Divinity

A petty criminal flees Earth in a stolen spaceship and crash-lands on an alien world where he's mistaken for a deity. That's the setup for Joseph Samachson's oddly moving 1950s sci-fi fable. Bradley knows he's a fraud, a coward running from his past, not a god. But the natives see divinity in him anyway, and he takes advantage of their worship, wearing a helmet to maintain the illusion. Yet something unexpected happens on this strange planet: the lies start becoming truth. As external threats close in and his secret threatens to unravel, Bradley must choose between maintaining the comfortable fiction or stepping into the responsibility he's been pretending to embody. It's a small, thoughtful novel about identity, self-deception, and the possibility that we can become better than our origins.