The Question :

Rating:
Summary: One Person's Opinion....
Review: As a frequent reader and long-time fan of good science fiction, I really enjoyed this book! Similar in style to early Asimov, the writing can seem a little too technical at times. However, the story is a good solid science fiction set in a very plausible future. It seems society has finally achieved it's long desired utopia and this book shows it's ultimate blueprint!

Our unlikely hero, a young man named Jamie, is a somewhat typical disenfranchised individual of the working class and truly someone that I can relate to. It is his inquisitive mind that leads him from the working class to a position among the ruling elite. It is also his natural curiosity that leads to the greatest threat which civilization has ever known....

That threat is, "The Question!"

Rating:
Summary: I wish to comment upon the book's relevance to our lives
Review: Is the internet safe from top-down control? Are our very lives? What will Y2K and the new millennium bring? Do others even care?

I asked these questions in 1989, even as I asked the overriding question their answers begged within the larger one I'd asked some 25 years earlier. My novel's set in 2020 and first written in 1989. It's the outcome of these questions and their problematic answers, problematic because their answers also are within these questions, also first within you, the questionably also independent questioner, and, I'd submit, also within the novel entitled for the overriding question itself.

But then... only recently have the internet and Amazon come online to permit you, the possible reader, to know in advance what we all face given the otherwise-unstoppable social forces at work. Only recently could my novel of a proposed answer even reach the most of you given the failures of my now-bankrupt first publisher within a top-down system which itself discriminated against new books, especially those which broke new ground and didn't fit a formula measured in $ signs.

Still, even our recently more-democratic and equally "free" means of information access increasingly will yield to top-down control as globalizing market conditions conform to "economies of scale." Our "window" of opportunity is limited therefore as mergers and acquisitions cross our increasingly obsolescent national borders....

My book addresses this as well. Within it, the "OMNI," the Orbital Mensurating Normative Intelligence, itself is a "character," ironically so because the OMNI's power itself already had been with us in a broader sense, had reduced your chance to access the very novel which considers its ultimately timeless human creation and consequences.

If you don't read this novel while still you can and act on the warning it contains, you and/or your offspring likely will exist within a more developed New World Order as I and mine also will... as my protagonist, Jaime Stewart, "fictionally" also does...

Yet, will you react as my social misfit, Jaime, does? Will you question the top-down rule which even more irresistibly will control the lives of the unquestioning, conditionable and conforming masses?

While perhaps it's never too late, you needn't wait to find out. You now can read this book somewhat in advance of our even more complete enslavement from the top. You can read it not only as an "un-preachy" novel but as an alarm which roots in the human condition, a "fictional" work which is nonfictional in essence-a work of "science fiction" within which science and its technologies, form first within that condition-a work of "fantasy" within which the outcomes of artificial intelligencing, robotics, and the international space station really aren't quite so "fantastic" after all.

A caring Jaime, Alesha, Kwami and Benazir "fictionally" live within that nascent-yet-essentially-contemporary world, one within which technological means virtually substitute for real human bonding-including even that for sex, all of which Jaime also questions as he quests for real human bonding given the elusive moral answers within the overall human question.

Please join him....

Rating:
Summary: a scienc fiction epic that seems to parallel our future fate
Review: THE QUESTION HOLDS MY ATTENTION AS IT SEEMS MORE FUTURE REALITY THAN FICTION.IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO DENY OUR PROBLEMS AND DISASTERS SUCH THAT IMPENDING CONTROL OF OUR FATE MAY RELY ON OUR ABILITY TO FORESEE A SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT THAT IS NOT INDEED BENEVOLENT. IN A MODERN FAST PACED LIFESTYLE, IF WE LET OTHERS MAKE OUR DECISIONS WE GIVE UP MANY OPTIONS TO CONTROL OUR FUTURE FATE. THIS BOOK SHOULD SOUND AN ALARM TO ANY FREE THINKING AWARE READER.

Rating:
Summary: A Review of 'The Question' by Dana Barbour
Review: This book combines a engrossing science fiction plot with it's mind challenging and thought provoking philosophical discourse. In this age of apathy and cynicism this is a book by someone who dares to give a damn, and that is refreshing.

No simple answers here but persistent readers will come away with their minds expanded.

Rating:
Summary: Formation of a just society
Review: This book combines a engrossing science fiction plot with it's mind challenging and thought provoking philosophical discourse. In this age of apathy and cynicism this is a book by someone who dares to give a damn, and that is refreshing.

No simple answers here but persistent readers will come away with their minds expanded.

Rating:
Summary: A Review of 'The Question' by Dana Barbour
Review: This novel both intrigued and concerned me as I enjoyed the science fiction aspects but was ever aware that the political implications are reality-based. Dana Barbour's character development is excellent, and he does an excellent job of integrating the plot with current sociopolitical issues. The Question is challenging intellectually but definitely read-worthy! If you wonder about implications of current political events, read Dana Barbour's The Question...it's in his book!