>>By the way I am a Science Fiction enthusiast (NUT!). Rod Serling is my favorite! Card is good!
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>Card is quite good... but after a dozen of his books, it became like reading Agatha Christie - I started guessing what's coming next. In the end you see the main (or only) reason he's having a plot is to put his characters into position where they'll have to make tough moral choices. Not that he's actively trying to sell his Mormon beliefs, but it feels sneaky after a while. When the third Shadow book hit the library, I didn't bother to go past page 50 - no more surprises there for me.
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>I liked the Homecoming series, though, even though that's where his method became obvious, just because city of Basilica looked so good :). Too bad he couldn't make it last and had to reintroduce patriarchs again. And that's what I didn't like - as if humankind wouldn't know how to invent anything new after a dozen thousand years, but had to reinvent a patriarchal society.
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>>As for Erich Von Daniken, he was interesting. On one occasion he landed in Columbia and spent a few hours waiting for his airline connection. Von Daniken talked to a fellow in the lobby of the airport who gave him the basis for one of his books.
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>>Von Daniken claimed that he had stayed in Columbia for a good deal of time to confirm that the story he had heard and wrote was true. He wrote a story about his difficult trip through the jungles of Columbia. His “stay” would have taken several weeks due to the place that he had to have visited. His airline ticket and the records did not agree with his timetable.
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>His fake science just builds on his primary flaw - and that's the assumption that our ancestors were morons. The fact that we can't repeat their feats without today's technology makes us look stupid, not them. The only fault I find at previous generations is that they allowed for so many tricks to be forgotten. Probably because they had a more important cause, like killing each other.

lol! Well stated!