those who don't know this: Jane Jensen created the Gabriel Knight adventure game series, generally assumed to belong to the best of the adventure games.

The book is about several present-day people who are intrigued by a Polish rabbi and victim of the Holocaust, phycisist/kabbalahist that suddenly disapeared into thin air while he was imprisoned in Auschwitz.
It involves Bible code, quantum wave physics, mysticism and parrallel universes.

So what do I think of it:
It is mediocre.

First of all, the sience in the book is mostly hogwash.
Jane Jensen admits that ninth grade biology was the most science she ever had in school, but even the biology part isn't even decent told in her book.
A scientist has some experimental data (characteristics of a carbon atom measured in some particle accelerator), a new formula and a quantum computer! to test her new formula. And the formula describes exactly the experimental data (no mentioning of inaccuracy of the experimental data!), apart from some one-minus one function (on/of block pulse).
Her interpretation is that the one-minus one function is always present (part of space/time continuum) and that it affects everything.
She then assumes (what happend to her science attitude??) that the one-minus one can be altered by putting very much power through some antennae, and she tests the effect of this pulse by examining a experimental group of things (fruit, mice, viruses!!) and compare the behavior of these with a control group that hasn't been exposed to the pulse.
(a typical ninth grade biology experiment, except that viruses on a culture dish won't grow, I think she meant bacteria).
So what happens: you discover the most important thing since quantum mechanics and you'll test it using some simple biology experiment!

Another major subject is the bible code.
The general idea behind it is that everything (people, important dates, disasters) can be found in the bible not by looking at the words how they have been written, but for example by looking at every 1215th letter. (Some real people actually think this is true, however it has been shown that everything you find in the bible can also be found in any other large text such as Moby Dick, War and Peace or Alice in Wonderland).
Since this is fiction, Jane Jensen is allowed (in my opinion) to show that there actually can be found something special in bible-code, but not by briefly mentioning that some name only can be found in the bible and not in War and Peace. To believe it I need something more (decent comparison).

40% of the book is situated in parralel universes (all stories of the different main-characters, that all live on different universes are all interwaven). And suddenly the book becomes pure sf/fantasy. I dare to say that if you skip the whole 2nd book (there are 3 books), you wouldn't miss a bit.

By the way, one of the main characters (Denton Wyle) is a good looking, blond reporter, sounds familiar?

The reviewer of scifi.com (http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue328/books.html) thinks that if Jane Jensen had a proper editor, it would have been much better. I agree that the science and the bible code bit could easily be improved, but the sf/fantasy part should be at least rewritten, so that the reader isn't able to easily leave it out.

Although this review doesn't cover all the aspects of the book, I hope you'll get the general idea of my opinion.


Jaap

[ysbreker]

Go read 'cryptonomicon' by Neal Stephenson, a much better book, and it's got humour too!

But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence, and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just labor-saving devices. He'd been working on a radically different sort of computing mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem whatsoever, as long as you knew how to write the problem down. From a pure logic standpoint, he had already figured out everything there was to know about this (as yet hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to build one. Lawrence gathered that actually building machinery was looked on as undignified at Cambridge (England, that is, where this Al character was based) or for that matter at Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not share this view.

Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind calling him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.

One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of thing.

Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.

Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged. But on their next bicycle ride--an overnight camping trip to the Pine Barrens--they were joined by a new fellow, a German named Rudy von something-or-other.

Alan and Rudy's relationship seemed closer, or at least more multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence's. Lawrence concluded that Alan's penis scheme must have finally found a taker.

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/text.html


But seriously, this is one of the best books I read this year, let alone my life. I seriously recommend it to anyone who likes a good read.

ps. Maybe this thread needs to be moved to chitchat, since it's about books, and not about games? Just my $0.02

[Kolzig]

I have ordered Jane's book from a local bookstore, still haven't got it, they promised it in about three weeks.

Now two weeks have passed...

[jaf]

I liked Millenium Rising, twas entertaining...