#Nate manages because A. he can read her mind and get infinitely more context

[deva-arts]

What are the worst ships you could think of between your characters and why? 🥸

There's too many to count. One of the most notorious ones is Nathaniel X Sonia.

Sonia is too focused on putting up her own airs and appearances herself, how is she going to accept someone's rawest self when she can barely stand her own? She got countless aesthetic procedures done to look this way, and Nathaniel can make those changes and more without batting an eye. So he should try. After all, his status as a variant could ruin her, and everything she's lived for. How steep of an ask could it be to ask a shapeshifter to do the one thing they're made to do?

Nathaniel is too people-pleasing, especially during his journey to becoming more pacific. As such he mistakes resolving conflict as avoiding it... And that only makes things bubble up. His deepest insecurities are constantly being prodded at. Every time she tells him to shift into something more 'presentable' it only makes him feel more disgusting. Unworthy. Unlovable. But hey, maybe she has a point. He's used to changing for others, this is no different.

She doesn't like how his true form looks, but considers any form of his to still be his body. What's the problem if you look like this instead? Except... She also doesn't find him to be very fun. Not dynamic, not... Lively. Some unpredictability wouldn't kill you, Nate. Why couldn't you just try to be a bit more fun?

He doesn't like how she wants him to look like other men. Sure, it's still him... But this body isn't his. It doesn't feel like his, it doesn't look like his... It doesn't even sound like his. He feels like he's cucking himself for a woman who thinks he's a bore. He thinks she's vapid, undisciplined, and ditzy. And it's nearly enough to make him regret choosing the high road.

When they break up, it's kind of messy.

leave more bad ship ideas I want to see them

[notanotherbookreview]

Paradise Gardens, Dystopian Business Proposal?

Paradise Gardens, ultimate real estate project 2250s (4/20/17 New Edition published by Pelekinesis Publishing Group, www.pelekinesis.com)

"If Madge Chilton wasn’t sure she was alive, it was clear she wasn’t dead. The problem was a matter of personal style and professional necessity. Being pleasant and agreeable was the stock and trade of public relations. Who cared about the emotional burn-out after decades of calculated pleasantness—her real personality mourned like a memory? Eject self-pity, she thought, crossing the eerily deserted lobby of the crumbling New York Sheraton. You can’t afford it. Wasn’t it her reputation for equanimity that helped her win Paradise Gardens?

   Madge reached the peeling brown and gold enameled elevator doors and hit the Up button. Where was Security at 9:30 Sunday morning? The conference was at ten. Greenfield was expecting her to deliver his guests in good condition. No easy teleconference for this job, the content was too sensitive. Why they needed outside PR and Greenfield had chosen her when he could have had anyone. “Cracker-jack,” he said. Big agency quality yet small enough for the personal touch. Small is right, she thought, examining herself in a mirror beyond re-silvering. She pressed the elevator button and took a last professional look."

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” TALE OF TWO CITIES

“What’s creativity but the instinct to destroy in order to start over? We are starting over, but this time we won’t destroy ourselves.”

“To that inspiring idea,” said Nate. “I look forward to seeing you all in Paradise Gardens?”

Paradise Gardens New Edition by the author of The Anarchist’s Girlfriend.

The world pf PARADISE GARDEN is  controlled byThe United Business Estates, after the Old Fed’s dissolved. The Unconnected, outside corporate enclaves,exist on the entirely polluted surface. In 2055, the U.B.E. flees for the last great real estate project, PARADISE GARDENS.

Advance review of PARADISE GARDENS New Edition. This  definitive edition has significant new material, original illustrations, preface w/historical context, Reader's guide.

Feb 20, 2017 Carla Sarett on GoodReads

Upton Sinclair meets Philip Dick in Susan Weinstein's dark, dystopian novel, which is illustrated by the author. In it, a quasi-messianic real estate mogul creates an underground "paradise" from which to escape an ecologically damaged world. There's not much joy here-- predictably, even sex is sanitized (but it's still around) and life is organized through a database. The novel spans centuries, shifting back and forth; as characters appear and re-appear, no happier or wiser than when we last met them. Personalities are bleached out, in this grim, corporatized future in which a "lucky" few get to live in a joyless Paradise, and the rest are left to fend for themselves or fight. It's no secret who seems worse off. A timely, ambitious novel

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

PELEKINESIS TO PUBLISH PRESCIENT PARADISE GARDENS, AN ORWELLIAN NOVEL

“From the infinitely imaginative mind of Susan Weinstein, Paradise Gardens spins a fabulous web. Clever, funny, serious, and prescient. Lovers of Aldous Huxley's and Margaret Atwood's dystopias are in for a satisfying treat."

—Sonia Taitz, award-winning author of The Watchmaker’s Daughter and Great with Child.

"One of the most disturbing yet oddly funny science fiction/dystopian sagas I've ever read. When corporations have wrung every drop out of nature and mankind has no other option but to build entire communities underground, how do you spin it to make it seem like a dream destination? You call it PARADISE GARDENS of course and you sell it like everything else. When we have no natural water, no natural food, and even the wind and the sunlight has been poisoned you will still have hucksters selling whatever is left for top of the line prices. A thought provoking story well conceived and brilliantly executed."

--Patrick King, author of the Shane Cullaine detective series

In the 1980s of Reagan’s America, Susan I. Weinstein wrote PARADISE GARDENS, an Orwellian speculative fiction that imagined a corporate feudal world, the United Business Estates, after the Federal government dissolved amid ecological breakdown. In the 2250s, Nate Greenfield, real estate visionary, with the help of P.R. maven Madge Chilton, sells corporate business on his “eden underground.” Left behind are the Unconnected, people outside corporate protection. Capitalism has devolved into feudalism so total, that employees are conceived to fit the needs of business.

Suspended between the settings of 2250s on the Earth’s surface and 3011s underground, chapters alternate with a revolving cast of characters. Fates are determined by the Psychologicians, who manage the civilization’s data base. Yet, when model employee Janet McCarthy finds herself caught in a web of alternate identities, only her lover Michael can attempt to cut her loose. At stake, is the reset of the planet. In this cautionary near-future, Upton Sinclair’s classic It Can’t Happen Here, has already happened. It is a vision at once strange and familiar. For instance, though written pre- Internet, there are Information Pirates dedicated to keeping facts free.

“It may look like a vintage filing cabinet on wheels, but it’s a supercomputer capable of retaining the genetic information of the human race and the requirements of your corporation. Not just projections of how many individuals will be needed for your work, but the qualities of those individuals and the number of people essential to consume your products"

PARADISE GARDENS is the second of three groundbreaking novels by Susan I. Weinstein to be released by independent publishing house Pelekinesis. The Anarchist’s Girlfriend (Dec.) and Tales of the Mer Family Onyx (June) complete her definitive new editions. Each includes a beautiful new layout, preface, visual material and other expanded content.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Susan I. Weinstein is a writer, playwright, and painter. Paradise Gardens was read in-progress, at the original Dixon Place and at Darinka, whose archive is now part of NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections. Pelekinesis published the new definitive editions of The Anarchist’s Girlfriend (2016) and Paradise Gardens (2017), previously serialized by maglomaniac.com. Susan’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in literary magazines, such as The Metric and The Portable Lower East Side. Currently, she is at work on a WWII novel based on blacked out V-mail. NEW EDITION of Paradise Gardens by Susan I. Weinstein Publication Date: April 20, 2017 ISBN: 978-1-938349-50-8 Suggested Retail Price: $21.95

Pelekinesis full catalog and ordering information available at www.pelekinesis.com

To pre-order book directly:  https://squareup.com/store/pelekinesis/item/paradise-gardens-by-susan-i

weinstein

WHY THIS BOOK NOW?  Read preface if so inclined.

Excerpts from Preface to Paradise Gardens

It was the age of Reagan, 1980s, when I began Paradise Gardens. I had just read a book on how capitalism evolved from feudalism and was living in "Morning in America." I began to imagine capitalism devolving into a modern corporatized feudalism, as a conservative ideal of America. Originally entitled Inside the U.R.S. (The United Religious System), the novel was written as a cautionary tale, since this was a time of ascendancy for far-right religious groups. Some were believers in the rapture, the apocalypse and rise to heaven of the faithful--after the 4 horsemen did their work. It seemed those in power were doing all they could to accelerate the end times.

Whether messianic or fiscal ideals, they manifested in actions, such as closing mental hospitals and having patients on the streets with no treatment. A vague plan for patients being integrated into "the community" never occurred. Benefiting corporations, stockholders and generally wealthy individuals was the higher objective. They had risen, because they were superior beings. It was a point of government to serve the elite doing the deity's work. Ayn Rand was again in vogue, along with a social Darwinism.

This attitude trickled down, not any financial benefit to average people, from huge tax breaks and unfettered business. I remember a casual conversation at a bar with a Wall Street investment banker. He told me, quite earnestly, that I should leave my rent-controlled apartment. I was preventing the real estate from achieving its market destiny. I was impeding the greater good of business. So before 1984, in this environment (an ethos culminating in 1987's "Greed is Good" in Wall Street), I began to dream Paradise Gardens.

The novel began with an image of a young woman in a corporate office, who was a model employee. In that time, I worked temp jobs in corporations and had a publishing job in the devilishly numbered 666 Fifth Ave building, which had a lush red carpet. I also was a publicist for Bluejay Books, which focused on science fiction classics in beautiful hard covers.

I was a literary person, who had an interest in utopias, from Thomas More's to America's Utopian experiments, from the Shakers to communes in the 1960s. Writing press kits and talking to people like Harlan Ellison, Vernor Vinge (whose True Names anticipated the Internet), and most of all Theodore Sturgeon, widened my idea of classics.

Sturgeon, who started out wanting to be a fiction writer for The New Yorker, fairly invented in the '50s the genre of something weird in the suburbs. Spielberg once acknowledged that if he hadn't read Sturgeon in his youth, he would not have made his suburban movies (his E.T. is a direct cousin of Sturgeon's story, "It!") Sturgeon also inspired Vonnegut's janitor Kilgore Trout (one of his various roles in Vonnegut novels). Science fiction could be literary and down to earth. I read Philip K. Dick and remember how Time Out of Joint blasted the complacency of day-to-day life. I could see the direct line from Kafka's Penal Colony to Dick's Man in the High Castle.

But my roots are in social realists, Zola and the Americans, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis. Lewis' It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale about fascism, through America's Jaycees and Lions Clubs. Patriotism is flacked by a president, an Ad Man selling America a bill of goods. It was written in the thirties and I considered it a period piece, though a very plausible one. Paradise Gardens has an edge of satire and Dick's wide-ranging freedom of invention. This story grew, was improvised, cut back and redrafted for about ten years.

Paradise Gardens is a dark book. It begins when the Earth's surface is too polluted to support human life. In the wake of the dissolution of the Old Federal government, corporations flee underground to the ultimate real estate project Paradise Gardens.

I have been haunted by what occurs, because it is lived by characters who became real to me. And as the story was always present, in the back of my mind, I dreamed segments, as well as imagined them awake. The characters evolved their world in my consciousness. Before it was serialized, I found I had to update things that had already occurred in my book, before they happened in reality. The World Trade Center is partially destroyed, the Information Pirates, their billboards and missions to preserve facts, operated before there was an Internet. Some things had to be updated for our time.

Now we find ourselves at what to the apocalyptic seems the beginning of the end of our democracy, with a president-elect who has sold angry voters what appears to be another bill of dubious goods. To the more pragmatic, this presidency just means four years of a regressive agenda--yet it's crucial for the international climate crisis, which can't be undone. Like all dystopians, I hope that reality does not continue to merge with my fiction.

If a cautionary tale has a function, it raises consciousness of what can happen--to ward it off. This novel may be the equivalent of shamanic practices, where a tribe wards off a disaster by transferring negative energy to an object. Some also use earth to cleanse negative energy, water or fire to change its nature. Knowledge for any society is the best protection. And in our time, perhaps negative visualization has a function. This novel can purge our fear, allow a passage for changing dark "unthinkable" visualization to a positive future. Paradise Gardens is a passage and at the end, there is unity--of people, place, and nature.

S.W.