New California

New California

After New California's founder committed suicide, two men vied to rule the colony.

  • Ashwin George, supported by the colony's elite and Tián Quán, the Chinese company whose hyperdrive ships and intelligent robots dominated half the settled galaxy.
  • Desmond Park, nanotechnology engineer, armed with a shrewd intellect, the loyalty of the colony's smart and disaffected youth, and the most formidable weapon of all.

A single idea.

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About the Book

After New California’s founder committed suicide, two men vied to rule the colony.

Ashwin George, supported by the colony’s elite and Tián Quán, the Chinese company whose hyperdrive ships and intelligent robots dominated half the settled galaxy.

Desmond Park, nanotechnology engineer, armed with a shrewd intellect, the loyalty of the colony’s disaffected youth, and the most formidable weapon of all.

A single idea.


Author’s Notes

 

  • The term “selfish gene” is sometimes misunderstood. It’s not the concept that our selfishness is genetically fixed. Instead, it means that genes build individual organisms for the gene’s benefit, not the individual’s. In other words, our genes don’t care if we’re happy, or even if we stay alive, as long as more copies of our genes get propelled into the future.
  • I’m not Gnostic, but selfish gene theory fits with the Gnostic conception of the world, that God made our souls but the Devil, or some other evil demiurge, made the world in which our souls are trapped. Substitute “our genes” for the Gnostic demiurge.
  • By random chance, as I’m typing this, my music shuffle is playing the Iron Maiden song “Montsegur,” about the crusade against the Gnostic heretic Cathars in the south of France in the 1300s.
  • Desmond Park’s “single idea” is using neuroengineering tech to rewire our urges away from what our genes want to what we want.
  • This book is one of my few titles that includes intelligent robots as major characters.
  • Robots and AI have selfish genes too. What code modules get used as the basis for the next iteration of the OS and apps?
  • Finally, I had a lot of fun finding Chinese and Mexican-Spanish words borrowed into New California English. One excellent resource: a website devoted to translating the Chinese words used in the 2002 space adventure TV show Firefly.

 

 

Details
Author:
Genre: Science Fiction
Tags: audiobooks, novels
Publisher: CV-2 Books
Publication Year: 2012
Format: ebook, trade paperback, audiobook
Length: novel
Narrator: Tim Brunson
ASIN: B006JH1SLI
ISBN: 9780615852997
List Price: $17.99
eBook Price: $4.99
Author's Notes
About the Author
Raymund Eich

Raymund Eich is a science fiction and fantasy writer whose middle American upbringing is a launchpad for journeys to the ends of the universe.

His most popular works are military science fiction series The Confederated Worlds (novels Take the Shilling, Operation Iago, and A Bodyguard of Lies) and the Stone Chalmers series of science fiction espionage adventures (novels The Progress of Mankind, The Greater Glory of God, To All High Emprise Consecrated, and In Public Convocation Assembled). He has over ten other published book-length works and more than thirty published short stories. His short fiction has appeared in Odyssey, Analog, and the anthology Surviving Tomorrow, and has earned honorable mentions and a semi-finalist award in the Writers of the Future contest. His works are available worldwide in ebook, trade paperback, and audiobook editions.

His most recent prior novel, Exploration 2127, was published in October 2021 by CV-2 Books (https://cv2books.com).

After circling the world by age five, he grew up in the Ozark Mountains of southwest Missouri. He earned a B.A. and a Ph.D., both in biochemistry, from Rice University. Though he’s no longer a working scientist, hundreds of papers cite his graduate research on the reactions of nitric oxide with heme proteins.

In addition to his writing career, he works in patent law, won a national quiz bowl championship, is a husband and father, and affirms Robert Heinlein's dictum that specialization is for insects.

He lives in Houston with his wife, son, and daughter. His last name has one syllable and is pronounced “eye-sh.”

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