Mindless Future Society Controlled by Systemization and Technology

Self-educated Young Man Seeks Real Personal Relationship in Stark, Carnal World

MEDIA RELEASE – High Rise Orange Groves, a novel by Richard M. Baker, Jr., is being released on Web-e-Books® as part of a rare collection of Baker’s newly edited novels. The Tri-Screen Connection, LLC, publisher and distributor of the e-book, is providing the technology platform and online shopping website for High Rise Orange Groves as an e-book.

Richard M. Baker, Jr. wrote High Rise Orange Groves in 1965 and shelved it. He knew from experience with conventional publishers that the adult nature of the story would be a tough sell. Knowing him and his work, that’s why he wrote it. The futuristic novel was a departure in genre but no less typical of Baker’s bold, uncensored style. Armed with a strong social conscience, he wasn’t one to pull punches in delivering the human story.

High Rise Orange Groves is the author’s prophetic and technically farsighted view of millions of people engaged in interactive social networking -- in this case, to the detriment of the populace. In this speculative, dystopian fantasy novel - reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, Eugene Zamyatin’s WE, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 - Richard Baker envisions an unspecified future time when people are isolated by the authorities and ruled by inertia, ignorance, and an absence of love. Uniquely his, Baker wrote High Rise Orange Groves during the height of the Cold War when fear of atomic annihilation was compounded by the population explosion and the sexual revolution, and America was being spoiled by human and technological wastes.

Beyond this period of human-induced catastrophes, the imaginary majority of peoples in this new world order are uneducated “tans” and the minorities are black or white. The tans – loosely ruled by the “Authorities” -- live in high rise buildings, do not work, and occupy themselves with sex. One, a self-educated tan who rather than go by a number names himself Richard, tries to establish contact with other tans via his “telecom”, part of the building-to-building, room-to-room, audio-video system.

In High Rise Orange Groves, Baker writes of a disturbingly bleak, future society. The impression imparted here is that it may be far more difficult for man to realize a meaningful social identity than to adapt to a mindless one.

Web-e-Books® Availability

High Rise Orange Groves is viewable in licensed Web-e-Books® format available from The Tri-Screen Connection, and is compatible with most any Internet browser-capable desktop, laptop, e-reader, mobile smart phone, or similarly equipped Apple®, Windows®, Android®, and Linux® PCs and mobile tablets at:

www.web-e-books.com

Priced at US $5.95 – read on-line, no download or installation required.

About The Tri-Screen Connection

The Tri-Screen Connection represents a launch pad for broad adoption of new-media communications services, including digital content and publishing. Our publishing strategy is to satisfy the market for literature of excellence that provides reflective insight to a wide range of human experiences.

Media Downloads:

High Rise Orange Groves Cover Art JPG File Sizes	464 x 640px	116 x 160px

R M Baker Jr. Outside JPG File Sizes	457 x 640px	320 x 448px
	224 x 314px	114 x 160px

R M Baker Jr. at Desk JPG File Sizes	480 x 600px	336 x 420px
	235 x 294px	128 x 160px

Media Blurbs:

“Only the children of authorities could acquire by succession the positions the authorities held, and the rule still applies in the present which is the future, for in my opinion, there is nothing much for men beyond it.”

“This was new, for while I had been allowed to call any room in the institution, I was not allowed to call outside. So, with a feeling of great excitement, I pushed the button.”

“You’re educated. I know something, too, but it’s hard to explain.” She paused and then said: “When you’ve been reduced to the point of suicide by the way we all have to live, exist, then you have to know something.”

“Why, I could be killed on the mall, strangled, tortured to death, screaming, and no one would care. A group of authorities would intercede, but more to take the killer into custody than to save me. That way, they would rid this dying country of two more people – numbers to them.”

“Dismayed and frustrated, knowing I could spend the rest of my life making calls and still not make much of a dent in humanity, I dialed number 2100-4129 and waited, wondering if my sex drive was abnormally low, hating to think so, and anxious to prove otherwise.”

“It occurred to me then that the bombs could fall and I wouldn’t much care, and that if I, a thinking being didn’t care, no wonder people were immune to the threat.”