Day 295 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

Finally, a fun, well-written novel. Dream Thief by Stephen R. Lawhead is a wonderful sci-fi novel in which you see the brilliance of Lawhead’s writing really starting to take form. I’m familiar with Lawhead’s most famous 5-book epic The Pendragon Cycle, though he has written much since then (which I plan on getting to).

Dream Thief was published just as Lawhead was beginning his work on the first book of the Pendragon Cycle. But unlike the sweeping Arthurian legend to follow, this book centers around Spence, a bio-psych researcher, who isn’t exactly a social person – more of a loner, who is having terrible nightmares that he can’t remember: he only knows that he dreads falling asleep. He’s conducting his dream research on a space station orbiting the Earth.

Of course there is a young woman that becomes his love interest. And well, thanks to her connections (her father is the director of the space station), Spence decides to go on a three month Mars expedition to see how the terraforming is done… but his real reason for going is to try and escape the nightmares and blackouts he’s been having.

Except on Mars, his life is turned upside down – and continues a downward spiral until he’s in India where he finally learns about the true Light of the universe and sees, for the first time, his calling in life.

Lawhead quite creatively uses space exploration, Martians and Hindi folklore to explain Christianity. It’s not thrust in your face, but throughout the book, it is subtly interwoven in conversations between Spence and his closest friends. One of the first things I picked up on was the evil human, Hocking who bears a striking resemblance to a certain physicist named Stephen Hawking. The Hocking of this book is a quadraplegic and can only travel by use of his pneumochair and basically looks like a skeleton. Of course Lawhead was pitting what Stephen Hawking believes against the truth of God’s creation and role in the universe.

There were only a couple of times where I felt the scene was going on far too long, but other than that, Lawhead kept your attention with his well-defined characters, and the various happenings going on throughout the story. It was a fun read and I enjoyed it. I’m ready to go back and re-read his Pendragon Cycle but… I’ll save that for later.