Short takes: ‘Evil Geniuses,’ ‘Logan’s Run,’ ‘John Dies at the End,’ ‘Agent Running in the Field,’ ‘Hangsaman’ and more

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 4, 2020

Well, it’s been another month and a half since I last wrote about the movies I’ve watched and books I’ve read or heard. I would have liked to have written about a few of the following items, especially the first one, in more detail than I have here; alas, circumstances prevented that from happening.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen (2020): The journalist and recently retired radio host explores how a determined group of conservatives — many of them quite wealthy or connected to those who were — succeeded in making our country safe for oligarchy over a 40-year period. Working primarily in the realms of economics, law and politics, various individuals and groups with varying degrees of coordination systematically undermined unions, conventional American notions of fairness and the idea that businesses should do anything other than accumulate vast amounts of wealth for a small number of executives and business owners or shareholders.

Andersen writes engagingly and earnestly about a concerted effort that has been so successful that the results have sometimes dismayed its own engineers. He also argues that a type of socialism, notably in the form of a universal basic income, will be necessary to stave off the deleterious long-term effects of automation and the devastating short-term effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

‘The Man in the High Castle’ is an alternative history that goes over my head

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
April 2, 2014

In San Francisco in the early 1960s, Robert Childan, proprietor of American Artistic Handcrafts Inc., fields a call from an important Japanese official whose order for a Civil War–era recruiting poster Childan has not yet been able to fulfill. Frank Frink, né Fink, ponders how to go about regaining his job at the factory where he has been helping to manufacture fake antiques distributed to Childan and other suckers. Childan’s important customer, Nobusuke Tagomi, consults the I Ching for guidance about how to impress his important visitor, a certain Mr. Baynes of Sweden.

In remote Canon City, Colo., Frink’s estranged wife, Juliana Frink, watches a point of light arc overhead before going into the local diner, where she meets a young Italian trucker named Joe Cinnadella. Aboard that moving point of light — in fact, a Nazi rocket ship bound for San Francisco — the supposed industrialist Baynes has an uneasy conversation with a German seatmate. After the ship lands, Baynes confesses that he is a Jew who, with the help of powerful friends, has survived the Nazi genocide; then he disembarks and meets Tagomi.

Such are the characters introduced by Philip K. Dick over the course of the first three chapters and 44 pages of The Man in the High Castle. This 1962 alternative-history tale about a world in which Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire were victorious in World War II earned Dick the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel.

Dick’s vision of the triumphant Axis powers is a sobering one. San Francisco’s swankiest neighborhood is controlled by Japanese; whites who visit are watched suspiciously, while people of Chinese ancestry have become a sort of caste of untouchables. The United States’ western region is controlled by the Japanese, while in the east the Germans have re-instituted slavery and exterminated the Jews. Worst of all, though, is the fate of Africa, which the Germans have evidently burned to a crisp with atomic bombs.

The Man in the High Castle is unlike the mind-bending science fiction for which Dick is most famous, the novel and novella that formed the basis for the popular movies Blade Runner and Total Recall. (His work has also been adapted as the movies A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau and Screamers.) Yes, there are rocket-powered commercial passenger ships, and allusions are made to the Nazis’ exploration of Mars, but otherwise the technology featured in The Man in the High Castle seems roughly comparable to what Dick and his readers would have experienced in 1962.