Book Review: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J.I. Corcoran
Libertarian SF on the Moon, with uplifted dogs.
Morlock Publishing, 2019, 663 pages
Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is hard at work making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals bolted privately-developed anti-gravity drives onto rusty sea-going cargo ships, loaded them to the gills with 20th-century tunnel-boring machines and earthmoving equipment, and set sail - for the Moon.
There, they built their retreat. A lunar underground border-town, fit to rival Ayn Rand's 'Galt's Gulch', with American capitalists, Mexican hydroponic farmers, and Vietnamese space-suit mechanics - this is the city of Aristillus.
There's a problem, though: the economic decline of Earth under a command-and-control economy is causing trouble for the political powers-that-be in Washington DC and elsewhere. To shore up their positions they need slap down the lunar expats and seize the gold they've been mining. The conflicts start small, but rapidly escalate.
There are zero-gravity gun fights in rusted ocean going ships flying through space, containers full of bulldozers hurtling through the vacuum, nuclear explosions, armies of tele-operated combat UAVs, guerrilla fighting in urban environments, and an astoundingly visual climax.
The Powers of the Earth is the first book in The Aristillus series - a pair of science fiction novels about anarchocapitalism, economics, open source software, corporate finance, social media, antigravity, lunar colonization, genetically modified dogs, strong AI…and really, really big guns.
I started this book as one of my Kindle Unlimited binge reads, which usually I DNF after a few chapters. This one held my attention, though, and I read it through to the end.
The Powers of the Earth is absolutely a love letter to Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you are not familiar with TMIAHM, it's widely considered one of Heinlein's best and most libertarian novels. (The degree to which Heinlein himself was actually a libertarian remains debatable.) It's about lunar colonists rebelling against tyrannical Earth authorities, with lots of moralizing, an AI deux ex machina, and railguns dropping big rocks on the planet at the wrong end of the gravity well.
The plot of The Powers of the Earth is essentially the same: freedom-loving expats have fled the authoritarian nation-states of Earth to set up a colony on the Moon. Eventually Earth decides to put a boot on them, and the lunar colonists must fight for their liberty.
Travis Corcoran includes Moon's free-wheeling libertarian frontier society aesthetic, and an AI who's more interesting than Heinlein's, but adds uplifted dogs that several people smuggled to the moon years ago to prevent the Bureau of Sustainable Research from euthanizing them all. The dogs are now genius hackers and engineers, but mentally they are teenagers. And they are still cursed with a lack of thumbs.
Not gonna lie, it was the doggos who hooked me.
The novel skips between multiple POVs. The main characters are John Hayes, a former US soldier who led the team that rescued the uplifted dogs from Earth and took them to the moon, and Mike Martin, the misanthropic founder of Aristillus. The chapters are mostly split between John, on a long hike/camping trip to the dark side of the moon with four dogs, and Mike, trying to run Aristillus and deal with legal and business shenanigans and the looming threat of an Earth invasion. We also occasionally get chapters from the POV of Earth "NPCs."
John, with his dogs, was actually my favorite part. The dogs had personalities as distinct as the humans, from Duncan, the nerd with canine ADD who uses virtual overlays to turn their hike into a Tolkien-themed MMORPG, to Max, the Angry Young ManPup who wants to start a race war against mankind ("present company excepted, of course," he says to John).
The Powers of the Earth did several things right. It made me keep reading despite my harsh "DNF early and often" policy towards KU downloads. It also made me want to reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I haven't read it in many years). Finally, it made me want to read the next book. This is part one of a duology, and unfortunately it ends on a cliffhanger; it's really a single two-volume novel.
It's not perfect, though. There is a lot of soapboxing, though it mostly stops short of being a one-sided polemic. Except when the main character, the founder of the Aristillus moon colony, who to be fair is portrayed as an asshole who's probably on the aspergers spectrum who keeps needing to be reined in by his more sensible friends, is going off on polemics. And ye gods, self-published authors, do some proofreading. Once again I started marking every typo and grammatical error, and I found over a dozen just with my casual read.
Aside from the typos, the writing was mostly fine, with some exposition but not too much infodumping. My chief objection was that the Earth adversaries are set up as very flat and mostly evil puppets who are meant to illustrate everything the author hates about governments and collectivism.
This is a very libertarian book by a very libertarian author (Travis Corcoran describes himself as a "Catholic anarcho-capitalist") and like Heinlein, Corcoran has lots of characters arguing and debating the merits of governments vs. no government, justifications for war, personhood (the uplifted dogs and the self-aware AI have the most interesting conversations), and other philosophical issues in Heinleinian style. (The AI even preemptively quotes Heinlein back at one of the dogs.) It is somewhat soapboxy; while interrogating the assumptions of anarcho-capitalism, and exposing some of the weaknesses of the ancap society built in Aristillus, the Earth characters are almost all caricatures, from the vacuous Oprah-like President of the United States to the scheming, power-hungry Senator who is her frenemy, to the dumb self-righteous rich college kids who come to the moon to FAFO, to amoral ladder-climbing military officers and other apparatchiks. All of them blindly accept the collectivist, innovation-suppressing tyranny of the government. The United States is a fading and broke socialist empire in decline, but still more or less top dog; China seems to have gone through Mao II Electric Boogaloo, there is a new Caliphate in the Middle East, and at some point Sudanese terrorists nuked Baltimore and now US troops are occupying much of Africa.
The setting is not hard SF; the technology and economics are handwaved a lot. The lunar colonists somehow acquired an "Anti-Gravity drive" which the Earth governments don't have. The US is in a half-century depression but still has the resources to maintain its global army (and pretty easily seizes some AG ships once they decide to do it). The lunar economy and industrial base seems surprisingly robust for being only a decade old. And the technology to create fully sapient, talking dogs and a self-aware AI are things that would radically change the world, but for now they are also, conveniently, confined to the moon.
Despite a few rough unpolished edges, The Powers of the Earth is an impressive debut novel from a self-published author, and I can see why libertarians love it (it won the Prometheus Award) and mainstream publishers don't. If you like SF books in the Heinleinian mold (hyper-competent people doing things in space against enemies with cardboard motivations), this feels like a Golden Age SF novel with updated technological and social references. A rare KU keeper.
My complete list of book reviews.
Morlock Publishing, 2019, 663 pages
Earth in 2064 is politically corrupt and in economic decline. The Long Depression has dragged on for 56 years, and the Bureau of Sustainable Research is hard at work making sure that no new technologies disrupt the planned economy. Ten years ago a band of malcontents, dreamers, and libertarian radicals bolted privately-developed anti-gravity drives onto rusty sea-going cargo ships, loaded them to the gills with 20th-century tunnel-boring machines and earthmoving equipment, and set sail - for the Moon.
There, they built their retreat. A lunar underground border-town, fit to rival Ayn Rand's 'Galt's Gulch', with American capitalists, Mexican hydroponic farmers, and Vietnamese space-suit mechanics - this is the city of Aristillus.
There's a problem, though: the economic decline of Earth under a command-and-control economy is causing trouble for the political powers-that-be in Washington DC and elsewhere. To shore up their positions they need slap down the lunar expats and seize the gold they've been mining. The conflicts start small, but rapidly escalate.
There are zero-gravity gun fights in rusted ocean going ships flying through space, containers full of bulldozers hurtling through the vacuum, nuclear explosions, armies of tele-operated combat UAVs, guerrilla fighting in urban environments, and an astoundingly visual climax.
The Powers of the Earth is the first book in The Aristillus series - a pair of science fiction novels about anarchocapitalism, economics, open source software, corporate finance, social media, antigravity, lunar colonization, genetically modified dogs, strong AI…and really, really big guns.
I started this book as one of my Kindle Unlimited binge reads, which usually I DNF after a few chapters. This one held my attention, though, and I read it through to the end.
The Powers of the Earth is absolutely a love letter to Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you are not familiar with TMIAHM, it's widely considered one of Heinlein's best and most libertarian novels. (The degree to which Heinlein himself was actually a libertarian remains debatable.) It's about lunar colonists rebelling against tyrannical Earth authorities, with lots of moralizing, an AI deux ex machina, and railguns dropping big rocks on the planet at the wrong end of the gravity well.
The plot of The Powers of the Earth is essentially the same: freedom-loving expats have fled the authoritarian nation-states of Earth to set up a colony on the Moon. Eventually Earth decides to put a boot on them, and the lunar colonists must fight for their liberty.
Travis Corcoran includes Moon's free-wheeling libertarian frontier society aesthetic, and an AI who's more interesting than Heinlein's, but adds uplifted dogs that several people smuggled to the moon years ago to prevent the Bureau of Sustainable Research from euthanizing them all. The dogs are now genius hackers and engineers, but mentally they are teenagers. And they are still cursed with a lack of thumbs.
Not gonna lie, it was the doggos who hooked me.
The novel skips between multiple POVs. The main characters are John Hayes, a former US soldier who led the team that rescued the uplifted dogs from Earth and took them to the moon, and Mike Martin, the misanthropic founder of Aristillus. The chapters are mostly split between John, on a long hike/camping trip to the dark side of the moon with four dogs, and Mike, trying to run Aristillus and deal with legal and business shenanigans and the looming threat of an Earth invasion. We also occasionally get chapters from the POV of Earth "NPCs."
John, with his dogs, was actually my favorite part. The dogs had personalities as distinct as the humans, from Duncan, the nerd with canine ADD who uses virtual overlays to turn their hike into a Tolkien-themed MMORPG, to Max, the Angry Young ManPup who wants to start a race war against mankind ("present company excepted, of course," he says to John).
The Powers of the Earth did several things right. It made me keep reading despite my harsh "DNF early and often" policy towards KU downloads. It also made me want to reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I haven't read it in many years). Finally, it made me want to read the next book. This is part one of a duology, and unfortunately it ends on a cliffhanger; it's really a single two-volume novel.
It's not perfect, though. There is a lot of soapboxing, though it mostly stops short of being a one-sided polemic. Except when the main character, the founder of the Aristillus moon colony, who to be fair is portrayed as an asshole who's probably on the aspergers spectrum who keeps needing to be reined in by his more sensible friends, is going off on polemics. And ye gods, self-published authors, do some proofreading. Once again I started marking every typo and grammatical error, and I found over a dozen just with my casual read.
Aside from the typos, the writing was mostly fine, with some exposition but not too much infodumping. My chief objection was that the Earth adversaries are set up as very flat and mostly evil puppets who are meant to illustrate everything the author hates about governments and collectivism.
This is a very libertarian book by a very libertarian author (Travis Corcoran describes himself as a "Catholic anarcho-capitalist") and like Heinlein, Corcoran has lots of characters arguing and debating the merits of governments vs. no government, justifications for war, personhood (the uplifted dogs and the self-aware AI have the most interesting conversations), and other philosophical issues in Heinleinian style. (The AI even preemptively quotes Heinlein back at one of the dogs.) It is somewhat soapboxy; while interrogating the assumptions of anarcho-capitalism, and exposing some of the weaknesses of the ancap society built in Aristillus, the Earth characters are almost all caricatures, from the vacuous Oprah-like President of the United States to the scheming, power-hungry Senator who is her frenemy, to the dumb self-righteous rich college kids who come to the moon to FAFO, to amoral ladder-climbing military officers and other apparatchiks. All of them blindly accept the collectivist, innovation-suppressing tyranny of the government. The United States is a fading and broke socialist empire in decline, but still more or less top dog; China seems to have gone through Mao II Electric Boogaloo, there is a new Caliphate in the Middle East, and at some point Sudanese terrorists nuked Baltimore and now US troops are occupying much of Africa.
The setting is not hard SF; the technology and economics are handwaved a lot. The lunar colonists somehow acquired an "Anti-Gravity drive" which the Earth governments don't have. The US is in a half-century depression but still has the resources to maintain its global army (and pretty easily seizes some AG ships once they decide to do it). The lunar economy and industrial base seems surprisingly robust for being only a decade old. And the technology to create fully sapient, talking dogs and a self-aware AI are things that would radically change the world, but for now they are also, conveniently, confined to the moon.
Despite a few rough unpolished edges, The Powers of the Earth is an impressive debut novel from a self-published author, and I can see why libertarians love it (it won the Prometheus Award) and mainstream publishers don't. If you like SF books in the Heinleinian mold (hyper-competent people doing things in space against enemies with cardboard motivations), this feels like a Golden Age SF novel with updated technological and social references. A rare KU keeper.
My complete list of book reviews.