Michael Knowles

Yes, that's right.

There's a part that really struck me too.

I think it's I-330 who says this, you know, the little vixen who's leading him into the rebel alliance.

They're referring to Mephi, it's the name of the rebel alliance.

And she says, Mephi, it's an old name.

It's one who, you remember there on the stone, there was an image of youth.

Oh no, look, there are two forces in the world, entropy and energy.

One of them leads to blissful tranquility, to happy equilibrium.

The other leads to the disruption of equilibrium, to the torment of perpetual movement,

bothering him in his imagination and soul.

Our, or rather your ancestors, the Christians, worshipped entropy as they worshipped God.

But we, anti-Christians, we, and then there's a

She, who is the representative of the rebels trying to overthrow the tyranny, she's saying, we're anti-Christians.

You guys come from Christianity.

Your totalitarian state is actually a derivation of Christianity, which I think is going to strike readers as very shocking.

We think of Christianity as the opposition to tyranny, but here the rebel is

in a book written by a former Bolshevik in the context of 1920s Russia, is saying, no, actually the tyranny is coming out of Christianity and the independence and the freedom.

That's in opposition maybe to modern rationalism, but also to Christianity, which I don't like very much.

When I'm finally clued into the fact that the Rebel Alliance is anti-Christian in their own words, now I say, hold on, now I need to approach the book a little differently.

I need more of a contrarian perspective.