I really disliked this book... alot!! This author showed a ton of distain toward organized religion. That made it kind of hard to read because it just seemed like he harped on how bad religion was...constantly, almost for the entire book. On top of that this story was based on his glory days in college. Lots of sex and drugs. And free unprotected sex and drugs were good. Being a goody goody was bad. This went on for half the book. So it got annoying. Ok, I can deal with the fact that he doesn't like organized religion, to each their own, but what really brought me down, was it was my religion he chose to pick on. OK... so I decide to have an open mind, about half way through the book the story started picking up, got exciting in fact, but if I talk about it then I just give away what little plot there was. But at the end it digresses back to free and unprotected sex is great, religion sucks and drugs are cool attitude. BORING... This book didn't work for me. I think he was trying to write about some hard sci fi, but it just didn't seem to mesh. I didn't really care about his glory days, in fact I don't think anyone would care about mine, so I don't go around telling people about it. I don't think that I'll read any more by this author, his books are a bit to liberal for my taste. I think that if he didn't harp on his personal beliefs and concentraited more on his story and plot it would have been a great read.