Book Review: The Gods Hate Kansas

See that picture? Isn't it great? '60s art work, a title like that, you can't help but think it's kinda awesome. You can buy a poster sized version for your wall [link].

This book has come to my attention several times over the years, largely because I came from Kansas. Yummy bought me a copy for Christmas. I finally read it. It's OK. I'm not recommending it too highly.

It starts out as another aliens inhabit humans and try to take over the world type book. Beings of pure thought ride a fleet of asteroids to Kansas from the Moon. The team that goes to investigate open some up and release the aliens that take over their bodies.

Instead of spreading out and taking over high ranking politicians they empty their bank accounts, set up an electric fence around the crash site, and start building a tower.

Then a plague breaks out that causes the blood to rush to a person's head, they bleed a bit, and then die. Some people are buried, some are burned, but this doesn't stop the spread of the disease. The aliens claim they've come to stop the plague by transporting the dead to the Moon where they're completely isolated. But the people aren't actually dead. Sucks to be the ones who were buried or burned. No, they were apparently hypnotized to do that.

Oh, I know. Believe me. But this is some of the more solid science in the book.

Eventually we discover that this alien race split into one of pure knowledge and thought while the rest remained emotional workers who kept their bodies and served as vessels for the thought creatures. But the thought creatures found they were going to evolve into nonexistence in another hundred generations or so. Look, don't even ask me how beings of pure thought reproduce. Anyway, they got some bodies and left their homeworld in search of a solution. Well, they crashed on our Moon. They sent several waves of asteroids to Earth but they weren't properly shielded so the passengers died. The bodies are getting elderly when they discover proper shielding. They've come to Earth to steal new bodies and build a ship.

The hero of the story can't be controlled, his mind read, or get hypnotized because he has a silver plate in his head after a car accident. He fights them back to the Moon, finds out what's up, and tells them that had they just asked we would have given them what they need for their ship. Of course, the technology we learned while building it would help.

And the solution to their fatal evolution problem is just that they need to start having emotions again and just be better people.

I had to read it eventually. Really, you're better off with the poster.