interest and influence overlap.

It changed how I looked at things and my perceptions of them. It also helped me begin to think about other-dimensional ideas.

In a way, that little book had an enormous impact on me and my intellect.

There is another science fiction book, the name of which I can't remember, that is about a planet with a very high gravity level, which makes everything living on that planet (or was it a neutron star) essentially two dimensional. They have an encounter with a spacecraft visiting the place. It's very interesting, in a similar way.

Took me back to my teens when you mentioned it.

Published in 1980. Here's a Wikipedia article about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg

that it was a neutron star. I remember thinking it was quite creative and thought-provoking.

I just realized that I couldn't have read Dragon's Egg as a teenager, since it was published in 1980. I was still reading science fiction then, though, but hard sci-fi had just about vanished and I had stopped reading much. "Dragon's Egg" gave me something in that genre to read again.

I had been thinking about a Heinlein story about bacteria and water organisms with consciousness evolving in a water planet once visited by humans who all died but created etched tablets and left them for guidance

Right wingers in power are bent on destroying democratic institutions. And they rely heavily upon racism and sexism in order to bring about their form of fascism. It's not much more complicated than that.

But that wasn’t my point I don’t think

You think that what has been uncovered is all there is to all of “this”?

But I think we already know the motive.

There’s a shitload of criminality out there. Motivations in order are money, sex, and power over others. Loads to go...