Tim Lahaye; Babylon Rising... Oh my. (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I read a lot of books while doing the midnight-4am watch, these books are generally pulp rubbish. My better books are reserved for when my brain is up to them. Having just finished a bit of dumb-fun Sci-fi I dug out Babylon Rising from the ships library.

IT SHOULD COME WITH A HEALTH WARNING.

The blurb gives the impression that we are dealing with a jaunty book, in the same ilk as Dan Brown books and their clones; This is most certainly not the case.

My main problems are;

The Main Hero: A professor in the field of Biblical prophecy, proving said prophecy via archology. Fair enough.
However he is the least plausable Hero, ever. Move over Dirk Pitt…
This guy is handed adventures by a Man. Who will only send him off on one of these quests once the hero has completed a challenge. Hence a fight with a LION in a warehouse. The quest is to find the Bronze serpant that Moses then Nabachanezza had a thing with…

Then we have the Beautiful woman who is married to the (No skanky sex before marriage here) hero is married too (She gave up a promising career of her own to counsel needy students at her husbands university) She dies.

The dialog after the violent demise of his wife is terrible. No getting drunk for a week and waking up in a bush in Mexico, no quest for bloody revenge. Our hero goes into a forest and shoots arrows at some trees. Where is the fun in that? I could do that if I wanted! I WANT HOOKERS AND BOOZE THEN BLOOD!

After the death he decides to go on with his quest, despite some not very menacing villians following. Could they perhapsd be using him as a tool to find the serpant and thus bring about the end times? I dont care. I got no further…

I have no problem with Religion, but I do have a problem with it being thrust down my un-suspecting throat. I might as well have read a book by Ron Bloody Hubbard.

It says on the cover he has sold #50,000,000 books! How? the writing is dire!
I’m sure an author could be true to his faith and still be fun, it can’t be that hard can it?

Sorry, bit of a rant I know…

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The first paragraph in this quote answers your question about how. He markets to the people who want to read heavily Christian works with Good Noble Heroes, and he wrote/cowrote some series of Armageddon books which sold at insane rates to the aforementioned niche market. (looks it up) Ah here we go, the Left Behind books.

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Could have warned you about that. Sad part is, I have a friend that likes fantasy. She is also very conservative (She laments the fact that she is stuck with McCain because Huckabee is so much closer to her views.) and she loves the LaHaye books because they are “good Christian books”. To be fair, she also likes the Harry Potter books. And the Sword of Truth series by Goodkind, which I stopped reading because they are full of torture and violent sex. :eek: :confused: And I have no idea how she reconciles all these things.