Book excerpt: In this awkwardly-paced thriller the future has gone amuck. A Christian group terrorizes the west. Boy Scouts are listed as a subversive hate group. Whooping cranes come back with a vengeance and are eating the Ridley turtles. The poles shift and the North Pole ends up in Libya. U.S. capitalists seek political asylum in Russia. Most Americans are in a stupor from their implanted entertainment systems/GPS locators. NASA mistakenly uses centimetres instead of astronomical units in a major space program. Some outlaw Linton clones accidentally knock a hole in the fabric of time and space. Finally a war breaks out between computers that completely gridlocks all electronic communication. Rapture comes but the massive amount of electronic noise interferes with the transmission so that most people are missed on the first try. What the future holds is unsettling and perhaps dangerously familiar! But in spite of all this, we still have the right to life, liberty and to file suit for unhappiness.