- Corcoran, Travis J. I.
The Powers of the Earth.
New Hampshire: Morlock Publishing, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-9733-1114-0.
Corcoran, Travis J. I.
Causes of Separation.
New Hampshire: Morlock Publishing, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-9804-3744-4.
-
(Note: This is novel is the first of an envisioned four volume
series titled Aristillus. It and the second
book, Causes of Separation,
published in May, 2018, together tell a single story which
reaches a decisive moment just as the first book ends.
Unusually, this will be a review of both novels, taken
as a whole. If you like this kind of story at all, there's no
way you'll not immediately plunge into the second book after
setting down the first.)
Around the year 2050, collectivists were firmly in power
everywhere on Earth. Nations were subordinated to the United
Nations, whose force of Peace Keepers (PKs) had absorbed all
but elite special forces, and were known for being simultaneously
brutal, corrupt, and incompetent. (Due to the equality laws,
military units had to contain a quota of “Alternatively
Abled Soldiers” who other troops had to wheel into
combat.) The United States still existed as a country, but after
decades of rule by two factions of the Democrat party: Populist
and Internationalist, was mired in stagnation, bureaucracy,
crumbling infrastructure, and on the verge of bankruptcy. The
U.S. President, Themba Johnson, a former talk show host who
combined cluelessness, a volatile temper, and vulpine cunning
when it came to manipulating public opinion, is confronted
with all of these problems and looking for a masterstroke to
get beyond the next election.
Around 2050, when the collectivists entered the inevitable end
game their policies lead to everywhere they are tried, with the
Bureau of Sustainable Research (BuSuR) suppressing new technologies
in every field and the Construction Jobs Preservation Act and
Bureau of Industrial Planning banning anything which might increase
productivity, a final grasp to loot the remaining seed corn
resulted in the CEO Trials aimed at the few remaining successful
companies, with expropriation of their assets and imprisonment
of their leaders. CEO Mike Martin manages to escape from prison and
link up with renegade physicist Ponnala (“Ponzie”) Srinivas,
inventor of an anti-gravity drive he doesn't want the slavers to
control. Mike buys a rustbucket oceangoing cargo ship,
equips it with the drive, an airtight compartment and life
support, and flees Earth with a cargo of tunnel boring machines
and water to exile on the Moon, in the crater
Aristillus
in Mare Imbrium on the lunar near side where, fortuitously, the
impact of a metal-rich asteroid millions of years ago enriched the
sub-surface with metals rare in the Moon's crust.
Let me say a few words about the anti-gravity drive, which is very
unusual and original, and whose properties play a significant
role in the story. The drive works by coupling to the gravitational
field of a massive body and then pushing against it, expending
energy as it rises and gains gravitational potential energy. Momentum
is conserved, as an equal and opposite force is exerted on the
massive body against which it is pushing. The force vector is
always along the line connecting the centre of mass of the massive
body and the drive unit, directed away from the centre of mass.
The force is proportional to the strength of the gravitational
field in which the drive is operating, and hence stronger when
pushing against a body like Earth as opposed to a less massive
one like the Moon. The drive's force diminishes with distance from
the massive body as its gravitational field falls off with the
inverse square law, and hence the drive generates essentially no
force when in empty space far from a gravitating body. When used
to brake a descent toward a massive body, the drive converts
gravitational potential energy into electricity like the
regenerative braking system of an electric vehicle: energy which
can be stored for use when later leaving the body.
Because the drive can only push outward radially, when used to,
say, launch from the Earth to the Moon, it is much like
Jules Verne's giant
cannon—the launch must occur at the latitude
and longitude on Earth where the Moon will be directly
overhead at the time the ship arrives at the Moon. In
practice, the converted ships also carried auxiliary chemical
rockets and reaction control thrusters for trajectory
corrections and precision maneuvering which could not be
accomplished with the anti-gravity drive.
By 2064, the lunar settlement, called Aristillus by its
inhabitants, was thriving, with more than a hundred thousand
residents, and growing at almost twenty percent a year.
(Well, nobody knew for sure, because from the start the
outlook shared by the settlers was aligned with Mike Martin's
anarcho-capitalist worldview. There was no government, no
taxes, no ID cards, no business licenses, no regulations,
no zoning [except covenants imposed by property owners on those who
sub-leased property from them], no central bank, no paper
money [an entrepreneur had found a vein of gold left by
the ancient impactor and gone into business providing hard
currency], no elections, no politicians, no forms to fill
out, no police, and no army.) Some of these “features”
of life on grey, regimented Earth were provided by private
firms, while many of the others were found to be unnecessary
altogether.
The community prospered as it grew. Like many frontier
settlements, labour was in chronic short supply, and even
augmented by robot rovers and machines (free of the yoke of
BuSuR), there was work for anybody who wanted it and job offers
awaiting new arrivals. A fleet of privately operated ships
maintained a clandestine trade with Earth, bringing goods which
couldn't yet be produced on the Moon, atmosphere, water from the
oceans (in converted tanker ships), and new immigrants who had
sold their Earthly goods and quit the slave planet. Waves
of immigrants from blood-soaked Nigeria and chaotic China
established their own communities and neighbourhoods in the
ever-growing network of tunnels beneath Aristillus.
The Moon has not just become a refuge for humans. When
BuSuR put its boot on the neck of technology, it ordered the
shutdown of a project to genetically “uplift”
dogs to human intelligence and beyond, creating “Dogs”
(the capital letter denoting the uplift) and all existing
Dogs to be euthanised. Many were, but John (we never learn
his last name), a former U.S. Special Forces operator, manages
to rescue a colony of Dogs from one of the labs before the
killers arrive and escape with them to Aristillus, where
they have set up the Den and engage in their own priorities,
including role-playing games, software development, and
trading on the betting markets. Also rescued by John was
Gamma, the first Artificial General Intelligence to be created,
whose intelligence is above the human level but not (yet, anyway)
intelligence runaway singularity-level transcendent. Gamma has
established itself in its own facility in
Sinus
Lunicus on the other side of Mare Imbrium, and has little
contact with the human or Dog settlers.
Inevitably, liberty produces prosperity, and prosperity
eventually causes slavers to regard the free
with envious eyes,
and slowly and surely draw their plans against them.
This is the story of the first interplanetary conflict, and a
rousing tale of liberty versus tyranny, frontier innovation
against collectivised incompetence, and principles (there is
even the intervention of a Vatican diplomat) confronting brutal
expedience. There are delicious side-stories about the creation
of fake news, scheming politicians, would-be politicians in a
libertarian paradise, open source technology, treachery,
redemption, and heroism. How do three distinct species: human,
Dog, and AI work together without a top-down structure or
subordinating one to another? Can the lunar colony protect
itself without becoming what its settlers left Earth to escape?
Woven into the story is a look at how a libertarian society
works (and sometimes doesn't work) in practice. Aristillus
is in no sense a utopia: it has plenty of rough edges and
things to criticise. But people there are free, and
they prefer it to the prison planet they escaped.
This is a wonderful, sprawling, action-packed story with
interesting characters, complicated conflicts, and realistic
treatment of what a small colony faces when confronted by
a hostile planet of nine billion slaves. Think of this as Heinlein's
The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress done better. There are
generous tips of the hat to Heinlein and other science fiction
in the book, but this is a very different story with an entirely
different outcome, and truer to the principles of individualism
and liberty. I devoured these books and give them my highest
recommendation. The Powers of the Earth won the 2018
Prometheus
Award for best libertarian science fiction novel.
April 2019 