Readers of my books will hardly need reminding that that planetary mother was called TIAMAT in the Sumerian Epic of Creation - a text deemed by scholars to be an allegory, a myth, a religious text -- but treated by me in The 12th Planet and Genesis Revisited as a sophisticated cosmogony dealing with the creation of our Solar System and the fate of Tiamat, a watery planet that had existed in the space between Mars and Jupiter and was destroyed in a celestial collision with an Invader-planet (Nibiru). As a result of the collision:

• Half of Tiamat was smashed to bits and pieces to become the asteroids and shortterm comets that orbit between Mars and Jupiter;

• The other half was thrust closer to the Sun to become planet Earth;

• The leading large satellite of Tiamat (“Kingu”) was carried along to become Earth’s Moon;

• Tiamat’s other ten satellites were broken up to become comets, especially those with retrograde orbits.

Clearly, Sitchin is a smart man. He weaves a complicated tale from the bits and pieces of evidence that survive from ancient Sumeria to the present day. Just as clearly, Sitchin is capable of academic transgressions (fracturing quotes, ignoring dissenting facts), theft of intellectual property (those tables he copied) and flights of intellectual fancy (the whole book, really). Worst of all, he is almost utterly innocent of astronomy and other assorted fields of modern science.

He nevertheless paints a picture that is very attractive. One wants to believe it, for it explains so many things. Intellectual honesty, however, prevents anyone with common sense, access to archeological and astronomical data and the ability to read from taking his book seriously. In the end, he's just another nut making a living selling books that treat folks to a tale they want to believe in.