Paradigm

2014 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Medalist!

Sam Cooper is seventeen. He spends his days exploring the open roads of the great American West, surviving by trading small kitchen appliances for food. Life is pretty good, but post-collapse America is a hard place to survive, even for someone with Sam’s wit and charm. His is a world controlled by corporate, municipal, and township tribalism with a contaminated yellow sky and street corner kiosks that offer digital self-medication.

As Bakersfield readies for war to protect its meager oil reserves, whack-job scientists whose qualifications consist of hand-me-down knowledge go on a cloning spree, while Sam tries to find out how his intentionally designed human enhancements are tied to an all pervasive artificial intelligence. His journey through the eco-ruins brings him face to face with corporate shock troops, young marauders who grow no older than 18, designer drugs, an argumentative best friend, and romance in a violent wasteland, all set to the gutteral roar of Sam’s pavement pounding ’68 Pontiac GTO.

Helen Stringer grew up in Liverpool, England, and currently lives in Northern California. Here in the U.S., she studied film, winning several student film awards, and was a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies. She is the author of "Spellbinder "and "The Midnight Gate".