"Red Sun: A Fictional History of Hawaii"

As a model for Alternative Futures for Hawaii

With authors Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson

Come and see the Japanese victorious at Pearl Harbor! Marvel as they successfully invade the Hawaiian Islands and restore the Monarchy, only to be repulsed later in bloody fighting by the Americans! See the Battle of Midway won by America's first and only use of the atomic bomb! Witness the horrible carnage as America invades and eventually defeats Japan! Stand in awe at Hawaiian independence achieved while Hawaii becomes a proud but shabby socialist nation: "The Cuba of the Pacific".

The authors of "Red Sun", Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson, History professors at Honolulu Community College, will lead a discussion of how they created the griping and convincing sequence of events in their alternative history of Hawaii's involvement in the Second World War.

For us the major questions are: what lessons can be learned for the futures of Hawaii? How can we imagine alternatives for Hawaii as plausible and convincing as their vision of a possible past?