This review is part of a series covering each installment of the serialized novel Higher Cause, written by John Hunt and published by Laissez Faire Books. To catch up, start with the announcement, the book’s link-rich table of contents, and the first review.
The next installment of John Hunt’s serialized novel, Higher Cause, is out and ready for reading. Last time we met a couple characters and got a glimpse of a plot. This time we follow one of the two characters, Petur Bjarnasson, as he continues to recruit. We also find out more details of his plan, while the shadow of the villain is cast in Amsterdam.
Mr. Hunt is assembling the pieces of a real thriller — so far. While Petur is recruiting, he runs into his first obstacle, which tells him and us that someone is on to him and does not want him to succeed. He also has an unlikely encounter with someone he had glimpsed in another city. Petur invents an excuse for it, but as readers we suspect something else is up. The locations are also interesting, and it looks like we will be hopping all over the world over the course of the story.
Chapter three is a repetition of chapter one, with a different location and a new target. This time, Petur is recruiting a man named Thomas Standall to invest in his vision. The danger here is for the story to lag as we go over ground we have already gone over. Hunt does a good job of feeding us more information about the plan this time, which does go some way to keeping our interest, but I still got a bit of a restless feeling at the inevitable repetition. If I were to give advice on the structure of the opening, I would suggest omitting the prologue and, in chapter one, showing us only the very end of the sales pitch, where Onbacher agrees to invest $400 million. With this little bit of information and next to nothing else, curiosity would be piqued. Then, in chapter three, we can see the recruitment process rather than have to see a lot of it twice in a short time.
This review is part of a series covering each installment of the serialized novel Higher Cause, written by John Hunt and published by Laissez Faire Books. To catch up, start with the announcement, the book’s link-rich table of contents, and our initial news coverage.
Laissez Faire Books is serializing a novel by John Hunt, a libertarian and student of Austrian Economics. Titled Higher Cause, it promises to be an epic adventure story. The first installment (of 22) consists of a prologue and the first two chapters. The remaining installments will be published every Wednesday, followed by my reviews every Friday.
I am generally in favor of eschewing prologues, and though the present one was not uninteresting, at this point I feel it was unnecessary. It seemed to set up a mystery, but then the mystery was solved at the end of the first chapter. Also, all the major points of the prologue were covered in chapter one, in brief. I would say it was better to just get to the first chapter.
However, the author does a good job of enticing us with vague but interesting possibilities. In chapter one we meet Petur, who comes to a rich investor with a proposal in a manner reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged. The details are withheld from the reader, but some great error that threatens humanity has been discovered, and Petur is attempting to set things right, before it is too late, with a market-oriented plan of attack.
In the second chapter we meet Jeff, an undercover agent trying to throw a monkey wrench in the gears of a Mexican drug lord’s machine. He runs into a little trouble and a small twist at the end.
In case you missed the announcement, Laissez Faire Books is serializing a novel on its blog. The first installment (of 22) was published yesterday, and subsequent installments will be published weekly on Wednesdays. The novel, Higher Cause, appears to be a present-day to near-future thriller. The description mentions new forms of energy as well, so it may be a techno-political thriller or a bit science-fictional.
The author, John Hunt, is an Austro-libertarian and a medical doctor, “a pediatric pulmonologist and allergist, former navy officer, tenured associate professor at the University of Virginia, cofounder of several companies, as well as Trusted Angels Foundation.” His bio also mentions that he’s written another novel titled Assume the Physician, “a spicy, eye-opening, tear-jerking, belly-laughing romp, and is chicken soup for anyone who struggles in the medical system of America.”
Hunt describes his novel as having “timely sweeping themes, active free-thinking characters, conflicts affecting the world, spies, guns, explosions, new forms of energy, sinister conspiracies, government plots, nationalization, destruction, and hope.”
Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.
I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.
Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.
Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.
Jeffrey Tucker: Both books cover the unconventional side of private life as governed by the market and human volition. I guess you could say that this is my beat. I’m interested in the myriad ways in which the government’s central plan — and there is such a thing — has distorted and changed our lives, and also interested in the ways we can get around this plan and still live fulfilling lives. I take it as a given that everything that government does is either useless or destructive or both. The government does a tremendous number of things, so this is a huge area. Bourbon is more focused on the rottenness of the state and its harm, while Jetsons is more the marvelous things that markets do for us. Neither subject gets the attention they deserve.
AM: These books are available for free online in PDF and EPUB formats. Explain why you’ve chosen to make your work freely and widely available.
JT: Every writer wants to be read, so it only makes sense for all writers to post their material. Of course publishers tend to intervene here with promises of royalties in exchange for which you become their slave for the rest of your life plus 70 years (that’s when they dance on your grave). This is the essence of copyright. It is a bad deal for writers. Those who go along with it these days nearly always regret it later. If they actually earn royalties — and very few actually do — it is likely they would have earned more had the material not been withheld pending payment. The bestselling books of 2012 — the Hunger Games series — are posted by pirates everywhere, even against publisher wishes. But, you know, this is starting to change. Publishers are gradually seeing the point to posting material online. Sadly, they aren’t budging on the copyright issue, which is really pathetic. No libertarian should ever publish anything with any institution that is not willing to embrace a very liberal policy on reprints, and one that is likely enforceable such as Creative Commons — Attribution. Meanwhile, the government is using copyright, a phony form of property rights, to step up its despotic control over the digital age. The situation is extremely dangerous. One hundred years from now, they will be laughing at our times and poking fun at how the anachronistic state tried its best to thwart progress.
![\"\"](\"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/noscript?tag=prometheusunbound-20\")