You've achieved something I've been hoping for decades someone would pull off - a book that is at once an affectionate tribute to and criticism/response to "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress".
The Aristillus books are very strong.
--
Eric S Raymond, author The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Better than "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
-- Russel May
Just what the market for libertarian SF is crying out for.
-- Ken MacLeod, author of The Cassinni Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Newton's Wake
Humor, firepower, and dogs! Very L Neil Smith-ish.
-- Claire Wolfe, author of 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
Just plain cool.
-- Kurt Schlichter, author People's Republic
One of the most riveting and fascinating books I've read in years. Highly recommended.
-- Robert Kroese, author of Mercury Falls, The Big Sheep and Starship Grifters.
The work of a professional writer who knows how fiction works and uses narrative techniques and tropes consciously and purposefully.
-- William H Stoddard, author of GURPS Steampunk
I'm sure this can be justified as your lovely American free speech and not hate speech or malicious communication, and yes, I'm sure Corcoran has a perfect right to say it and all that shit. Guess what? I have a perfect right not to like it, and a right to not be associated with the nutter who spews it.
-- Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, Iron Man Extremis, The Authority
Stupid, ill-advised, and, frankly, immoral
-- Radley Balko, former Huffington Post senior writer
How is Travis Corcoran still a free man?
-- The Daily Kos
Optimistic fiction with ornery and insistent individualism
I came of age reading the great science fiction novels of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, but somewhere between the 1980s and today, though, science fiction went wrong.
The science, the stories, the heroism that made science fiction great - these have given way to novelisations of TV shows and movies and video games, space melodramas, and stories about social justice, women, and marginalized people. I wanted that great science fiction back - so I wrote the books I wanted to see on the shelves. This is a project to get those books into your hands.
Eric S Raymond, open source luminary, author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and science fiction fan, once said that "hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards" and that hard SF is characterized by "radical transformation, optimism, applied science as our best hope, the lust for possibilities". He then went on to say that the core of science fiction is libertarian, and defined SF's libertarian tradition as "ornery and insistent individualism, veneration of the competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and treats all political ideologizing with suspicion".
This perfectly describes the kind of science fiction I love ... and the kind of science fiction that I can't find on the shelves any more.
I've flipped past thousands of books featuring tattooed Strong Woman vampire hunters, Hollywood love stories that have nothing to do with science fiction except that they're set on a spaceship, tales of beautiful intuitive women who must choose between suitors while arranging a revolution against the Bad People, adolescent wizards, and more, while looking for the novels I want to read.
Where are the Heinleins, the Nivens, the Pournelles, of today? Sure, there are a few - but not enough.
Out of frustration, I finally wrote the novels that I wanted to read - and with this kickstarter, you can read them too.
The two books of the Aristillus series deliver what Eric S Raymond described as the ideal. It's a big Neal Stephenson-esque tale - a true science fiction story - with lots of hard science, although mostly in the background. It doesn't clobber the reader over the head, but all of the science (aside from one or two big "this is the fictional bit!" pieces) is plausible, from the space suit technology and the implicit calculations of potassium superoxide CO2 scrubbing, to the reentry speeds of various ships, to lunar geology (selenology). It also doesn't clobber the reader w politics, either!
...but more important than that is the tone of the story. I've had more than enough tales where everything man does is garbage and we need to trust in Gaia, or the powers of logic lead us astray and we really need to listen to our hearts, or the conflict is resolved in the end by realizing that everyone was actually a little bit wrong and the secret is to listen to each other.
Ugh. No.
These novels tell a story with a good team and a bad team. Our heroes want to be left alone, free to live their own lives. The villains are nosy, intrusive, and think that they should make decisions for everyone. That's not to say that it's a treacly morality tale - there are shades of gray, good people stuck on the wrong side of a bad situation, and characters torn between differing virtues. But it is a story of with good guys, and those people have a belief in the power of logic, heroism, and Thinking Big.
And, finally, this is a self consciously - and unashamedly - libertarian story. It's got competent men and women who believe in their right to be free, and are frankly unreasonable about it - they refuse to do what they're told, they refuse to knuckle under and obey their betters, they refuse to believe that the best days of mankind and the west are behind them. They dream big and work hard to make their dreams happen. They are ornery and insistent individualists, and if they have to write open source code, build spaceships, dig tunnels, or weld armor plate to turn bulldozers into tanks in order to fight for their freedom, that's exactly what they'll do. They have no tolerance for carbon permits, political correctness, listening to their betters, or waiting for permission.
A note on quality
If you're like me you've probably read a fair bit of self published fiction that is, to be frank, garbage. I'm disgusted by the lack of craftsmanship I've seen in so much self published work. There are often typos galore, duplicated words, hackneyed phrases, and beginner level mistakes in grammar.
...but worse than that, the stories are often trite, have embarrassingly implausible dialogue, mistakes in pacing, Mary Sue characters (just like the author, but super-awesome at everything), and reveals and twists that weren't properly set up. The stories often fail to explain the stakes, make us care about the characters and their struggles, or raise the tension appropriately before releasing it with a climax.
A satisfying novel is actually a very tricky and complicated piece of social technology, and it's not one that someone can get right on the first try...or even the second or the third.
This was something I learned the hard way. I've been publishing non-fiction articles in national magazines since I was 13 ("Revised AD&D Combat Tables" in Dragon Magazine issue #117 (buffs nails on shirt)), and it was a surprise to me that even after one has a mastery of the English language, fiction is a second and unique challenge.
It took me five drafts, and over a million words of practice before I finished writing this, and even then, it wasn't done until after I'd paid to have the entire thing professionally proof-read.
In short: the white hot core of science fiction is tales of competent men and women fighting for their ideals against forces that would hold them back. These tales are worth reading only when they're well-executed: realistic and interesting characters, good writing, good dialogue, steady and confident pacing, and an exciting payoff that is not merely justified but required by all that has gone before."
I strongly think that the Aristillus series delivers the goods, and I think you will too.
About the Author
Travis J I Corcoran is a Catholic anarcho-capitalist, a software engineer, and a business owner. He is an amateur at farming, wood turning, blacksmithing, cooking, throwing ceramic pots, and a few other things.
He lives on a 50 acre farm in New Hampshire with his wife, dogs, livestock, and a variety of lathes and milling machines.
Travis has had non-fiction articles published in several national magazines including Dragon, Make, and Fine Homebuilding.
The Powers of the Earth is his first novel.
![The Powers of the Earth (Aristillus Book 1) by [Travis J. I. Corcoran]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51vyIGDMubL._SY346_.jpg)
