Lendle

Jeremy Fade is a desperate man. An engineer turned salesman, a father and husband, he sees ghosts. He would like to resist reality, but reality has a forceful way of intruding itself. Finally, a ghost speaks to him, and his life changes forever.Fade’s middle daughter Angua needs help; his oldest has begun on a bad path, while his young son, he finds, is a mystery to him. But how does he address these problems when a ghost brings him news of a nuclear terror plot?Ghosts of the Multiverse is the hilarious story of something very serious indeed. The new Central Asian nation of Wyrigistan has decided, through an open and fair process, that San Francisco is the most evil city in the world. What the world does not know is that Wyrigistan has acquired nuclear weapons from a fanatical Islamist group and is seriously evaluating the use of one of their precious few nuclear weapons to destroy San Francisco.Set in San Francisco in the near future, Ghosts of the Multiverse is the first of a series that exploits quantum physics and the polycosmic interpretation to explore and occasionally satirize this world we live in. The novel clearly explains that the human mind is the most important thing in the universe. And yet many of us are often unhappy, our central role in the polycosmos is not enough. This situation is absurd. Perhaps a grand conspiracy is at work. Do the Aesir gods of the ancient Norse really exist? Are they behind the scenes, pulling strings? Or is Islam really the answer? In the Islamic faith, some kinds of love are forbidden, but some kinds of very kinky sex are permitted, and in San Francisco, actively encouraged.Somehow, this mix of nuclear terror, love and physics comes together to tell the story of a man, his family and faith. In the best traditions of Tom Sharpe and Neil Gaiman, Harald Hansen has tried to tell a story in the style of Neal Stephenson. Failing at that endeavor, something unique resulted: a novel that is clearly science fiction and yet also a novel of ideas that emphasizes the central role of love.The satirical side of the novel skewers the Great American University, a thinly disguised U.C. Berkeley, where it is the administrators that make a great university great.