What It’s About

Not easy to describe, but NASA accidently breaks mathematics and reveals the angels who control reality

How I Discovered It

The Rationalist community

Thoughts

One of the funnier books I’ve ever read – unique in concept and delivery.

What I Liked About It

Pretty much everything, very readable

What I Didn’t Like About It

Nothing really. There were a lot of charachters

Who Would Like It?

Everyone

Related Books

Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

Quotes

This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Very, very difficult commentary, written in Martian, waiting to devour the unwary.

In the Book of Job, God takes an innocent man and afflicts him with various curses. First He kills all Job’s cattle, sheep, and camels. Then He kills all Job’s servants, sons, and daughters. Then He covers Job from head to toe with boils and leprous sores. But—and this is crucial—He never asks Job, “Oh, great, and how do you like it?”

I won’t say I had gazed upon it bare, exactly, but in the great game of strip poker every scholar plays against the universe, I’d gotten further than most.

That was why you needed to know the rules. God is awesome in majesty and infinite in glory. He’s not going to have a stupid name like GLBLGLGLBLBLGLFLFLBG.

the clouds were forming ominous patterns, and Tuesdays had stopped happening. The Tuesdays were the most worrying part. For the past three weeks, people all over the world had gone to sleep on Monday and woken up Wednesday. Everything had been in order. The factories had kept running. Lawns had been mowed. Some basic office work had even gotten done. But of the preceding twenty-four hours, no one had any memories.

The Names of God are long, apparently meaningless, and hard to remember. I don’t know who first figured out that if you sing them to a melody, they’ll stick with you longer, but so they do. That’s why we call it choir practice, why I’m choir director, why the people who learn the Names are called Singers and Cantors. The twenty of us joined together in song.

“In a different part of the Talmud,” I said, “Rabbi Akiva gives a different explanation. He says that even the Heaven-bound righteous have a few sins, and since those sins won’t be punished in Heaven, they have to be punished here on Earth. Therefore, the righteous suffer on Earth. But even the Hell-bound wicked have a few virtues. And since those virtues won’t be rewarded in Hell, they have to be rewarded here on Earth. Therefore, the wicked prosper on Earth. Then people ask why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper, and it looks like a mystery, but it actually makes total sense.”

But humans can’t leave well enough alone, so we got in the Space Race, tried to send Apollo 8 to the moon, crashed into the crystal sphere surrounding the world, and broke a huge celestial machine belonging to the Archangel Uriel that bound reality by mathematical laws. It turned out keeping reality bound by mathematical laws was a useful hack preventing the Devil from existing. Break the machinery, and along with the Names of God and placebomancy and other nice things we got the Devil back.

The Bible is silent on the subject, but Rabbi Klass of Brooklyn points out that during the 420 years of the Second Temple, there were three hundred different High Priests, even though each High Priest was supposed to serve for life. Clearly, High Priests of Israel had the sorts of life expectancies usually associated with black guys in horror movies.

The kabbalistic meaning of news is “the record of how the world undoes human ambitions.”

It had taken a kabbalistic rearrangement of the Midwest’s spatial coordinate system that rendered roads there useless, plus a collapse of technology so profound that airplanes were only able to fly if Uriel was having a really good day, plus the transformation of the Panama Canal into some sort of conduit for mystical energies that drove anyone in its vicinity mad—but America had finally gotten its act together and created a decent rail system.

tend to think of the Central Valley as a nightmarish stretch of endless farms inhabited by people who, while not exactly dead, could hardly be called living.

ATTENTION. DUE TO A SCALE BACK IN COVERAGE, THE MORAL ARC OF THE UNIVERSE NO LONGER BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

(Mark Twain once said, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” I think he would have liked Kabbalah.)

The hardest hit were the atheists. They’d spent their whole lives smugly telling everyone else that God and the Devil were fairy tales and really wasn’t it time to put away fairy tales and act like mature adults, and then suddenly anyone with a good pair of binoculars can see angels in the sky. It was rough.

In 1972, the President, Mr. Kissinger, and several other high officials took an unexpected trip to Yakutsk, where they opened full diplomatic relations with Hell. Nixon and Thamiel agreed to respect the boundary at the Bering Strait and cooperate economically and militarily against their mutual enemy.

Kissinger was lauded, but the real praise fell on Nixon, whose stern anti-Communist stance had given him the moral credentials he needed to forcefully defend his action. Thus the saying that sprang up in the wake of the trip: “Only Nixon can go to Hell.”

“Look,” Nixon told Kissinger, in one of the most damning tapes. “Everything I did, I did for the love of this country, I did it to fight Communism. But [expletive deleted] God isn’t going to see it that way. He’s going to be too soft to realize what had to be done. And I’m going to end up burning in [expletive deleted] for all eternity. Why the [expletive deleted] did I ever let you convince me to sign an alliance with [expletive deleted]?” “The idea behind the alliance was sound,” Kissinger answered. “We did not entirely understand how things stood at the time, but even if we had, I would have made the same suggestion. Brezhnev was getting too strong, especially with the Vietnamese and the South American communist movements. We did what we had to do. If the good Lord disagrees with me, I will be happy to point out His tactical errors.” “[expletive deleted] easy for you to say!” said the President. “You can talk anybody into anything. But I’m the one whose [expletive deleted] soul is on the line. Doesn’t the Bible say something about that? What use is it to something something the world if it costs you your soul? Something [expletive deleted] hippie dippy like that? I’m breaking the alliance. There’s no other choice.”

Spies reported that the Other King had been gravely wounded, a Fisher King wound that never healed, his mind intact but his body hopelessly mangled.

“I know your True Name,” he said. “You are Gadiriel, the Lady of Los Angeles, the maker of golems. The angel of celebrity and popularity and pretense. This is your work.” When Reagan next spoke, it was with a lilting feminine voice, one with a faint undertone of amusement. “Come, Jalaketu ben Kokab. Let’s go somewhere a little more private.”

He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on.” “I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel,” said Jalaketu. “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal. Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel.”

Reagan’s voice shifted back to the masculine, drawling register that would entrance millions. “Guess we lost track of the time out here! Well, Jala, are you ready? Let’s go make America great again!”

And Mexico is starting to industrialize really heavily—like, more heavily than any country has ever industrialized in all of history. Turns out communism works just fine when there are no individuals. The two countries start to prepare for war.

UM, said Uriel. I THINK OF GOD AS SORT OF INTERPLAY BETWEEN THE LOGICAL AND MORAL CONCEPTS OF NECESSITY, WHICH CAUSES UNIVERSES TO EXIST AND CONTAIN THE POTENTIAL FOR HOLINESS. I AM NOT SURE HE IS REALLY THE KIND OF ENTITY THAT GETS INVOLVED IN REAL ESTATE NEGOTIATIONS.

Fast cars! Fast women! Fastidious adherence to the precepts of the moral law! —Steven Kaas

There was Trump Hotel, whose etymology traced back to triumph and thence to thriambos, the orgiastic rites of the pagan gods of chaos.

“Tell me, Ms. Lowry, you’re a writer, what would be an appropriate message to put on a card for a letterbomb?” Valerie thought for a second. “How about—condolences on the recent death in your family?”

Hell made the first offer. US recognition of all Thamiel’s outstanding territorial conquests, including Russia, Alaska, Canada, and the US north of Colorado and west of the Mississippi—even Salish, which Hell had never actually managed to conquer. In exchange he would disarm all but a token remnant of his ICKMs. If not, he would nuke the Untied States, and let Reagan decide whether to launch a useless retaliation that would kill hundreds of thousands of innocents but allow the demons to recoalesce after a few months. Reagan made a counteroffer: not doing any of that. And if Hell used any nuclear weapons, he would nuke the whole world, destroying all human life. Thamiel’s goal, he said, was to corrupt humanity and make them suffer. Piss off the Untied States, and they would knock humanity beyond all corruptibility and pain forever. Some would go to Hell, others to Heaven, and that would be the end of that for all time. Mutually assured destruction was the only way that anyone had ever prevented nuclear war, and sometimes that meant threatening something terrible in the hopes that your enemy didn’t want it either. Reagan gambled everything on the idea that the Devil didn’t want a final end to all sin.

The ability of a vast empire to subsidize heroin stores was no match for the ability of addicts to want more heroin.

This man here on my right side is the incomparable Clark Deas, my trusted lieutenant. Comes to us all the way from Ireland, where he used to engage in ‘republican activity’ up in the parts where that means something a little more decisive than voting for tax cuts. Had his own splinter group for a while, the Deas IRA, which like all good splinter groups spent 95% of the time fighting people on its own side and the other 5% catching unrelated people in crossfires. With His Majesty’s finest breathing down his back, he joined millions of his countrymen in crossing the Atlantic to a promised land of wealth and freedom where all the policemen are blind and deaf and the streets are paved with plastic explosives.”

You say you have problems as great as my own I am forced to admit it is true But the thing is that my problems happen to me Whereas yours only happen to you.

you’re going to make a certain mistake. It’s an easy mistake to make. You’re going to hate evil. And you’re going to think that’s enough. That it’s the same as loving goodness. It isn’t. It’s nowhere close. It will lead you to Hell—whether as tenant or landlord.

Asher spoke the Incendiary Name again. It hit home, and Brenda Burns went up in a conflagration of nominative determinism.

Ana wondered exactly what kind of a priest he was. Apparently the type who would agree to join an expedition to hunt down God if they paid him enough. Probably not Pope material.

THE REASON EVIL EXISTS IS TO MAXIMIZE THE WHOLE COSMOS’ TOTAL SUM GOODNESS. SUPPOSE WE RANK POSSIBLE WORLDS FROM BEST TO WORST. EVEN AFTER CREATING THE BEST, ONE SHOULD CREATE THE SECOND-BEST, BECAUSE IT STILL CONTAINS SOME BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS. THEN CONTINUE THROUGH THE SERIES, CREATING EACH UNTIL REACHING THOSE WHERE WICKEDNESS AND SUFFERING OUTWEIGH GOOD. SOME WORLDS WILL INCLUDE MUCH INIQUITY BUT STILL BE GOOD ON NET. THIS IS ONE SUCH.