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Elijah by Robert Rasch

Elijah

by Robert Rasch

Pub Date: July 9th, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5049-0435-3
Publisher: AuthorHouse

From debut author Rasch comes a sci-fi novel about a young man’s journey back in time and its subsequent impact on humanity.

In the distant future, Elijah, a member of the Centurion race, is a young man with great curiosity about his surroundings. Fortunately for him, his father, Aligious, isn’t one to skimp on explanations. After they discuss such topics as the finer points of wormholes (“They are a means of travel between two points of time and location, connecting and linking all that you see here in the galaxy”) and the intricacies of a game called Zobzball, Elijah and his father travel back in time through a complicated process. Their destination: the Earth’s moon, some billions of years in the past. During the journey, Aligious provides background information on the makeup of the human race, which has required the influence of outside forces to guide its evolution. According to Aligious, “the development of the planet Earth in its natural state over billions of years led to an under abundance of life (simple forms), and not intelligible communicative beings.” It has only been with the help of alien races that humanity has evolved, he explains, and so it’s managed to become “a less aggressive species.” What, though, does this all mean for Elijah? He becomes the prophet Elijah of biblical times, and his quest includes such miracles as raising the dead. As he runs “his own probability programs,” he investigates life even more deeply. This novel is full of technical jargon, and some portions prove to be particularly dense, as when Elijah asks his father to explain a finer point of engineering: “How is the bough distributaries constructed from within the confines of this underground enormous Herculean?” Some readers may feel lost, if not despondent, as Elijah delves into “quantum physics algorithms while simultaneously running data searches.” Nevertheless, the book is adept at exploring events of the past from the point of view of a highly advanced being, and it sheds new light on religious and historical events. Readers undeterred by detailed descriptions of technological advancements will uncover a starkly ambitious tale.   

This collision of sci-fi and religion offers a nuanced, if dense, examination of the story of mankind.