Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is the worst book I've ever read; to address what is wrong with it in full would take more space than the book itself, so I'll just hit the highlights. First, it's a transparent plagiarism of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, starring Howard Roark and John Galt as Jethro Knights, Ellsworth Toohey as Reverend Belinas, and Peter Keating as Gregory Michaelson. In an interview on Patheos, Mr. Istvan states that, had he gone through a publishing house, “It would be difficult to get a story like The Transhumanist Wager past the lawyers...” Probably so, Mr. Istvan had better hope that Ayn Rand's estate doesn't get wind of this book. While we're on Ayn Rand, it's fair to mention that, while she liked her Mary Sues, Jethro Knights (yes, Knights, plural. There's also a Dr. Whalefish and Mexican gentleman named Katril Bentoven) leaves all of her supermen in the dust. A college philosophy major, he's able to spend a mere four weeks in the library, plus some time chatting up an old sailor, and design a thirty five foot yacht which is capable of being sailed round the world, weathering a typhoon, and even being flipped by a 70 foot tall rogue wave, all because he, and he alone, with no help, welded it together from “six thousand dollars of rusty recycled steel”. He's also an incredible coder, capable of creating “dozens” of web pages in a four week stretch while simultaneously adding his organization to all the local phone books and internet search engines. He's largely immune from explosions. His senior thesis, which, incidentally, is the first thing his program allows him to write on his own, is so compelling it eventually forms the basis of a worldwide utopia. He's an amazing explorer who is able to discover uncontacted tribes in strange lands in a matter of days and achieve rapport with the Japanese “Samaria” clans. Samaria? Samurai, I guess. Mr. Istvan's command of vocabulary is not as impressive as his hero's command of, well, everything. In the above mentioned interview, he admits to not having had an editor, and opines that his book is more “indie” and “raw” because of it. True, very true. He throws words around without really seeming to know what they mean, based on similarities of sounds or collocations that he's heard before. One of the characters has “Arian” looks, there are those Japanese “Samaria,” there's a guy who is a “nationalized” American citizen, and his fighting robot comes equipped with a “canon.” His dictator announces that ignorance “is...a crime that will be punishable by excessive fines...” There are quantum thoughts and clairvoyant Zen bombs, “ethnic and religious imperatives,” plus the assurance that transhumanists “don't hinder ethnic or religious people from reaching their supposed immortality.” Wait, ethnic people? Is that like that Mexican who became a “nationalized citizen”? Or perhaps the “drug induced shamans” that pop up later are ethnic people, I'm not sure. Perhaps the people that issued the “three million dollar fatwa” could help me out, they could fly over in a “megasonic airplane.” I'm “ghostly serious” here, “the muse on the transhuman city [would be] festive” if I could only understand what Mr. Istvan thinks he's trying to say. And then there's the elephant, or elephants, or over a thousand elephants, in the room. Transhumanism. Yes, the book is called The Transhumanist Wager, and yes, it is about transhumanism, so we can expect that the word will pop up fairly often. According to my Kindle Reader for the iPad, the word “transhuman” or one of its variants (transhuman, transhumanist, transhumanism, and Transhumania, the name of his utopia) occurs 1,189 times. In 298 pages. That's almost four times per page. I'm so sick of that damn word that I'm about ready to take up homeopathy just to not have to read it again. For all that, for the first two-thirds of the book or so, he rarely touches on what transhumanism is, or why it's a good thing, it's just something the bad guys hate for religious reasons, and the good guys love because, well, transhumanism. Every time the book mentions something factual, it merely exposes the author's ignorance. I suppose you could defend some things by saying that it takes place in an alternate reality very similar to our own, but the ideas that a “Presidential seal” is some sort of legal trump card, or that people who wish to remain anonymous are allowed to simply not put license plates on their cars, are just ludicrous. His understanding of the military is confused at best; in his world a fifth of the United States' active military is stationed in Washington, D.C., to protect it from a terrorist attack. His modern naval engagement takes place at a distance of 20 miles. The concept of money in the book has its own idiosyncrasies. In order to carry out an assassination, a $50,000 bribe is necessary to induce a couple of maintenance men to allow entrance to a conference hall. On the other hand, Jethro Knights is able to build a floating island with the most modern facilities for 10,000 scientists and their families (let's say 30,000 people) for a mere 5 billion dollars. There are to be three main towers, one of them fifty-two stories high, the second sixty-six, and the third eighty stories. In the real world, One World Trade Center is going to cost about $4bn dollars, and it doesn't have to float. The budget for this undertaking comes from a ten billion dollar donation from an oil magnate, which is divided, more or less, as follows: Cost of construction: $5bn Defense budget: “one third of his ten billion dollar budget”: $3.3bn Recruitment bonuses for the scientists: $1m dollars each x 10,000 scientists= $10bn So we're at $18bn plus now. To be fair, he does mention that there were other donors, and that the scientists, once recruited, were encourage to buy, rather than rent, in order to bring some of their bonus money back into the budget, but the math is still pretty shaky. In the end, Knights becomes dictator of the world (seriously, he does) by, like a malevolent Santa Claus, destroying all the major religious and political buildings in the world (including that navel of power and influence, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo), all in one night. Then he finally delivers his “This is John Galt” speech, but by that time, I was so tired that I was just skimming. And skimming. And skimming. For fifteen pages. Pretty sure most of it was cribbed from Rand, but I could be wrong, like I said, I was skimming. I too could go on and on, but I'm tired. Don't read this book. Don't waste your time or your money. I never thought I'd say this, but if you'd like to read a much better work, I'd recommend either “The Fountainhead,” or “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. You'll get most of the same ideas, but in a much more fluid and readable form. Yes, this makes Ayn Rand look fluid. One final quote, the best lines in the book, delivered by the hero's hostile philosophy teacher, Prof. Rindall, serves quite well as a review of the whole book: “[T]his rant of a thesis, this is not philosophy. Maybe, this is art. No, not even art. This is science fiction. Bad science fiction. B-rated science fiction.”