The Man in the High Castle

Or as I sometimes like to call it, “High in the Man Castle”.   Season 4, its final season, ended recently on Amazon Prime, and I wondered if I’d actually reviewed it in my blogs.  Answer: yes – the Phillip K. Dick novel, written in 1962, which I addressed briefly in blogs on Dick himself (11/12/2010) and alternate history novels in which Germany won WWII (5/27/2010).  The Amazon series debuted in January 2015, well after these blogs were written.  Moreover, even when it did premiere, it was by no means obvious that there would be more than one season.  It was expensive, with high production values, Amazon’s first shot at producing its own material, so there was no guarantee they’d continue it.   In fact, season 1 itself corresponds to the novel, meaning that to produce subsequent seasons, they would have to write new material.   Fortunately for us, they did, and I’ll comment on that below.

Making History.  Here is another one, written by actor Stephen Fry, which I hadn’t reviewed earlier – probably because I hadn’t read it.  

An obvious question anyone would have is:  HOW did the Nazis win WWII in “Man in the High Castle”?   The narrative shows that somehow the Nazis managed to develop nuclear weapons and destroy Washington, DC.   So why didn’t they do that in real life?

Well, because the top nuclear physicists at the time were Jewish, and the Nazis had a problem (!) with Jews.   The Final Solution – the deliberate policy of murdering Europe’s Jews in extermination camps in Poland – only started in 1942, well after the war was underway.  Before that, and in the years leading up to September 1, 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland, Jews were free to leave Germany, ostensibly with the Nazis’ blessing.  In particular, the US was happy to welcome any particularly smart Jews like Einstein.  Bottom line was that we had all the scientists who knew how to develop nukes, and the Nazis didn’t.

In this story, Hitler’s hometown well was dosed with birth control pills and he was never born, so another German, a particularly shrewd officer, developed the Nazi Party and became the Fuhrer.  This man, Rudolf Gloder, was smart enough to keep his anti-Semitism a secret, so Germany’s Jews helped the Nazis win WWII.   Then, having successfully defeated everyone, Gloder proceeded to wipe out the Jews in Yugoslavia with no interference from the Allies or Russians.

None of that happened in “Man in the High Castle”, so Dick never quite managed to explain how the Nazis succeeded at developing nuclear weapons.

As noted, season 1 corresponds to the Dick novel.   Seasons 2, 3, and 4 plunge forward into uncharted territory, and the show ends with Episode 10 of season 4.  I don’t have the patience or the inclination to exhaustively map out all four seasons.   I actually watched E10 of S1, 2, and 3 to refresh what happened in those seasons, as season 4 is still fresh in my mind.

Situation.    The US is divided into three sections.   The East Coast, as far west as the Midwest, is under Nazi control.  Washington, DC is a nuclear wasteland, and the country’s capital is in New York City.  The Japanese control the West Coast, with San Francisco being its capital.   The area of the Rockies is a neutral territory evidently under no one’s control, home to a modest population of hipsters.

Major Characters.

Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith (Rufus Sewell).   A former US Army officer who fought in the Pacific, Smith is the head of Nazi Germany’s American sector.  In Season 4 we see how, upon the Nazis’ victory, former US officers were offered the chance to join the Nazis – the alternative being imprisonment or death.   For much of the series he’s actually somewhat enthusiastic, but as the series wears on he’s less so, as is his wife, Helen.   He actually manages to switch over into the “US won” dimension and see his alternate wife and son – and the latter volunteers for service in Vietnam.   To make matters even stranger, his alternate family lives in “Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia” – literally exactly where I live.  Of course, in that dimension, Washington DC is alive and well, as are its suburbs like Northern Virginia.

As a former US officer, Smith’s loyalty frequently comes into question by Germans, particularly Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, though Adolf Hitler himself – aging with grey hair – still trusts him. 

By the way;  Mengele shows up as a scientist at the Nazis’ dimension portal.  J. Edgar Hoover is here to make sure Americans remain loyal to the Reich.   

Inspector Kido (Joel de la Fuente).   The ruthless inspector from the Kempetai, Japan’s version of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo.   Based in San Francisco, he travels around considerably, and even meets Smith – ostensibly they were enemies in the war though they didn’t actually meet face to face in combat.  The show gives him a remarkable degree of sympathy for a character who would otherwise be a villain.

Trade Minister Nagomi (Cary-Hiruyoki Tagawa).  The true hero on the Japanese side.  He also discovers the alternate dimension – the finale of S1 finds him in a San Francisco with ads by Ronald Reagan and news reports of President Kennedy.   In the alternate dimension his personal life turns out considerably different. 

Robert Childan (Brennan Brown).   An antiques dealer in San Francisco, he speaks fluent Japanese, and is somewhat of a collaborator.  Somehow he manages to keep himself in one piece, through means he himself might admit are questionable. 

Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos).   Competing with Smith as the lead character in the series.  She starts out in San Francisco but travels all around – and is one of the few characters capable of switching dimensions without the Nazis’ complex machine in a former mine shaft in Lackawanna, Pennsylvania. 

Hawthorne Abendsen (Stephen Root).  The Man in the High Castle himself.   He has these films of Allied victory which Crain and others recognize are not forgeries, but actual footage of the alternative dimensions.  By season 4 he’s captured by the Nazis and forced to shill for them – though even then he hides messages in his propaganda.   It turns out that his wife, Caroline, only hooks up with him in this timeline, in all the others they never meet.  He has an intriguing conversation with Smith in S3/E10.

Frank Frink (Rupert Evans).   A major character in S1 (and the book) who becomes less significant as the series wears on, he’s nominally Juliana’s boyfriend.    He’s a craftsman who creates “relics” for Childan to sell to Japanese customers looking for obscure and arcane Americana, but he’s also involved in the resistance against the Japanese, which puts him at odds with Kido. 

Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank).   Vying with Frank for Juliana’s affections, we learn where Joe came from originally.   He varies from being a strong character in his own right to being a mere pawn. 

The Resistance.   Naturally not everyone drinks the Nazi Kool-Aid.   There’s a considerable resistance in Japanese territory and in the Greater Reich, supposedly using the neutral territory as an effective sanctuary. 

By Season 4 we see a Black Communist Rebellion using AK47s, supplied by the Chinese and Soviets.  Which is odd, though, as China is controlled by Japan and Soviet Russia was defeated by the Nazis.   To explain this, some Japanese characters refer to rebellions in China and elsewhere in the Japanese empire which induce the Japanese to scale back.  Likewise, presumably the Germans lack the resources or manpower to control all of Russia, so the vast expanses of territory between the Urals and Manchuria provide ample hiding places for a combined Russian-Chinese communist rebellion.  In real life, Stalin moved much of the USSR’s factories east of the Urals, and the Nazis never intended to control Russia in its entirety even if they managed to take Moscow and defeat Stalin.  And militarily, while nuclear weapons are highly effective against sovereign nations with major metropolitan areas, they would be useless against a guerilla army which melts into the countryside across the country.  So this element of the narrative isn’t entirely implausible.

Alternate Timelines.  Dick never quite explained that part of it, at least not to my satisfaction.  For their part, the Nazis discover this, but it remains a closely held secret among the characters.  Once the Nazis do discover it, they develop a portal, with the ultimate goal of stealing as much technology they can from other timelines and then using that to invade and conquer those in which they didn't win WWII.  Not an optimal outcome, and the Resistance, by the end of Season 4, sets upon the task of destroying the portal.  Stay tuned.  

As you might imagine, the most notable achievements of the series was continuing the narrative past season 1, past the original story.   That took considerable imagination and a truly inspired writing staff.  I’m aware that not everyone is impressed with how it ended, but given how far they took it from Dick’s source material, they did well to give us three seasons more, so I’m inclined to cut them slack on that.  It had to end sometime, and it was going to be an ending which Dick didn’t provide them.   

Nazi America.   The other major achievement was portraying the US under Nazi control.   A US flag with a white swastika in the upper left quadrant where the 50 states’ stars would be.   Armbands with red and white stripes.   Propaganda cleverly mixing US culture with Nazi ideology.   Even “Reichgiving”, combining our Thanksgiving holiday with Nazi ideology.   Amazing.   [Credit Hugo Boss with the uniforms, by the way.]

Nazis in 1962.   Finally, they also extend things into the 60s.   The German combat uniforms have a splinter pattern closer to the East German army (NVA), although the helmets remain the 1935 pattern.  German soldiers carry H&K assault rifles similar to the Bundeswehr.   Ceremonial guards in Berlin still have the famous black SS uniforms.  SS insignia is not merely ubiquitous but also authentic: they got all the various rank patches right, from privates, NCOs, junior officers, up to Himmler himself.  Berlin is the metropolis Hitler always wanted.  Joe Blake visits Berlin and is invited to a party of hipster artists who introduce him to LSD - imagine hits of acid with swastikas on them.  

The Nazis are an evil, totalitarian dictatorship and ideology at its most seductive and irresistible.  The Swastika is simple yet dramatic, and can be incorporated in all sorts of ways, as the show illustrates, even into traditional American imagery.   The Man in the High Castle gives us the ultimate depiction of Nazi America.    

BladeRunner

Recently I caught the long-awaited sequel to 1982’s “Bladerunner”, thankfully including Harrison Ford back as Deckard, though by now long-retired from the replicant-retiring business.  I’ll try to avoid spoilers for those of you who haven’t yet seen the new film and intend to see it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  The original Philip K. Dick story.  Mostly identical in plot to the movie, but the book has several elements missing from the movie: this whole business of robot animals (real animals are so rare as to be priceless, and even synthetic animals are valuable enough that a catalog of values – like the Blue Book – exists with regard to them) and Mercerism.  I should re-read it again, now that I’ve finally finished reading all of PKD’s scifi novels.

Original.  Ford stars as Deckard, an LAPD cop whose job it is to take out rogue replicants.  Apparently the replicants off-world achieved self-awareness and returned to earth, hiding out among humans.  The most deadly are Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Daryl Hannah).  Roy in particular is trying to find out from Tyrell, who originally designed them, if there is a way around their hard-wired life span.   Note: if Deckard could simply keep these two away from everyone else, they would expire on their own.  But how exciting would that be?

Sequel.   It’s thirty years later and a new replicant (Ryan Gosling) is trying to track down rogue older models, none of whom resemble Rutger Hauer or Darryl Hannah.  Clare Underwood is his boss.  He even has a virtual GF who keeps him company in his apartment.  Tyrell Corp is gone, replaced by Wallace (let’s see Neil Fallon wear that on a t-shirt at the next Clutch tour), led by an equally enigmatic CEO (Jared Leto).   In this particular case, what he’s got on his hands is evidence that Rachael, the replicant originally played by Sean Young in the first film, had a child – theoretically impossible for a replicant.  Who would design a female replicant with a uterus, ovaries, etc. and allow it to actually conceive a child?  Then again, Tyrell indicated that Rachael was different.  So it would seem...

Overall I’d say it’s a good sequel.  Gosling’s replicant is sympathetic.  Deckard is back - and just as crusty and badass as you would expect him to be 30 years later.  Lots of action and wastelands.  Pretty much what we’d want from a sequel.  Thank you, Denis Villaneuve (director of “Arrival”), for not messing around.  He did his job properly and didn’t let his ego turn this into something stupid. 

*

Here’s an issue loosely raised by both films.  Some people believe that Deckard is actually a replicant.  That theory should be conclusively shot down as he appears in this film taking place 30 years later.  Mind you, Dick himself addressed this issue during his lifetime and confirmed that Deckard is human after all.  Ford said the same, and only Ridley Scott advocates this – plus useful idiots on Facebook who love to cling to provocative but stupid ideas.

Humans have to eat, sleep, pee, poo, vomit, get sick, age, and die.  Female humans have menstrual cycles and give birth.  A replicant doesn’t have to do any of that and – unless programmed otherwise as the original series was in the first film and PKD’s book – effectively have eternal youth.  So for a replicant to truly emulate a human, it would have to be programmed to do all these things.   A huge pain in the ass for what?   

Moreover, the original series was expressly designed as workers.   You created robots so you couldn’t have to hire unreliable humans.  Why create unreliable replicants?  That makes no sense.  Moreover, K (Gosling) appears to have self-awareness:  he knows he’s a replicant.  Logical, as Roy and Pris (Hauer and Hannah) did too.  If I were a replicant, I’d be happy that I don’t have to eat, drink, pee, poo, get sick, and eventually age and die.  If I ever got tired of living, I could just kill myself.  Well, so long as I wasn't hardwired to die...

Can we combine the two?  Remember “Robocop II” where the bad guy was created by removing his brain & nervous system and implanting them into a robot.  The prior two specimens went nuts and killed themselves, as turning into a full-on robot was too nuts.  But how about implanting them into an expressly humanoid and/or replicant body?  Get working, people. 

Then take opposite scenario:  a replicant who is really human.  Huh?  The replicant wouldn’t need to sleep, eat, pee/poo, etc. any biological functions.  How would a human survive without doing all these things?  Unless some dumbass was creating replicants which did all this stuff, the sole purpose of which would be to pass them off as humans.  WHY? 

Bottom line is that anyone/thing expressly identified as human is 99.999% likely to be human, and anything expressly identified as a replicant is 99.999% likely to be a replicant.  

Harry Harrison

Blog time came up and I realized I’d never covered this particular author, who deserves more attention than he gets:  Harry Harrison.

Ross.  This story has a beginning.  For those of you who don’t care, fast forward.  For the rest of you, listen…

Back in the 1880s, I went to college at the University of Maryland, College Park.  After freshman year, spring of 1887, we received a letter from Resident Life asking if we wanted to move to a nice newer dorm in the South Hill neighborhood of College Park Shire.   We readily responded, “Indeed!”  Therefore, upon returning to the campus in late August 1887, to start my sophomore year, I found my new home. 

Soon I sought out my comrade Baron, who had been living in a double in Wicomico Hall, in the slightly less upscale North Hill neighborhood.  It turns out his upgrade was not as fancy:  to a single in the front T section on the top floor.   I visited him often.  The Resident Adviors (RAs) in this dorm wouldn’t blink if they saw a sophomore with a beer. 

At the end of his hall was Ross.   Ross was cool.  (1)  He went to high school with half of Delta Sigma Phi, so we got to hang out with his frat buddies there.  (2) VERY IMPORTANT:  He knew the Scorpions had been around longer than Matthias Jabs had been in the band, and clued me into Fly To The Rainbow, which he had on vinyl.   Ken alerted me to Lonesome Crow, and another adventure began.  (3) He told me about Harry Harrison, a sci-fi author from the US.

HH started writing in the early 1960s.  He started from a Heinlein baseline and added some Philip K. Dick -type irreverence, though not going nearly as far in the TOTALLY F’IN WEIRD department as PKD does – then again, no one short of Cixin Liu (The Three Body Problem) has managed that.

He was well-liked by fellow sci-fi authors and is somewhat of a cult figure in Russia – the latest SSR stories are only in Russian.  Politically he was quasi-libertarian and atheist. 

Stainless Steel Rat.   If there’s a #1 character associated with Harrison, it’s the Stainless Steel Rat.  He’s a thief in the future, who has to survive amidst a technically advanced society with all sorts of sophisticated surveillance.   Just as the rats of the Middle Ages crawled amidst the sewers and wood, the rat of the future has to survive amidst stainless steel.  The SSR, James DiGriz, justifies his livelihood by explaining that he steals from big companies which have theft insurance, so it’s all covered.   I’ve read several of the stories and found him modestly sympathetic and entertaining.  Given how much I enjoy his writing even now (recently finished Make Room) I should probably revisit these.   This guy wound up as a character in the British sci-fi comic magazine 2000AD, best known as the source for Judge Dredd. 

Bill the Galactic Hero.   This started as a spoof on Starship Troopers and continued.  It’s modestly entertaining.

Deathworld.   Bad ass planet where literally everything will kill you instantly – every life form and even the plants hate your guts.  Aside from that I can’t recall much about it.

Those are the series.  He has a few one-off books which are good:

The Technicolor Time Machine.  A movie studio has a limited budget and a tight schedule BUT they have a killer secret weapon: a real time machine.  This lets them shoot their Viking epic ON LOCATION, not merely geographically but also temporally.  They pay the main Viking dude in whiskey, which the Vikings never had.  The time machine also lets them essentially do the entire movie in 5 minutes.  It’s very clever.

A Transatlantic Tunnel! Hurrah!   A Steampunk story about an alternate world in which the Brits won the Revolutionary War.  Washington’s distant descendent is a top notch engineer, and he successfully orchestrates construction of a transatlantic tunnel from England to the colonies.   Pretty fun.

Make Room!  Make Room!   The most recent one I read.  This was written in the mid-60s and takes place in NYC in our own time.  Food is scarce.  The weather is hot.   Aside from that, not much happens.  They claim it forms the basis for “Soylent Green”, the sci-fi horror movie with Charlton Heston, but having seen that one and read this from cover to cover, I’d say the connection is practically nil.  That would be the only film adaptation of any of his stories.

The Three Body Problem Trilogy

A few months ago, Reason Magazine reviewed a remarkable new work of science fiction, The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, and translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Ken Liu.  The premise is that we are not alone:  another advanced civilization, approximately 4 light years away from us, needs help.  With one sun, we’re OK.  Even a binary star system would be stable.  But three suns – the three bodies – is inherently unstable.  The aliens of Trisolaris, as they end up being called, need a better place to live.

The catch is, while they might prefer to take our planet and enjoy the stability of our sun, don’t expect them to share.  Nope, it means GAME OVER for us here on Earth.  Or does it? 

Fortunately for the narrative, we manage to develop hibernation technology, so many major characters can survive for several centuries.  Unfortunately for us, the Trisolarans have much better technology which they’re not inclined to share with us.  Much of the story is a back-and-forth of conflict, negotiation, cooperation, and disputes between the two. 

Not only that, there are still MORE civilizations out there.  And you can bet – you can assume – they are irredeemably hostile to us.  Indeed, they consider us to be cockroaches to be squished out of existence without a second thought.   That is, if they ever learn of our existence….

“Trilogy” means that the fun and excitement of The Three Body Problem continues in The Dark Forest (book 2 of the trilogy) and finally Death’s End (book three).   Thanks to the aforementioned hibernation technology, many of the same characters continue over the centuries.

This being a Chinese story, most of the characters are Chinese.  Of the non-Chinese characters, there are quite a few important ones, but they are tangential.  Does it compromise the story?  Not at all, mainly because it’s been translated into English – with a few footnotes as necessary.  Given the scale and scope of the story, the specific nationalities are not really important.  When the entire human race faces extinction – in fact, the entire Solar System - why do we care what our passports say?

Many of us take psychoactive drugs.  Many of us don’t.  Of those who don’t, and who know those who do, we are content to enjoy their experiences vicariously.  Many of these experiences are captured in musical form, such as Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Hawkwind, and other such psychedelic bands.  Actually, virtual reality looks like the best way these days to do so, but I haven’t seen it reach that point yet.  In written form, it’s often comic books (e.g. Dr. Strange, which was my favorite) or science fiction.  Up until now, I considered Philip K. Dick to be the strangest, most psychedelic of the science fiction authors.  Indeed, LSD and other drugs were common elements of his stories.   But PKD now has a major competitor, a worthy heir, in the form of Cixin Liu.  While the first two books are certainly strange, it’s the third book (Death’s End) where things get extremely strange.  If it’s possible to actually trip on a book, this comes as close as you can to that.  On the other hand, PKD includes some pretty twisted humor and sarcasm, which are absent here.  But the two are mutually complimentary rather than exclusive.

By the way, The Three Body Problem is being made into a movie, in China.  It’s due to be released in 3D, sometime in 2017.  If anyone sees the trailer, please let me know.

Robert A Heinlein

Lately I’ve been alternating between Robert A. Heinlein (hereinafter, “RAH”) and Philip K. Dick (hereinafter, “PKD”).   I downloaded their respective bibliographies and have been reading them in order of writing or publication, although I’ve already read their more popular and mainstream books.   Since I’ve already written on PKD, I’ll cover RAH now, a topic long overdue.

RAH, born 1909, died 1988, started out as a Navy engineer (USNA Class of 1929) and later turned into a science fiction writer.  Scientists and geeks love his material because he has a very strong basis in sound science and made a strong effort to make his sci-fi technology as plausible as he could. 

Early.  His earlier material, the novels Rocket Ship Galileo through Methuselah’s Children, could be described as “space cadet” fiction.  The protagonist is often a young man with ambitions of being a space pilot.   He encounters problems, adversity, and danger, but always seems to defeat these obstacles by determination, skill, intelligence, and some luck.  Romance is a non-issue, with girls and women being baggage.   Uppity women complain that the spaceship lacks the luxuries and amenities they enjoyed on Earth and somehow expect to find on a spaceship, so the ship’s captain puts them to work in the galley washing dishes for the remainder of the voyage to shut them up.  Absolutely, positively NO SEX.

            If you’re adult looking for sci-fi, his later work is better.  If you’re looking for some Hardy Boys in Space fiction for your 12 year old son or daughter, the earlier work is better.  Describing them all isn’t productive, as there are about 20 of them and they’re all pretty much the same.

Late.   Starting with Starship Troopers, Heinlein began writing for adults in the late 1950s.   He makes up for the lack of sex earlier with rampant promiscuity.  Mind you, this isn’t erotica: the sex is definitely implied yet never described. 

Unlike the earlier stories which are fairly formulaic and consistent, the later stories can be distinguished from each other.  I’ve yet to read one I didn’t like, but the following four should be considered the CORE RAH books to start with – even to own.

Starship Troopers (1959). The space cadets grow up and go to war against an alien bug race.  Powered armor, like Battletech!   RAH also starts injecting politics into the story, which also ups the sophistication.  He has a strangely militant form of libertarianism which resembles fascism at a casual glance.  

In particular, only military veterans have the right to vote, but this has several loopholes:  first, you don't have to be a combat veteran, you simply have to have served in the military; second, you can't vote until you've been honorably discharged and are now a civilian, so active duty military cannot vote; and third, and most importantly, the military has to accept literally anyone who volunteers, regardless of how poorly qualified they might be (e.g. blind, crippled, etc.).  Moreover, the penalty for desertion is none:  not death, simply nothing.  But you won't get your honorable discharge and the right to vote.  I consider this more of a later novel than the last of the early ones.  I saw the movie ages ago, but this is yet another story where reading the book is definitely the way to go; consider the movie a bonus - especially since Paul Verhoeven, who did the film, misunderstood Heinlein's politics and deliberately made the movie as stupid as possible.

Stranger in a Strange Land (1962).  Valentine Michael Smith is the sole remaining human left from an expedition to Mars.  Instead of wolves, he was raised by Martians, so he has supernatural powers he barely understands because he takes them for granted.  Also, his thinking – at least at first – is impenetrable.  He’s entrusted to a crusty old cynic, Jubal Harshaw, and eventually becomes something closer to a sideshow Jesus, with his own cult, although much more articulate and worldly.  Stranger is to Rocket Ship Galileo as Abbey Road is to Please Please Me.  I have the unabridged version released in the recent past, but since I read the abridged (as originally published) version so long before, I can’t tell you what the difference is.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).  Settlers on the moon colony, which is somewhat of a penal colony, decide to break free from Earth’s dominance.   Mannie, the technician who services the moon’s computer system, HOLMES IV, soon discovers that HOLMES IV has actually achieved self-awareness, and calls him Mike.  They team up with Wyoming “Wyoh” Knott, and start a secret rebellion against Earth.   Mike comes in handy by adapting the moon’s catapult system, designed to get ships lifted off, into a deadly cannon to use against Earth.  Along the way libertarian values are espoused, and Mannie learns how to organize a clandestine organization with cells, etc.   Very anti-establishment, and very entertaining.

Time Enough For Love (1973).  The cornerstone story for Lazarus Long, a fascinating character who pops up in other stories.   Long is the patriarch of the Howard Clan, which is a family of extremely long-lived persons who interbreed only with others specifically invited because they share a genetic propensity for longevity.  Oh, Heinlein was also BIG on genetics, by the way, and it’s front-center in this book.  The clan has also developed a rejuvenation treatment which is proprietary – they do NOT share it with non-clan members.  Long is cynical, lusty, and clever.  He even goes back in time to the early twentieth century and romances his own mother (her story is told, from her perspective, in To Sail Beyond The Sunset).  Did I mention how lusty he is?   Rather than one continuous story, though, this is a collection of related stories which do have a consistent pattern.  

Longevity.  Clearly the rejuvenation business showed Heinlein's obsession with extending life and eternal youth.  I Will Fear No Evil tells of a Monty Burns-type old man who transplants his brain into a young woman in a brief experiment with prolonging life.  And Beyond the Horizon features a world government project to determine if there is life after death.  Unfortunately for us, RAH did not find the answers, but he was certainly active in looking.

Finally, I’ll add For Us, the Living, (not to be confused with Ayn Rand’s novel We The Living, with which it has nothing in common).  It was written in the late 40s but only published recently.  A man from the 40s winds up in the future and has to adapt quickly.  It seems in the future, nudity taboos are gone, so everyone walks around half-naked.  Maybe that was why it was shelved for so long….

Comparison with PKD.  Heinlein is very political, very science oriented, and very fact-and-reason based.  While you may never have all the answers until he gives them to you – which he will – you are never flat out confused or bewildered.  The furthest outside the box RAH gets is Number of the Beast, in which the main characters meet other Heinlein characters – as characters; it also acts as Heinlein’s tribute to Burroughs’ John Carter stories.  PKD loves to twist stuff around intensely, making us doubt our reality and our sanity.  Heinlein remains grounded in reality and never leaves.   Control freak types who prefer everything neat, tidy, and scientific might prefer Heinlein.  Others, who don’t mind thinking outside the box – WAY outside the box – can look to PKD for entertainment.  But since I read them both, they’re not mutually incompatible, just completely different flavors for completely different moods.  Enjoy.

Vulcan's Hammer vs. Occupy Wall Street

Vulcan’s Hammer, Phillip K. Dick (Kindle) (written in 1960).  The year is 2029 (!) and Earth is ruled by a supercomputer called Vulcan 3.  An anti-computer movement, led by anarchic, monk-like Healers, rises against the computer.  The human head of this so-called Unity government, Jason Dill, seeks advice not only from Vulcan 3, but its predecessor, the obsolete and de-authorized but still fully functional Vulcan 2.  Vulcan 2 warns that Vulcan 3 will develop self-awareness and begin to act on its own behalf and initiative.  For that reason, Dill withholds information about the Healer movement from Vulcan 3, but Vulcan 3 finds out anyway.  A sympathetic sub-director, Barris, is the main protagonist of the story:  he opposes Vulcan 3, but initially cannot bring himself to switch sides to the Healers.  Ultimately, however, he determines that Vulcan 3 has access to thermonuclear weapons and will not hesitate to wipe out the entire human race if it deems it necessary to protect its own interests, so Barris decides that, as anarchic and “we don’t stand for anything except tearing down the system” as the Healers may be, they are less of a threat to humanity than Vulcan 3.  Moreover, the Unity forces upon which Barris could count on to oppose BOTH Vulcan 3 AND the Healer movement are nonexistent; so he allies himself with the Healers.  

            The plot of this story is so much like “Terminator” (even down to the year 2029) that I couldn’t imagine Cameron was oblivious to this story.  But Wikipedia says this:

 In Rome, during the release of Piranha II: The Spawning director James Cameron grew ill and had a dream about a metallic torso dragging itself from an explosion while holding kitchen knives.^[2] When Cameron returned to Pomona, California he stayed at Randall Frakes' home where he wrote a draft for The Terminator. Cameron later stated that his influences while writing the script were 1950s science fiction films, episodes of The Outer Limits as well as contemporary films including The Driver and The Road Warrior.

...Writer Harlan Ellison stated that he "loved the movie, was just blown away by it", but believed that the screenplay was based on an episode of The Outer Limits he had written, titled "Soldier". Orion gave Ellison an undisclosed amount of money and an acknowledgment credit in later prints of the film. Some accounts of the settlement state that "Demon with a Glass Hand", another Outer Limits episode written by Ellison, was also claimed to have been plagiarized by the film, but Ellison has explicitly stated that The Terminator "was a ripoff" of "Soldier" rather than "Demon with a Glass Hand".

As you can see – NO mention of Dick in this whole thing.  He had died in 1982, only shortly before the movie came out, but the story dates from 1960.  It seems his estate was asleep at the switch.   Here, by the way, is the plot to “Soldier” (also from the Wikipedia entry for this particular Outer Limits episode):

Eighteen hundred years in the future, two foot soldiers clash on a battlefield. A random energy weapon strikes both and they are hurled into a time vortex. While one soldier is trapped in the matrix of time, the other, Qarlo Clobregnny, materializes on a city street in the year 1964.

Qarlo is soon captured and interrogated by Tom Kagan, a philologist, and his origin is discovered. Qarlo has been trained for one purpose, fighting, and that is all he knows. Progress is made in "taming" him; eventually Qarlo comes to live with the Kagan family.

But the time eddy holding the enemy soldier slowly weakens. Finally he materializes fully and tracks Qarlo to the Kagan home. In a final hand-to-hand battle, Qarlo sacrifices his life to kill the enemy and save the Kagan family.

In a limited sense, the “time traveling opponents seek each other out” element of the plot is evident in “The Terminator”.  But Cameron’s overall scenario, of Skynet developing self-awareness and destroying the human population to protect itself, is almost verbatim from Dick’s story. 

The Healer movement described in this book is very similar to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.  As I’ve noted several times in the past, the anti-World Bank/IMF group is extremely vocal in its opposition to capitalism and Wall Street, but is equally silent about its actual goals and objectives, besides simply trying to shut down the system or embarrass as many people as possible.  Among others, the Anonymous movement has been described as “anarchist”.  However, it seems that Adbusters was the primary organization to instigate these protests and Anonymous has simply encouraged its own supporters to join in.

Actually, identifying the Occupy Wall Street movement with the Healers in Vulcan’s Hammer gives the OWS too much credit: the Healers opposed what was clearly a totalitarian dictatorship run by an all-powerful machine, Vulcan 3. OWS appear to be, at best, yet another vaguely articulated attack on capitalism per se by a movement which NEVER explains what type of system it favors.  Are you socialist?  Are you anarchist?  If you oppose capitalism, what do you support?

One thing that Wall Street does not do that Qaddaffi, Syria, and other regimes do:  use armed force to attack protesters.  Where are the Morgan Stanley Armored Divisions?  The Goldman Sachs F-16s spraying Merrill Lynch Napalm on the crowds?  The GM & Ford Riot Police?  Even the Pinkerton strikebusting goons are history, quite literally.  Not even US armed forces, or the National Guard, as “proxies” for their corporate puppetmasters, are present.  In DC, the Mall has always been a place for protest marches, and the DC police only arrest people for not having permits or blocking traffic.  No tear gas, no massed ranks of riot police, no Cossacks with sabers chasing unarmed protesters and their baby carriages down the steps of Odessa.

Whatever else it might be, the US government and Wall Street are not totalitarian regimes – and never have been.  North Korea, Red China, and Cuba still are.  I’ve seen some pictures showing “V For Vendetta” imagery among the protesters.  Neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama – nor any other US President, even the much-maligned Richard Nixon – are or were anywhere close to Adolf Hitler, nor any US regime remotely close to the UK dictatorship depicted in “V For Vendetta”, Orwell’s 1984, or Nazi Germany.  Even Franklin Roosevelt, who co-opted the socialists’ agenda and enacted much of what could be found in the Nazi Party’s 25 Points platform of 1920, did not turn the FBI loose as an American Gestapo, and the very worse excesses of his administration, the Japanese internment camps in California, were just that: internment camps and not Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, or even Dachau or Theriesenstadt.  This plague of “moral relativism” and “moral equivalence” is ubiquitous among the protesters.  By making these bizarre and obviously inapplicable parallels, they completely lose any moral credibility or political coherence they might possibly have.  Lyndon LaRouche makes as much sense as they do.

Here’s your challenge, latter-day Marxists and anarchists:  take what we’ve learned from (1) the Paris Commune, (2) Soviet Russia, (3) Red China, (4) North Korea, (5) “Market Socialist” Europe (Sweden, Denmark, etc.), and (6) the capitalist First World, and give us a coherent, sensible blueprint for a fair and free modern day society: its government (if any) and its economic system.  Tell us how that would work not merely in Belgium, Sweden, or Canada, but also in larger countries like the US and Russia with diverse, multi-ethnic populations and huge, complex modern economies.  When you’ve got that all figured out, THEN you can tear down the current system once you’ve figured out what the hell you’re going to replace it with.

And as for freedom of expression, listen up:  you have a right to say what you want.  You have a right to wave placards.  You have a right to get up on a stage and bark and bray.  And you can invite as many of your comrades as you can get to join you at the same time.  But here’s where your rights end:

1.         No right to block traffic – e.g. roads and bridges - simply to inconvenience others you feel are complacent or indifferent to your political agenda;

2.         No right to obstruct pedestrian traffic to museums and other tourist attractions, again as some misguided attempt to disrupt others’ lives because you feel they don’t care enough about your movement;

3.         No right to blow things up, even if you target unoccupied office buildings at 2 a.m. with a warning call, simply to attract attention to your cause (“propaganda by deed”) and stir the general public out of its bourgeois complacency.  This applies whether your goal was to stop the war in Vietnam (The Weather Underground), the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, or Wall Street. 

Philip K Dick

PKD was an American science fiction writer, mostly writing in the 1950s up to the late 70s.  By now I’ve read enough of his stories and books to make some sort of appraisal thereof, and a meaningful evaluation, though I still haven’t read all of them by now.

 Background.  Born in 1928, died in 1982, he is typically associated with Berkeley, well known as a bastion of left wing extremism (home of Country Joe (“Stalin”) among others).  Virtually his entire writing career concerned science fiction.  My closest comparison to him is Robert Heinlein.

 Themes.  Dick was less concerned with the specifics of technology than Heinlein.  Nor is there nearly as much sex in Dick’s books compared to Heinlein’s.  The topics Dick liked to address:

1.         Totalitarian dictatorships supported by high technology.  In his view, as societies grew more technologically advanced, the government improved its ability to spy on its own people.

2.         Anarchy & corruption.  By corruption I mean the gradual breakdown of technology – nothing works anymore and no one knows how to fix it.  As freedom and decentralization increase, technology decreases and approaches nature – anarchy and technology are treated as polar opposites.  Especially since technology is so closely related to dictatorship, people are uncertain, in a later anarchist society, whether to embrace technology again, although they sense some value in it for its own sake.

3.         Altered consciousness and alternate reality.  What is really going on?  Are we perceiving the real world, or something else? And how can we know for certain?  More so than any other writer, PKD’s stories often have you wondering, “what is really going on???”

4.         Robot self-awareness.  Particularly in “Second Variety”, this idea that robots achieve self-awareness and man’s creations turn against him.  Robots create more robots, and so on.  In “James P. Crow”, robots run the country, while humans are substandard – discriminated against and kept down – and no one can remember that it used to be the other way around, until Crow (taking an ironic pseudonym) manages to reveal the truth.

5.         Time travel, reverse time flow, paradoxes.  Time travel is as much an element of PKD’s stories as any other sci-fi writers, and he’s as likely to address the issues of causation as anyone else.

6.         His take on capitalism is more along the lines of, “damn incessant advertising for stuff we really don’t need”, and planned obsolescence.  He doesn’t seem to take on the system per se. 

7.         Many of his stories have an abrupt plot swerve at the very end, almost a “gotcha!” like “The Twilight Zone”.

 Short Stories.  He has more than I can count (121).  I read no less than 5 separate compendiums of them.  Clearly addressing them all would be useless, but here are the best – aside from the ones which were made into movies, which I’ll address separately.

 he Turning Wheel.  Asians as mystics controlling a futuristic anti-technology society; Caucasians are reduced to a small underground of lower class caste who actually understand technology.

 The Last of the Masters.  …is actually a robot, in charge of the last bastion of technology-driven, totalitarian dictatorship left on the planet.   A small team of anarchists emerges from the wilderness and takes on the Master in his home base.  This is the biggest “technology = totalitarianism” vs. “anarchists = nature” story.

 Exhibit Piece.  Mindf**k!  Bureaucrat/scientist can’t tell if the museum exhibit of a suburban home from several centuries ago is simply an exhibit piece…or if this is his real home and family.

 Pay For the Printer.  Another “dying world where nothing works anymore and almost no one knows how to fix anything” story.

 War Veteran.  Time-travel paradox involving a war between Earth, Mars and Venus.  By the end, the truth is revealed.

 Colony.  This is another paranoia trip: an intelligent alien race, very deadly and very aggressive, knows how to mimic inanimate objects.

 Nanny.  In the future, nannies are robots.  In addition to being loved by the children and taking care of them as well as any human possibly could, they have combat capabilities to defeat other robot nannies.  This means that parents have to constantly upgrade and trade in for newer, deadlier models.  The children are not at risk, but last year’s model certainly is!

 Holy Quarrel.  The computer running society develops self-awareness (yet again) and becomes a religious fanatic.

 Orpheus with Clay Feet.  A writer is considered too untalented to write his own material, so he’s initially sent back in time to serve as a muse to someone important.  Except that he screws that up so spectacularly, that they decide to send him back to Munich in 1924 to un-inspire Adolf Hitler.

 Waterspider.  A team from the future has to go back to the past to contact Poul Anderson at a convention of sci-fi writers in the 1950s.  This story seems like a “call-out” to a who’s who of sci-fi:  Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Robert Bloch, even himself (“Phil Dick”, as author of The Defenders).

 Beyond Lies the Wub.  The Wub is a very intelligent alien which produces odd effects when eaten.

 Not By Its Cover.  The Wub returns – with odd effects when its hide is used to bind books such as the Bible.

 Pre-Persons.  I could never imagine a story about abortions could be funny, but this one was.  Apparently the pro-choice movement succeeds in extending the time for legal abortions to the age of 12.  “Boobs are obsolete, like the Pontiac GTO.” 

 Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked.  A cynical “Wind in the Willows” meets “Married With Children” story.

 Faith of Our Fathers.  Apparently the Red Chinese managed to take over – and is continually dosing the entire population with LSD.  The resistance develops a drug which counteracts the LSD – yet the “normal” state perception varies, while the LSD perception is constant. 

 The Variable Man.  Astonishingly good story; they manage to get someone from the past, Cole, to fix their rocket in the future, to assist in the war against Proxima Centauri.  Cole has an amazing intuitive ability to not only figure out how things work, but also repair them and even improve them.  Lots of excitement and combat. 

 The Eye of the Sibyl.   A Roman noble is reincarnated in the future – his modern counterpart displays a natural inclination to cite Latin without realizing why.  I liked this concept of the “collective unconscious”, inheriting not merely genes but social and cultural memories.

 The Defenders.  After a nuclear war between the US and USSR, the survivors burrow underground and allow robot surrogates to continue the war above by proxy.  Eventually the humans discover that the surface had cooled and recovered long ago, but they had been lied to by the robots.

 Books.  He had 36, but of these I’ve only read a handful.

 The Man in the High Castle.  I described this earlier in my blog about alternate history stories in which Germany won World War II.  The Nazis run the East Coast of the US, the Japanese run the West Coast, and the middle is still independent.  Everyone consults the I Ching for guidance.  Fairly good, but not his best work.

 Now Wait For Last Year.  I liked this one.  It turns out that Earth is a former colony of an alien race and humans are not indigenous to Earth.  The humans from the original home planet (the Starmen) finally managed to reestablish contact with Earth, but treat the Terrans as second-class idiots.  They’re involved in a war with reegs (insectoid race like preying mantis) but the reegs come off as more sympathetic than the arrogant Starmen.  The main character ends up taking a drug which induces time travel – and even meets himself.  Very intriguing.

 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.  A popular TV/radio celebrity wakes up one morning to find his identity completely erased – no one recognizes him and his name is absent from every database.  Ultimately the answer lies with a policeman’s incestuous sister.

 Ubik.  Easily the biggest mindfuck book of all.  Joe Chip goes to the moon on a mission from Gene Lassiter, which goes horribly wrong.  From then on, things start getting weirder and weirder.  Towards the end we FINALLY get told what is really going on, and the truth is still strange and screwed up.  If they ever made this into a movie, “Inception” would get a run for its money.

 Movies.  Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying levels of faithfulness to the original story and commercial success.

 Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).  Easily the most popular movie, a real cult film.  The book has several elements missing from the movie: this whole business of robot animals (real animals are so rare as to be priceless, and even synthetic animals are valuable enough that a catalog of values – like the Blue Book – exists with regard to them) and Mercerism.  Deckard (played in the movie by Harrison Ford) sleeps with Rachel (Sean Young in the movie) a replicant who does not know she is.  His job is to track down replicants (androids) illegally on Earth – and kill them.  For their part, the replicants are dangerous and do not cooperate. 

 Screamers (Second Variety).  In a futuristic war, the robots originally developed by one side to help them win the war eventually develop self-awareness, begin fighting both sides equally, and develop new three new varieties of androids.  The first and third varieties are a wounded soldier and a 10 year old boy, but the “second variety” remains unindentified and at large.  More of this “who is human, who is really a killer robot assassin paranoia”.  The main character in the movie is played by Paul Weller.  Although the movie changes the human sides to fictional countries/companies, in the story the two sides are simply the US and USSR.

 Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale).  Here the story takes place all on Earth and all issues are resolved at home.   A bored Earthbound citizen goes to a memory implant clinic to have memories of a fictional Mars vacation artificially implanted in his consciousness – only to find that he had already been to Mars and subjected to memory erasing treatment by whatever government agency he worked for.  The movie uses the story as a basis for a much larger story, in which the man (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes back to Mars and gets involved in the mess there.  For this I’d recommend reading the story then watching the movie.

 Paycheck (same).  This has a similar memory-wiping deal; the story and movie are identical in basic plot but change the ultimate ending.  A high-skilled technician finishes a major project for his firm and finds, to his surprise, that instead of the expected fat paycheck, he’s opted to forgo that in exchange for the contents of an envelope which he left himself before undergoing the memory wipe – these contents are a bewildering collection of seemingly unrelated and worthless items.  The idea is that the contents of the package, when used correctly, will allow him to achieve a result 100x better than his mere paycheck would have been, if he can only figure out these clues he left himself.   Ben Affleck stars in the movie.  This is another one where reading the story first, then the book, makes sense.

 Minority Report (same).  In the future, crimes are solved before they’re even committed, by a “pre-crime” division which relies on a mysterious trio of psychics who predict future crimes.  Unfortunately, the main investigator, Anderton (Tom Cruise in the movie) finds himself implicated in a murder and then has to escape his own police force and find out what’s going on.  In the story he winds up committing the murder anyway (!) to salvage the pre-crime system. “Minority report” refers to the procedure of logging, but officially ignoring, the report of the third psychic when his/her report conflicts with the other two – Anderton finds that the minority report on his own “crime”, which might explain what is going on, is missing, i.e. he may have been set up by his rival (played in the movie by Colin Farrell). 

 A Scanner Darkly (same).  This Dick’s very intriguing critique of LSD and drug use, in this case a mysterious drug called Substance D, which doesn’t seem to directly correlate to anything we know of, but most closely resembles LSD; Substance D is highly addictive, LSD is not.  The main doper, Robert Arctor (played in the film by Keanu Reeves) is also a narc assigned to investigate his own house.  Down at the DEA headquarters he wears a sophisticated shapeshifting costume which warps his voice and disguises his identity.  He watches surveillance camera footage of events occurring at his own house, including himself.  His biggest problem is with his housemate James Barris, extravagantly portrayed in the movie (seriously underrated Oscar-worthy performance) by Robert Downey Jr.  Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder are also major characters.  The movie uses a unique rotoscope technique.