Christopher Pike Sati and Season of Passage

In Sati, Michael Winters picks up a female hitchhiker in the middle of the desert.  The hitchhiker's name is Sati, and Sati believes she is God.  Sati ends up staying with Michael, and she immediately captivates everyone who comes in contact with her.  Sati holds meetings, and soon she has a large number of followers.  But is Sati really God?

I did not enjoy this book very much when I read it around 25 years ago.  I don't care for it any more now than I did then.  The story is okay but not that great.  The problem is that the book is not horror but instead has a large amount of spiritual mumbo-jumbo.  Pike tends to lose me when he goes into his lengthy spiritual discussions.

In The Season of Passage, Lauren Wagner leaves on a mission for Mars.  The purpose of the mission is to discover what happened to the Russian mission that disappeared on Mars two years before.

When I read this book in 1995, I didn't notice anything off, but now, the story is dated.  The book is set in 2004, and the failed Russian mission was in 2002.  Everything mentioned in this book seemed logical by 1995 standards when I read the book in 1995.  Some events that occurred between 1995 and 2004 cause parts of this book to be impossible to take seriously.

For instance, the mission takes off in the space shuttle Columbia.  In 1995, one would have thought that Columbia would have still been in use in 2004, but as we know now, Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on February 1, 2003.  In retrospect, it would have been better for Pike to have used a fictional name, but who could have predicted that disaster?

The Mars part of the story is very creepy, suspenseful, and horrifying.  This is a true horror story.

I feel like one aspect of the ending was not wrapped up.  A character named Kathy has a sister who apparently came in contact with someone who has the Mars infection.  I guess she didn't get infected, but it's a gaping plot hole.

Another aspect that is tied in with Kathy's sister is also glossed over.  The infected person was said to be not interested in spreading the virus, so they didn't worry about finding and killing that person.  Um, okay...

This book has way too much expository information in the opening chapters.  That part of the book should have been shorter, and the ending part of the story should have been less rushed.  It's not logical to go after one infected person with great fervor and then just to assume that the other person will quietly go off and die without infecting anyone.  They shouldn't be unconcerned about the other person.

I figure that the entire human race becomes extinct shortly after the "happily ever after" conclusion of the story, since that other infected person is running amok somewhere.

This is an overall excellent story, but it is way too long.