I read James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars<\/i><\/a> in high school or early college, and I was easily smitten with his version of speculative science fiction mysteries. So when I hit Downtown Books in Milwaukee last week, I looked for an author with whom I was familiar, and I found James P. Hogan and The Multiplex Man<\/a><\/i>. I started reading it that night, and I have finished it a little more than a week later. The elapsed time counter reflects the nature of the new job and all that rather than the nature of the book.<\/p>\n The Multiplex Man<\/i> starts out on a good paranoid fiction note: A middle school (well, they call it “junior high” in Minnesota where the novel takes place) teacher Dick Jarrow has a normal day, with a normal visit to his experimental psychotherapist. He, Dick Jarrow, wakes up in a different body<\/i> in the Atlanta Hyatt some months later and he’s got to figure out what happened. And why the authorities claimed he died.<\/p>\n The world in which this story is set reflects a dystopian future of the United States. It, and its allies, have been yoked by environmentalist concerns into rationing and authoritarianism. On the other hand, the newly-liberated East is known as the “Wild East” because its liberal, laissez-faire policies are not centrally planned. It’s a spooky projection that reflects what conservatives and isolationists fear most, and it’s odd because James P. Hogan published this in 1992<\/b>. He wrote it before Kyoto and before Kofi.<\/p>\n I loved<\/i> this book, and would recommend it if you’ve got a couple nights open in your schedule, or if you’ve got a book club with whom you want to discuss materialism and the nature of the human soul as reviewed through the prism of science fiction. Or, even if you don’t have a book club and just want to engage me in a discussion of the same over a couple of yummy Guinness Draughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars in high school or early college, and I was easily smitten with his version of speculative science fiction mysteries. So when I hit Downtown Books in Milwaukee last week, I looked for an author with whom I was familiar, and I found James P. Hogan and The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7091"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21512,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7091\/revisions\/21512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}