The God Patent [Paperback]

***Spoiler Alert*** I am prefacing this review with a spoiler alert mainly because I will probably come off sounding like a spoil-sport as I give this book a slightly less glowing review than the vast majority already posted.

A major theme of the "story" appears to be faith and patience and we are brow-beaten with it from very early on in the book. I suppose it is fitting, then, that attempting to read this book is a major exercise in faith and patience. Faith in the author that there is a story buried in there somewhere and patience to wait for him to finally get around to it. I finally lost both just shy of the half-way point in the book. I was about to pack it in a third of the way through the book but the author finally hit an actual plot point and revealed a general direction for the story. Up to that point the author had been doing character development and leading us through a year in the life of four of the characters while he set up various sub plots. Unfortunately his characters are one dimensional: (SPOILER) the rich tech manager whose marriage fell apart and lost his job and sank into drugs and strippers, the "damaged" and rebellious teen who just happens to be a math super-genius, the beautiful physicist who is passionate about the purity of science and the greedy and sleazy lawyer. Even after spending a third of the book developing the characters they still came off as more caricature than character and I found myself not caring about any of them. After the first plot point is revealed I continued reading, hoping the pace would pick up. Instead I was introduced to a new group of characters that had to be developed. Mercifully, these characters were given a little less backstory and development and I was treated to a second plot point before I finally gave up, not quite half way through the book.

The overall tone of the book seems heavy handed and preachy. I kept checking Amazon to see if this book was listed as some type of sub-genre of Christian science fiction but I could not find anything. (SPOILER(again)) My last impression was that the high-tech start-up run by the ultra-conservative Christian group was going to be the home of the bad guys. But what the final message of the story would be still eluded me. And I lacked the faith and patience to find out.

Based on the number of 5-star reviews this book has received, the author has obviously found an audience. And I applaud him for that. Unfortunately for me, I am not his target audience.

I quickly found myself engrossed in this book. I got that deja vu feeling (all over again) akin to what I felt the first time I picked up a John Grisham novel. Only this book has a science/consciousness angle instead of a legal beagle angle. You can tell that Ransom spent time as a particle physicist just as you can tell that Grisham spent time as a lawyer. The results are that the books feel authentic. They also keep the cast of characters to a handful. It turns out to be a nice little read. It also enticed my to purchase Feynman's Lecture (3 volume set) but that may not be everyone's cup of tea! One last note, be a great book to turn into a movie!

The God Patent -- a wry, knowing story of heartbreak, cutting-edge scientific research, staying afloat in hard times while trying to steal a march on the system, and the eternal struggle between faith and reality -- voyages deep into the heart of contemporary America.

"The two relevant things to keep in mind when you run away are, first, you have to choose a direction and, second, since you can't run away from your problems, you might as well run toward their solutions."

Following this logic -- he's a logical kind of guy -- Ryan McNear flees Texas for Northern California. But it turns out his problems are running after him. Read this book before you take out a patent on the human soul -- it might get you into more trouble than you were bargaining for.