The Road to Damascus

Title: The Road to Damascus
Author: John Ringo & Linda Evans
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
Copyright: 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7187-3


I highly recommend “The Road to Damascus”.

The title references the Apostle Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus while Paul was on the road to Damascus. It’s an apt title.

Sonny, a 20,000 ton sentient war machine called a Bolo, is on a mission during which he encounters a four-year old child armed with a pop gun. Sonny stops and is unable to move for a time while he reviews his memory banks recalling the events that led him to be at this time and place and he reconsiders his mission and the purpose of his creators.

In recounting twelve years of history from Sonny’s perspective, John Ringo and Linda Evans present a timely and prescient discussion of a political party, PAPPA, which wins control over all three branches of the representative constitutional republic of the planet Jefferson.

PAPPA, motivated by strong populist socialist ideology proceeds to disassemble the capitalist economy justifying each incursion as a response to a new crisis. In the end, the economy is destroyed and a major portion of the population is in open armed rebellion. Sonny, by historical accident, is on the wrong side.

That the book was published in 2004 precludes the possibility that they wrote it in response to the current lurch to the left we are experiencing under Barack Obama. But while reading “The Road to Damascus” one wonders which of the authors is the prophet.

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