You are correct Freedom, it is the Apple/Google thing, but I think he also pulled the plug on the Kindle "all you can eat" program as well for the same reason. They seemed to have lowered the fees paid to authors, for unlimited use of their material.

His series got mostly good reviews on Audible and Downpour. Most people complained about the short length (they are 8-10 hour audio books, 100-110K word books) and the second one was deemed as unnecessary. I found you did need to listen to all of them to get all the stuff going on, but I interpreted it as sort of a "Star Trek with different names" type storyline. You have a young brash captain, thrown into command, a logical and analytical XO (complete with emotional detachment), a Russian (not Scot) engineer who can fix anything, and it moves planet to planet with the usual misadventures. I would rate it at a 7-8 on a 1-10 scale, and it seems to get better as you go along. The premise is pretty good, if not standard fare, but RB seems to be growing into the writing role with each book. It is projected to be a series of 75 books, in 3 story arcs, covering a 100 year span. He is at book 14 I think in the first 25 book arc. I would recommend it as a Sci Fi series, but you may also want to look into H.Paul Honsingers "Man of War" series. He does a better job with characters and suspenseful interest, and his bad guys are giant rats who just happen to match human DNA to 98% due to some long ago alien intervention, who are really pissed about it and want to wipe out humanity for it. Much more fun and great, well thought out science to it.

xthinker, you may be right in that interpretation, Mike could do the miracles he propounded to do, which was why they offed him (which they really didn't). I think RAH was trying to say on several levels that he believed that there were more things we do not understand about the universe, and have a habit of then writing off to a mystical god being, and his Mike was just the vehicle to show how even when given a gift of the ability to "grok" things to a point were you understood their essence. Unfortunately, he did not believe we could be mature enough to handle such power, and that people will screw it up anyways just to able to be unhappy. Mike offered man a huge benefit that most rejected because of prejudice and greed. His "religion" was a scam in the sense that it was framed as one, when in reality, there was no god, no other being, that you had to hope would be nice to you. You could be nice to yourself. Since you are God. I would think it was an Objectivist view is many ways.

That was the Fosterites, the group Mike absconds with.