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I first became familiar with Robert Zubrin through the Mars Direct plan, advanced in his 1992 The Case for Mars, which would see a highly economical spacecraft travel to Mars where crew members would live and work for a year and a half, this extended stay and the return flight enabled by the exploitation of Martian resources in situ. As someone on my friends list who reviewed the book said (and my apologies if I've got the phrasing wrong), the plan seems to be approximately technically correct but really doesn't supply a convincing reason as to why someone would like to travel to Mars, never mind (as Zubrin suggests) colonize it. Still, it was an entertaining enough read when I picked it up as a teenager.

I picked up Zubrin's latest book, Energy Victory, with similar hopes. Most of the chapters were inspired by the reasonably informed technolibertarianism that I'd expected, although Zubrin did seem to be upset about hydrogen fuels and electric cars, did seem to be strongly in support of ethanol, and did make references the the profits earned by states like Saudi Arabia without investments in human capital. It was only when I neared the end that things took a decidedly odd turn, as Zubrin began talking about how developing alternative fuels was essential for the West because the Muslim East and its ideologies and religion failed to nurture individualism and freedom nearly as fully in the Judeo-Chrstrian West and how this belief system oppositional to us incorporates Baal and Marduk and how we're facing--in Islam as a whole or in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, I honestly got confused at this point--must defeat by these malign forces by developing alternative fuels so as to deprive fundamentalists of money and--

I don't go looking for this kind of stuff. Really. All I was looking for in Energy Victory was a mildly provocative book-length treatise on energy futures directed towards a popular audience. This kind of conspiracy-theory geopolitics really is everywhere.