The story of this man-made God, literally deus ex machina, includes an splendidly inventive take on the infamous Men in Black. These are the sinister variety, who haunted the dreams of a generation, long before Will Smith turned them into a joke. There are elements of The Matrix, with a dash of 1984, and a whole heap of fun stuff for those whose idea of a good time is pondering the imponderable. Machina is a novel for closet clever-dicks , couch philosophers, people estranged from organised religion, the disciples of intellectual heavyweights, and you'll be glad to know, those of us who just like to dip a metaphorical a toe in deep waters. The small cast include the wonderfully named Macmillan Trull, former Remote Viewer Delphina Hutchings, and an off-the-peg college dropout called Sinclair Stauffer. The story wavers about over a 30-year span, pulling together the author's thoughts on subjects such as quantum mechanics, string theory, Schroedinger's probability wave and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Machina, in the tradition of vastly expensive clandestine projects, doesn't turn out quite the way its creators envisaged. Indeed, the very existence of the American made mechanical God threatens the natural order of the universe!

Things get moving when Sinclair Stauffer hears a voice in his head, a voice that identifies itself as the Elder, and he thinks might be a dying God. At the same time, Delphina Hutchings has realised the big mistake she has made, and is on the run from Machina, seeking the one person who can defy the machine and reshape reality. Reality, and the way it is perceived, is the overall theme, which draws upon several religions and schools of philosophical thought. Although, the overview is non-denominational. God, appears as a character, but this is an unstable fading version of the deity, which the author uses to illustrate his intriguing theory of the cyclical nature of godhood. A notion which cleverly explains how various religions, throughout the span of human history, have managed to perceive vastly differing faces of the one God. The ideas set in motion meander from astonishing clarity, to rather clumsy inclusions which do nothing to advance the plot.

In summary, Machina is a cut above most speculative fiction. There are a few elements which could have been better, such as the character who becomes God failing to perceive an obvious human conspiracy. But nothing is ever perfect, and Jonathan Lyons got the benefit of my doubt with his captivating overview of what he calls the Great Ocean of Thought, and a wryly amusing vision of the universe remade.