prot (in all lowercase letters) claims to be an alien from the PLANET K-PAX in the constelation LYRA. He says he travelled to EARTH on a beam of light, and has toured pretty much all of it, even Antarctica. When he winds up in dr. gene brewer's phychiatric hospital, almost all the patients believe his story. But the psychiatrist is determined to find out what has caused his amnsesia, and who prot really is.

There is so much evidence to prove that prot is just a secondary personality developed to cope with the many hardships of his difficult life. At the same time, there is just as much evidence to prove that prot is really from the PLANET K-PAX.

I am still unsure if this is completely fiction, or if the events really happened. The forward in the front of the book suggests that this is a true story, but as I said, it is hard to tell.

Confused. It also provided a basis for deep thought, since it pointed out so many human problems, and ways to fix it. For example, instead of incarcerating criminals, one simply avoids them in the rest of the UNIVERSE. Also, in creating energy, the K-PAXians have two types of power plants: one which produces the primary power supply, and the other which counteracts the heat produced by the powerplant, so as not to change the climate with heating and/or cooling pollution.

explains everything really well. In some sci-fi books, such as Contact, you almost need to have knowledge of astrophysics, mathematics, etc. to understand portions of it. But gene brewer explains everything very well, so no one has to be a nuclear physisist to understand. The same goes for the psychological descriptions: no one needs to have any background knowledge of the field to understand. However, the vocabulary tends to go above the average american's sixth-grade reading level, so be prepared.

Everyone has probably seen the movie, but read the book. It is so much better.

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Created May 15, 2003 at 6:34pm • Submit your own review...