Saucer Wisdom [Paperback]

As a lover of good science fiction and futurology I usually keep up on the current subjects but this book really put forward some exotic ideas on what it is to be human and whether technology is a friend or foe to our spiritual development. I was pleasantly surprised at one of the theses in this book that, properly used and properly seen, technology is not our foe but is merely one of the means to bring humankind to a higher plane of awareness. There are so many people who spend all their lives accumulating things as if those things are ends in and of themselves. But these people miss the point. If they put their hearts to gaining the right kinds of material things they would see the higher transformative power of those things. In other words, let's say, a car can either be just another toy to help you be a chick magnet or that car can actually be a material thing to convey you on a spiritual journey. These are the ideas that Frank Shook brings back to Rudy (at least some of the underlying messages that were important to me).

Also the musings on our anthropomorphic desires versus the vast possibility of other alien desires in the universe was amusing.

I'm sure people will have many, many other thoughts.

Unfortunately, for me, I have this pretentious need for a book to have a literary execution that's equal to the ideas being presented and "Saucer Wisdom" was a little too lightweight. It felt more like a "snack" book than a main course. It felt too much like easy feel-good physics on the same level as "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters." Real physics is weighted down by those pesky little calculations that indicate some physical process is doable in the universe we live in.

So, in short, some interesting mental gymnastics but the plot felt too cobbled together.

What IS surprising is how lamely it is all presented. The basic premise is that a saucer abductee named Frank Shook tells Rudy the future as it was revealed to him by aliens, but I guess Rudy wasn't counting on any of his previous readers getting ahold of this book, because this future is all-too familiar to us. By presenting his various ideas for future biotech advances in short vignettes "as told to Frank Shook" Rudy saves himself the trouble of crafting a coherent plotline to contain them. In fact, one of the entries in Rudy's "Seek!" collection of non-fiction was a "Tech Notes toward a Cyberpunk Novel," a sort-of shorthand collection of cool ideas he'd like to incorporate into some future novel.

"Saucer Wisdom" reads like an expansion of "Tech Notes" -- lots of jumbled ideas (some quite cool, others not) but nothing yet written to place them into the context of a story. This is not really a novel, not really a book of predictions (like Ray Kurzweil's "The Spiritual Machine"), but more of a notepad of ideas which Rudy has toyed with over the past decade.

The book could have had fun with the self-referential aspect of it, but instead took a tone I found a little annoying -- saying several times that this exact book, "Saucer Wisdom," was to become so influential that it actually creates the future it describes and remains intensely popular into the 40th Century.

He wishes.