It’s a hell of an opening for a book. A six-legged alien lands on earth. He doesn’t land in Washington, DC in front of the White House. No, he lands in Toronto in front of a museum. And he doesn’t ask the nearest passerby to “take me to you your leader,” he goes to the front desk and inquires of the security guard if he might speak to a paleontologist.

So begins Calculating God, Robert Sawyer’s twist of one of the most beloved tropes in science fiction.

That trope is the alien who comes to earth to share the advanced knowledge of his species with humanity, often for good, though sometimes for ill. Think Klatuu from The Day the Earth Stood Still or the Overlords of Arthur C. Clark’s (and SyFy’s!) Childhood’s End. Hollus, the alien in question for Sawyer does the same, but with a twist – she’s come to share the Good News.

Well, not quite. But she’s looking for God. Actually, she’s a believer, certain that there was an intelligent designer. Her cancer-riddled human counterpart, Tom Jerrico, is not. Thus the usual frame of received wisdom from aliens is flipped. Thus ensues a lot of talking, of the vaguely scientific and philosophical variety, about the possibility of an intelligently designed universe.

To be certain, this is not a serious exploration of the issue. That’s because Sawyer stacks the deck, adding in a few additional “facts” known to the aliens but not us that pushes well beyond the basis for modern intelligence design or “Goldilocks” theorists. Rhetorically it’s a cheat, but dramatically it’s quite interesting. Tom, after all, is a man of science as well as an atheist and skeptic. If anyone should be open to new evidence about a feature like the existence of God, it would be him (contrary to popular belief, most of we atheists don’t claim to know for certain God doesn’t exist, just that we haven’t seen proof of his/her existence). Given that, it’s silly for people to get upset about the arguments presented and Tom’s eventual “conversion,” given that, to paraphrase MST3K (talk about resurrections!), it’s just a book and folks should really just relax.

In this sense, Sawyer’s book hasn’t aged well. In 2000, when the book came out, it might have been possible to give the benefit of the doubt to those arguing “intelligent design.” However, just five years later in a landmark court decision, it was revealed that intelligent design purveyors are simply religious folks trying repackage creationism into a “science” they can shove into public schools. The hilarious find and replace evidence in that case speaks for itself.

Not that those people are interested in the same kind of designer as the aliens Sawyer constructs. Their designer is just another advanced alien intelligence, one so far ahead of the rest of us as to appear magical (kind of like the Vorlons from Babylon 5, now that I think of it). The aliens aren’t interested in saving souls, condemning sinners to hellfire, or purging heretical ideas. That the book ignores that this is true for so long is one of its primary faults.

But far from its only one.

For one thing, the book is awfully talky. Which makes sense, as the main interest is in Hollus learning about Earth’s history and how that plays into her theories about a created universe. But it can be kind of dull and doesn’t have any real tension to it. In addition, Tom is a pretty bad foil for Hollus (he turns Occam’s Razor from a guidepost into dogma) – more stacking of the deck. For most of the book the only breaks are Tom’s maudlin asides about his cancer, which don’t add much to things.

Sawyer does something about this in the last third of the book, but in incredibly ham-handed fashion. He introduces to Arkansas Christian terrorists – one is even named Cooter (the other is JD – thanks Robert!) – who bomb abortion clinics and, eventually, shoot up a bunch of priceless fossils at the museum. Putting to one side how these rednecks ex machina manage to get into Canada after first blowing up a clinic in Buffalo (but, remember, this was before 9/11), their stories end when they’re both killed at the museum, so they come and go so quickly and without any real impact that you’re left wondering just what the point was.

The second attempt at action fares better, but makes you wonder why it hadn’t come earlier. A celestial event that should destroy life on Earth (and the other alien worlds) is blocked, literally, by the hand of God, leading the aliens to pick up and head to that part of space. Naturally, cancer-ridden Tom comes with them – who wants to spend your last days with your loving prop family, anyway? What plays out frantically in the last bit of the book might have been interesting with some more room to breathe, but it’s so rushed that you just don’t care.

The jaunt to the stars also highlights how the alien technology conveniently moves at the speed of plot. Yes, they’re advanced enough to travel at near light speeds from star to star. No, sorry Tom, they’re not any more advanced than late 20th century Canada when it comes to treating cancer – not only do they not have a cure, they don’t even have a better way of treating it. But, good news! In spite of the fact that you’re lurching toward your death bed, they can put you in suspended animation (twice!) for the space trip! It just doesn’t make much sense.

All this makes the book sound worse than it is. It’s a fairly quick read, has a fun premise, and raises a couple of interesting ideas. It could have been a lot more engaging and epic, however.

There’s a scene deep in Kevin Smith’s Dogma in which Rufus, the thirteenth apostle, explains to a credulous Bethany who she can be a descendant of Christ. “Mary,” she points out, “was a virgin.” Rufus explains that while it’s true Mary was a virgin when Christ was born, she was married to Joseph for an awful long time after that. Why assume she stayed a virgin? He concludes:

The nature of God and the Virgin birth, those are leaps of faith. But to believe a married couple never got down? Well, that’s just plain gullibility.

That scene popped into my head late in The Water Knife, the new novel by award winner Paolo Bacigalupi. It’s set in the American southwest, mostly Phoenix, Arizona, in a near future where climate change has displaced populations and fueled droughts that have made water the most precious commodity on earth. Life is pretty much lived to find water, either by scrambling with other refugees at a pump set up by the Red Cross or by being part of the upper crust that lives in high rise arcologies that are self contained recyclers of water.

It’s not the setup that’s the problem. Like any piece of science fiction there are certain things that are, to borrow Rufus’s term, “leaps of faith.” Bacigalupi isn’t leaping very far, to be honest. The world he creates is terrifyingly plausible, if not without its blind spots (the role of the federal government in all this, which still exists but allows states to war on each other, is never really explained). It’s rich, in a gritty, ugly sort of way and is fully convincing even if one might be able to pull at some of the details.

No the need for gullibility comes when the story requires us to believe that characters won’t behave like people or submit to the basic laws of biology.

There are three main characters in the book, united by a set of water rights with nearly mystical powers that could be a game changer for the whole Southwest. It’s pretty much a McGuffin, a genre appropriate version of Pulp Fiction’s glowing briefcase, but it does drive people to do some really awful things.

Before I go any further – this is really a brutal book. I’ve seen comments in various places from readers who just stopped and gave up at certain points. I don’t blame them. In addition to the horribles entailed in living in an arid, post-apocalyptic tableau choked with refugees and amoral operators, there are scenes upon scenes of pure savagery. In fact, each of the three main characters is brutalized pretty severely (and in detail). Yet they manage to shake it off, for the most part.

Said characters are Angel, the titular Water Knife, a local reporter named Lucy, and a teenaged Texas refugee named Maria. Angel is sent from Nevada to figure out what’s going down in Phoenix. Lucy is trying to do the same, hunting for a big story and trying to figure out what got a friend killed (and brutally tortured – detail we get second hand). Maria just wants to get out, constantly scrapping to figure out how to get north. They all orbit each other, though Angel and Lucy pair up about midway through the book for good.

And I mean “pair up” in the Biblical sense. The sexual activity between the two of them is so clichéd and obvious that it really disappointed me Bacigalupi went that route. Lucy has no reason to trust, much less desire, a man whose profession is strangling cities like Phoenix of their water (he has the book’s first scene, where he rides Apocalypse Now style in a chopper that attacks an Arizona city’s water plant). Nonetheless, she sleeps with him, because, why not?

She also betrays him, which sets up the true gullibility moment. As I said all three characters are brutalized (the women basically for fun, which says something). Angel’s turn comes when the car he’s sitting in is ambushed by his own people. He’s riddled with bullets and smacked in the head by an exploding airbag. Not only does that not knock him unconscious, he manages to crawl away, only to fall head-first into an empty swimming pool (an interesting recurring image of Phoenix). After all this, which should leave him bleeding profusely, concussed, and probably with a broken neck he’s miraculously saved by Lucy and some hand-waving med tech.

This is where, even in the oppressive Phoenix heat, my snowmen started flying. As I said, the other main characters also suffer horrible abuse and manage to shake it off, but not quite like this (a minor character is up and walking a few days after having his kneecap blown away!). Unless Angel is superman – and there’s been no suggestion he is – he shouldn’t survive. At the very least, he should be incapacitated for the rest of the book. After that, I simply couldn’t care what happened to these people.

That’s not true. I kind of didn’t care all that much about these people to begin with. Angel’s basically a gun for hire. Lucy wants a big story, but doesn’t seem all that motivated by anything else until the very end. Only Maria is really worth rooting for, which makes the rather abrupt ending work in a way that it probably shouldn’t have worked.

I loved The Windup Girl and have really enjoyed Bacigalupi’s short stories. Unfortunately, The Water Knife doesn’t measure up. That’s no crime, but it’s perhaps a missed opportunity. Worth a read, but not essential, and certainly not one to pick up if you’re looking to have your faith in humanity restored.