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Science fiction, art, history, politics, and more populate the pages of this look into both the past and the future. It’s a story of how one man’s recognition of powers beyond this planet wind up challenging every man and woman on Earth to re-examine their own ideas about belief, behavior, and our own world’s destiny.
When the narrative begins, Mark is an artist living and working in New York City circa 1998. His paintings reflect a moral consciousness spurred by an innate desire to awaken viewers’ attention to the plight of social injustice. One night he experiences an encounter with extraterrestrials, and so begins an odyssey that will include celebrity, scandal, accusation, trial, and eventually imprisonment. Mark has been chosen to help deliver a message of the need for change. It is a message that few will find believable until events occur that make it impossible for anyone to disbelieve.
Author Joseph tells his tale in the first person. As such he’s able to personalize a story that includes goings-on such as telepathy between humans and galactic visitors as well as materialization and de-materialization. He humanizes his yarn further by concentrating more on the intriguing potential for shared moral values rather than the shopworn possibilities of nuclear warfare and mutual destruction. His protagonist continually displays support for left-of-center public policies. In fact, Joseph’s novel is sort of the polar opposite of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, with a lot fewer pages plus the inclusion of beings from other planets. Think of it as socio-political sci-fi for today’s times.