Calculating God

Robert J. Sawyer

★★★★☆

It’s been a while, but Calculating God sticks in my head as an interesting exploration: What if there is scientific evidence out there for a supreme being, but to find it you have to correlate knowledge from multiple inhabited worlds across the galaxy?

The specific situation is a pattern of mass extinctions that’s common on all known inhabited worlds, and a multispecies expedition has come to Earth to cross-check our fossil record and see if it matches too. (It does, of course, which is what sets the rest of the book in motion.)

Like a lot of Sawyer’s more philosophical science-fiction, it’s mostly talking and thinking and figuring things out. There’s not a whole lot of action, and I remember thinking the young-earth-creationist vandals were too much of a caricature to take seriously. (I suspect if I read it again now, they’d seem subtle compared to the pundits and politicians making noise today.)

The main (human) character is a paleontologist, and most of the story takes place in and around a natural history museum. He and the aliens spend a lot of time checking for mismatches, trying to find other explanations for the matches, and looking at planets that didn’t make it one way or another.

I think this may have been the first place I saw the “great filter” concept named (the idea that somewhere between a planet having the conditions for life and a spacefaring civilization there’s at least one step that’s extremely unlikely or difficult). They’d found worlds that had nuked themselves into oblivion and others that were simply abandoned (though the human dying of cancer comes up with a compelling theory as to what happened to them), but only three that were still alive.

There’s a deus ex machina close to the end, but it’s sort of the point of the book, and an epilogue that pulls together several of the “why is this aspect of life universal???” questions the characters had been trying to figure out.

Overall: big questions, with interesting possible answers, that will make you think of science and religion.