Matthew Mather Adds Atopia Offshore

With the world facing overpopulation and diminishing resources, the initial marketing campaign to seek a solution could have said anything and still succeeded. The world's first artificial island owned by a corporation was set afloat in the Pacific Ocean and invited two classes of people to populate it.

The first class included the world's elite, wealthy families looking to escape the crush and clutter of the struggling world. The second were talented, gifted individuals that helped manage and maintain the sovereign city-state it had become overnight. But that wasn't the only marketing pitch for Atopia.

From day one, Dr. Patricia Killiam had always envisioned Atopia as the launching point for something better — a program that creates a virtual reality so complete and conniving that the population's wildest dreams and self-gratifiying wishes can be made real with a mere thought.

Atopia discovers a breakthrough that bends the mind.

If you can imagine living in the world but having your perception of the world altered to censor advertising and annoyances, then you've imaged an introduction Atopia's first scientific export. Killiam and company have created a software program that blends virtual reality and the real world.

The program enables you to augment your perception. But more than that, people can use it to interact with the world around them — with computable data readily available in their visual cortex — or invent entirely new ones that transform a small apartment into a lavishly appointed estate.

Or perhaps, you want something more. The program can help you be two or more places at once by giving your primary perception the experience it wants while your material body takes care of more mundane tasks via a secondary proxy. It can transport your mind to any place on the planet, step inside someone else's real time experiences, and simulate children to prepare you for the real thing.

Aside from the immediate practicality of it all — giving the brain everything it wants without the need for increasingly scarce resources — the program slowly begins to unlock one profound application after the other. And it doesn't take long to appreciate that if someone has an infinite number of possibilities to change human perception then it will eventually change humankind.

Told as a string of interconnected short stories from a number of characters and unique perspectives, Matthew Mather does a remarkable job at easing into a new, fantastic, and frightening world of altered and immersive realities. Most of them teeter back and forth between dream and nightmare.

A few more graphs about Matthew Mather.

Science fiction inspired Matthew Mather so much that he pursued a career in technology. From his first job at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, Mather went on to found one of the world's first tactile feedback companies. Along the way, he worked with a variety of other start-ups, including computational nanotechnology, weather prediction systems, and social intelligence research.

Five years ago, however, he found himself drifting back to the place he started — imagining the future with the masters of science fiction. Except this time, it was his imagination that would create a near future world of altered realities.

The Atopia Chronicles By Matthew Mather Imagines 7.2 On The Liquid Hip Richter Scale. 

There is something not quite likable about any of the characters Mather introduces and the way he introduces them — short stories that only somewhat adhere to linear time — works most of the time. But where these failings and occasional typos might otherwise make a book boorish, Mather's near-future imaginings and societal challenges are all too predictive to pass up. It's a must read.

You can find The Atopia Chronicles by Matthew Mather on Amazon. The book is also available at Barnes & Noble or you can download it for iBooks. If you are concerned about occasional errors, the audiobook reads over them with a cast of six narrators, each taking up different characters and chapters to bring additional life to the story.

The Source Behind The Adjustment Bureau

While the film The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, might have only received a lukewarm reception on the silver screen, some people might feel differently about the source material. The movie is loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick called The Adjustment Team, first published by Orbit Science Fiction in 1954.

Loosely is the operative word. While the premise is the same, any other similarities are few and far between. The original, in contrast, represents everything great about the sci fi genre in the 1950s.

It begins when a clerk from the Adjustment Team is tasked with ensuring Ed Fletcher gets to work on time so an “adjustment” can be made to people within a designated “sector.” To do this, the clerk enlists the assistance of a summoner—a talking dog—who is to bark at an appointed time. Things go wrong because the dog falls asleep and barks a few minutes too late.

Sometimes letting a sleeping dog lie is the wrong thing to do.

Instead of heading out to work, Ed lingers at home and is interrupted by an insurance salesman knocking on his door. He reluctantly agrees to let the salesman in, and — one insurance policy later — Ed makes his way to the office two hours late.

When he arrives, something is wrong. Everything is gray. Anything he touches turns to ash. When Ed tries to escape, he is followed by members of the Adjustment Team. As he makes his way further away from the scene, everything starts to become “real” again. But is it?

Since Ed wasn’t where he was supposed to be when the reality adjustment took place, he hasn’t been “adjusted.” This wouldn't be a problem, except that he notices how everyone else has been adjusted.

The team hasn't given up on him. When Ed steps into a phone booth, he is levitated into the sky to have a discussion with the “old man,” the adjuster of adjusters. Once he learns a little about what happened, he is allowed to return to resume his normal life on the condition that he will never tell anyone—not even his wife— what he saw and what he knows.

Ed agrees, but this proves to be easier said than done. His wife wants to know where he’s been and suspects he may have been cheating on her. Ed, of course, has a hard time coming up with a believable excuse. There are a few more surprises before the story ends abruptly, and don't expect to fully get to know the characters in this short story. It only makes it all the more strange.

An adjustment to cover author Philip K. Dick.

Dick (1928-1982) was a prolific science fiction author who never received any real recognition for his work by readers and critics during his lifetime. His work was largely and sadly ignored by the masses, with his greatest success coming posthumously.

His novels and short stories typically explore topics such as destiny, free will, identity, metaphysics, and perception. To date, a slew of feature films have been made based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

The mental issues Dick grappled with all his life are often the issues his characters battle too. He suffered from terrible bouts of vertigo and nervous breakdowns at various points in his life. In 1974, he claimed to have been contacted by an extraterrestrial force, which he described as a pink beam of light. The experience even found its way in to his work, for which he was at once lauded and maligned by critics.

The Adjustment Bureau (Story) By Philip K. Dick Clicks At 5.5 On the Liquid Hip Richter Scale.

While the Adjustment Bureau is available for 99 cents from the Kindle store on Amazon, the audiobook lends some additional life to the story. It's certainly worthwhile to consider.

Phil Gigante does a fine job narrating the story, staying true to the original and employing solid voices for various characters. It mostly works to good effect, especially, albeit briefly, as the talking dog. The audiobook clocks in at just under an hour, and it’s an engaging listen.

I’m guessing the audiobook company changed the name of the work to capitalize on the popularity of the movie. You can find The Adjustment Bureau on Amazon. You can also download the source audio version of The Adjustment Bureau on iTunes.