The Edge of Reason
Melinda Snodgrass
Tor, 2008
U.S. hardcover, 1st ed.
ISBN 0-7653-1516-5
384 pages; $24.95

According to a Gallup poll conducted May 8-11, 2008, 44% of Americans believe “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” This figure is up 1% from the previous year’s poll.

I’m not particularly interested in starting a debate on this blog about evolution versus creationism, but what I find interesting in this statistic is what it says about how religion seems to be edging out science in our country. Personally, I’ve never understood why anyone thinks they need to be in conflict, and the Catholic Church, in which I was raised, appears to agree with me (in this century, at least). But many seem to see them as being not only incompatible, but metaphorically at war. Melinda Snodgrass takes this concept one step further, and has them actually at war with one another. And from her viewpoint, it is science – and Lucifer – with whom righteousness lie.

It is not that God does not exist in the world Snodgrass creates in The Edge of Reason. He does, in all His aspects – Yahweh, the Holy Spirit, and every version of Christ you can imagine, from the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Jeffrey Hunter of “King of Kings” to the more politically correct, ethnically Jewish working class man who can be seen in the popular print entitled "Jesus Laughing.” The one allied with the forces of science, in fact, is a homeless man living in a cardboard box. But God is not the only god – all gods from all time exist. And it is their goal to ensure that they are worshipped for all time. They feed on the suffering of humankind, and therefore must keep humans away from reason, understanding and technology. Otherwise, humans might free themselves from the yoke of superstition and achieve the stars. The tool of the Old Ones is magic, which genuinely exists; they can create golems to do their bidding, for instance, or throw spells at their enemies (that, after all, is what miracles are).

Opposing these forces are the Lumina, headed by an entity in human form called Kenntnis – the German word for “knowledge.” Kenntnis is a rich and powerful man, but one who cannot act without human agents; man, it seems, must save himself, by his own choice. His recruit is Richard Oort, a police officer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, chosen to be the paladin for our time, following in the footsteps of the likes of King Arthur and Benjamin Franklin. Richard is a man with a complicated past that includes a domineering father, a failed career as a musician, and a dark episode of which he will not speak. Oort is also a man of faith who finds Kenntnis to be a tempter indeed – the snake in the Garden of Eden bringing knowledge to Adam and Eve, Prometheus bringing fire to humankind. He does not know whom to trust, and must go through his own dark night of the soul in order to decide which side he is on.

Snodgrass does not make any of these decisions easy for any of her characters. Her writing is brisk and absorbing; I had difficulty putting The Edge of Reason down. Her background as a television screenwriter is apparent in the way she can build suspense (she wrote for Star Trek: Next Generation, including the famous script, “The Measure of a Man,” perhaps my favorite episode – the one in which Data is put on trial to decide whether he is sufficiently human to determine his own destiny). My only real complaint is that I realized at about page 200 that this was clearly only the first book of a series. I have nothing against series, but I like to know what I’m getting into up front, and nothing about this book gave me a clue.

Snodgrass’s website says that she is “currently” writing the next book in the Edge series, which I read with dismay; I had hoped to read that it was to be published in the very near future. I want to know what happens next. Ultimately, is there any greater compliment one can pay an author than that?