New California

New California

Galactic intrigue and a high-tech religion collide on a planet addicted to pleasure

After a colony world's founder commits suicide, two men battle for control.

Order Now!
About the Book

When ruling a high-tech colony world of sensual pleasure isn’t enough…

When the colony’s founder resolves to commit suicide…

Desmond Park lets him succeed.

While the colony’s decadent elite schemes to fill the power vacuum and find meaning in their hollow lives, Desmond blazes a new path. Combining evolutionary theory, brain science, and ritual, Desmond forges a new religion that draws the colony’s unhappy youth…

…and raises hostile forces against him.

The elite manipulate the colony’s politics to marginalize Desmond and his followers.

The corporation that dominates half the settled galaxy deploys intelligent robots and orbital weapons to monitor and destroy them.

And forces within Desmond’s movement—and within his own mind—threaten to topple them from within.

Finally, men, women, and artificial intelligences collide in a conflict which could cost Desmond his life.

A conflict which could deny freedom to millions of colonists.

A conflict which could transform the destinies of billions of human beings across the galaxy and on Earth itself.


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: Raymund Eich
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
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, dabbles at golf and Python, is a husband and father, and agrees with Robert Heinlein 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.”

Preview
Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the page above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."
Scroll to Top