(mild spoilers ahoy)
Just read it today and while it was an entertaining novel I can’t help but be disappointed. The basic premise of the story is this: in a world almost like our own, it’s been scientifically proven by radioisotope dating that the world is only about 5500 years old, corresponding with Biblical accounts of creation. Now I could write pages about that premise alone, but let’s move on to the main plot of the story: So far paleontologists have been able to rationalize away fossil remains but then Flores Man is found, which just doesn’t pigeonhole into any theologically acceptable category. The potentially revolutionary impact of this discovery drives most of the first part of the book, but then the story veers off into a conspiracy thriller. And by the end of the novel we’re given no explanation at all. It’s explicitly said that the fossil evidence is completely at variance with the known, proven age of the Earth. Either radioisotope dating has to be wrong, or molecular biology is wrong; the conundrum is never resolved. The problem is that the events of the story should be literally impossible, as in logically contradictory. It’s a little as if someone had written a horror thriller whose plot simultaneously required both that there are no such things as ghosts and that there are.