Science Fiction

“The Man in the High Castle” – Pilot Episode
The Man in the High Castle - Amazon Studios

The Man in the High Castle – Amazon Studios

Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle is one of his best books, apparently having been written in less haste and under fewer drugs than some of his others. It’s an alternative history set in the US of a 1962 where the Axis powers won WWII and the pacifist US succumbed and is partitioned, with the West Coast ruled by the Japanese Empire and the East Coast under a Nazi puppet state a la Vichy France. But like all his books, much more is going on here than just an alternative history story; reality is slippery and no one is quite what they seem, and this history may not be real, either.

It is not really science fiction — there’s no scientific explanation for what is going on, or portals between multiverses, although some characters can “see” other realities in foggy San Francisco. The delicacy and ferocity of Japanese culture is examined, the I Ching functions as a kind of Greek chorus pronouncing on the plot, and there’s a shadowy author who has written a book describing a world where Roosevelt wasn’t assassinated and the Allies win the war. The author points out what all historians know — the conquerors are affected by the conquered and absorb some of their culture.

Most of Dick’s novels and stories have been made into movies by now:

Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty,[6] eleven popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau and Impostor. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.[7] In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

He is now seen as marketable by Hollywood financiers. His estate’s commercial success is a bit tragic, since he died largely unrecognized in 1982.

Now we have a miniseries of Man in the High Castle, partly produced by Ridley Scott (another magic name in Hollywood) and financed by Amazon Studios. I watched the pilot and highly recommend it for its high production values and good acting. Because the complexity of the novel would be hard for film viewers to follow, it’s been simplified a bit, but the essence of the novel appears intact. This is the kind of production SyFy would mount if it weren’t run by science fiction illiterates.

Watch the Pilot Episode at Amazon Prime Streaming

Review by Jim Henley

For more on pop culture:

“Game of Thrones” and the Problem of PowerThe Lessons of Walter White
“Blue Valentine”
“Mad Men”
The Morality of Glamour
“Mockingjay” Propaganda Posters
“Big Bang Theory” — Aspergers and Emotional/Social Intelligence
Real-Life “Hunger Games”: Soft Oppression Destroys the Poor
Reading “50 Shades of Grey” Gives You Anorexia and an Abusive Partner!
YA Dystopias vs Heinlein et al: Social Justice Warriors Strike Again
“Raising Arizona” — Dream of a Family
Coen Brothers: 30 Years of Great Movies

“Red Queen”: UK Amazon Review, 5 Stars
Red Queen: The Substrate Wars

Red Queen: The Substrate Wars

One of the odd things about Amazon’s Anglophone sites is a kind of review imperialism; for example, the UK’s site features UK customer reviews, then includes US reviews separately, for the good reason that there aren’t enough UK reviews for most books to be useful. But on the US site, UK customer reviews aren’t visible. Why? Because of individual country laws, the sites are separate, but all English-language reviews should be equally useful and visible. Ditto for Australia and Canada, and even India; and on those other country sites, there’s much less reason to write a review, because it will be seen by far fewer people.

So while I’m happy to see this nice review come in over at the UK site, the US customers won’t see it!

5 out of 5 stars
A frightening view of what could already be happening
By Mr. Victor Botterill on 12 Jan. 2015

This is a fast moving book and it took me a while to tune into the characters. However, they are all very different and because a variety of opinions are expressed, it means that the central message behind a straightforward plot soon begins to emerge. The story literally starts with a bang.

Like all good science fiction there is an inbuilt theme which reflects the society we are living in and what could in fact happen in the future. Try to explain the story to someone else and it would sound far fetched, but clever “technical” descriptions of the physics and technology involved makes reading the tale believable. This book ends where another story will begin.

The Notes on Politics at the end are very useful and although the action is set in America, it is apparent as you read these notes that they accurately reflect what is already happening in the United Kingdom. This is a real wake-up call. Thoroughly recommended, though you may find it difficult to put down.

5 Minutes with Jeb Kinnison
Red Queen: The Substrate Wars

Red Queen: The Substrate Wars

[An interview prepared for Chris Pavesic’s literary blog.]

This is a chance to learn a bit more about Jeb Kinnison, whose novel Red Queen: The Substrate Wars, was published in December 2014.

About the Author

I started writing when I took writing classes at MIT and Harvard, then worked with a writing group in Cambridge. After receiving rejection notices from some of the top magazines of the day (e.g., The New Yorker), I focused on my career in computer science and financial management – because paying the rent was important. I have returned to writing in retirement.

What I love most about writing is the creation of a new world, and the unexpected things your characters do after you’ve created them. It sounds trite, but they have their own ideas about what they should do, and it helps to be a little bit schizophrenic yourself so that they can exist as subprocesses in your head.

The toughest thing about writing is re-entering the real world after an extended period of living inside a fictional one. I cut myself off from most social activities to get the story out, so I can write a novel in three months but lose track of friends and family a bit. It’s hard to make small talk when the fate of the (fictional) world hangs in the balance!

The writer I most admire? That’s tough because different writers have different goals. If your goal is highly accessible and entertaining stories, J. K. Rowling wins the prize for our age. For extremely adult, intricate fiction of ideas that is also full of humor and fascinating characters (some of them spaceship AIs!), I’d have to pick the late Iain Banks.

My fiction is informed by my diverse background and multiple careers. I went to MIT and dropped out of a Ph.D. computer science program; I was a researcher at a famous think tank (Bolt Beranek and Newman) where the ‘@’ for email addresses was invented and half the work of designing the early Internet was done down the hall; worked at the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena for a summer writing up oil spills, earthquakes, and volcanos; did IT work for Electromagnetic Launch Research, which built the first practical railguns; developed a subdivision in British Columbia, which involved working with logging crews, pipelayers, and roadbuilders; was chief writer for a political campaign that failed; managed the family office for a Stanford professor and managed about a quarter of a billion dollars of his assets; wrote two popular books on attachment theory and its application to mate seeking and marriage.

Favorite Novels: Aside from Iain Banks and J. K. Rowling, I should mention Robert Heinlein as a strong influence, especially his juveniles, which were almost pure adolescent wish-fulfillment; e.g., Citizen of the Galaxy (where a poor slave boy finds his way to outer space, then discovers he must take his place as a long-lost heir with barely enough time to crack a ring of slavers being run by his own family’s companies.)

Favorite Movies: Magnolia, for its emotional honesty; Blade Runner; almost all Coen Bros. movies; and more recently, I approve of the Star Trek reboot by J. J. Abrams no matter what purists think!

Favorite Foods: I live on a simple, healthy, and most of all efficient diet of canned salmon from Costco, yogurts, vegetables, nuts, and chicken. The goal is to eat tasty, healthy, low-carb food without spending any more time than I have to preparing and cleaning up, so I can get back to work quickly.

Advice to aspiring authors: Keep writing. If your Plan B career is lucrative, specialize in that like I did, so you can save up enough money to go full-time later. While there are many young prodigies who write well, most lack the life experience needed to give their characters depth and diversity. As you get older your palette expands, and your fiction grows richer; so if you can’t live on fiction writing when you’re 21, do something else until you can, and you will have lost none of your abilities and gained much. You can also do nonfiction writing in your specialty to sharpen up skills before taking up fiction.

RED QUEEN: The Substrate Wars is a science fiction thriller set in the US of a not-too-distant future, when the Bill of Rights is ignored and the US is run by the Unity Party, combining the worst of Democrats and Republicans.

Red Queen is a story about young people searching for freedom and agency in a world dominated by bureaucrats, administrators, and propagandists. The world of Red Queen is a police state with its roots in today’s events: post-9/11 warrantless physical and electronic surveillance; the erosion of personal liberties for supposed security reasons, even when the government’s actions are shown to be ineffective or wrongheaded; and the rise of a penal-industrial complex that imprisons one in three black men, often for victimless crimes. When the next terrorist action occurs, there may be calls for even more restrictions on freedom and privacy. That’s where Red Queen begins.

Jeb Kinnison: The Long Bio
Jeb Kinnison’s Amazon author page

“Red Queen”: IndieReader Review, 4.5 Stars

Red Queen: The Substrate Wars

By Jeb Kinnison

star star star star star

IR Verdict: RED QUEEN is a tempered look at politics and science in the near future. It is a coming of age novel where the characters reach out beyond the safety of their university to take back their right to self-determination.

 Jan 07, 2015

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“The idea of freedom and the right to self-determination are explored throughout the book as the students seek a refuge from the ubiquitous spying from Homeland Security.”

IR Sticker IR ApprovedAs a new school year ramps up on campus, Justin Smith began another day at the Artificial Life lab running ALife simulations on human evolution. The lab was a sanctuary from the political divisiveness on campus and, for that matter, across the nation. A nuclear terrorist attack in New York City some years ago resulted in a government crackdown on dissent as well as a depressed economy where educational grants were drying up except for those labs who “cooperated” with the government. However, Justin’s lab was soon to transform itself from a sanctuary to the center of resistance to the government. This transformation came about when another graduate student, Steve Duong, was investigating an anomaly in his quantum computer research that led to a discovery of a computer program so powerful that it could be weaponized,  tilting the balance of power even further into the hands of an already repressive government. The race to keep this mega weapon out of government hands leads Justin, Steve and a small cadre of students to secure the weapon and fight for their freedom from a tyrannical Dept. of Homeland Security.

RED QUEEN is the first book in The Substrate Wars series. On the surface, it is a tale of insurrection against a government that believes that the ends justify the means. Where this plot diverges from other of this type is that the government is not a fascist state nor the result of a coup but a duly elected government that uses the terrorist attack to stifle dissent and maintain order according to their politically correct philosophy. The prologue begins with a quote from Robert Heinlein, “There is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency”. This quote from 1950 eerily foreshadows life in the United States in the immediate future where there is only one political party with true power. The idea of freedom and the right to self-determination are explored throughout the book as the students seek a refuge from the ubiquitous spying from Homeland Security. The plot occasionally bogs down when discussing the physics behind quantum computing. The author attempts to work through this with footnotes and an appendix with “notes” on politics and science that are somewhat long and a bit too academic for this type of story. These are only minor drawbacks to an engrossing book about life in the near future that is neither perfect nor dystopian.

RED QUEEN is a tempered look at politics and science in the near future. It is a coming of age novel where the characters reach out beyond the safety of their university to take back their right to self-determination.

~IndieReader.

– See more at: http://indiereader.com/2015/01/red-queen-substrate-wars/#sthash.82mzEoWj.dpuf