novels

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.

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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.

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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.”

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The Libertarian Futurist Society issued a press release on Friday, July 13th, announcing the winners (plural) of the 2012 Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Novel.

The winners and finalists, with links to our reviews:

The Winners

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman (consistently came in last in voting for our Lightmonthly Read selection; not yet reviewed)

The Finalists

• The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge
• In the Shadow of Ares by Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson
• The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod
• Snuff by Terry Pratchett (our current Lightmonthly Read; review coming in early August)

The 2012 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award winner is “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.

Our Take

We’re not sure we would have recommended any of the finalists for the Prometheus Award this year.

We haven’t read The Freedom Maze yet, so we can’t question its selection as a co-winner. Maybe it is worthy and we’ll discover this if and when we get around to reading it. Clearly it meets the criteria of the LFS voting membership.

While we enjoyed Ready Player One we do not think it was libertarian enough to qualify for the Prometheus Award. The same goes for The Children of the Sky and The Restoration Game.

While In the Shadow of Ares was libertarian enough, and apparently written by actual libertarians (unlike many Prometheus Award winners), and we enjoyed it, we do think the writing quality was not quite there. The authors are ones to keep an eye on, however.

We’re currently reading Snuff and, as one would expect from Terry Pratchett, it is well written. Whether we think it is unambiguously libertarian enough remains to be seen. We’ll publish a review in early August.

We’d love to publish a review of Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, if anyone is interested in submitting one.

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For the month of July we are reading and discussing another Prometheus Award finalist,

Snuff — A Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett (winner of a Prometheus Award for Night Watch, also set in Discworld), Snuff blends comedy, drama, satire, suspense, and mystery as a police chief investigates the murder of a goblin and finds himself battling discrimination. The mystery broadens into a powerful drama to extend the world’s recognition of rights to include these long-oppressed and disdained people with a sophisticated culture of their own.

It’s currently available on Amazon in hardcover and Kindle ebook and Audible audiobook formats. Buy your copy today, via the affiliate links above, and help support our work here at Prometheus Unbound.

Join us as we read and discuss Snuff.

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Living Proof is the opera prima of Kira Peikoff, the daughter of Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff. In it, Peikoff uses a near-future setting to explore the logical conclusion of certain prolife arguments with which she disagrees. The plot of this thriller is well-structured and the writing, notwithstanding the occasional imperfection, is decent. However, in the end it gave me the same feeling I get from a dish made from good ingredients that nevertheless wants salt. Or pepper. Or oregano. Or something.

Arianna — a protagonist in the Randian tradition — is a brave, rational, free-thinking and beautiful doctor working at a fertility clinic in New York City in the year 2028. Embryos have been given the same legal status as human beings, and the Department of Embryo Protection is tasked with making sure that embryos not used in implantation are frozen and taken care of instead of being disposed of. The DEP chief becomes suspicious of Arianna when her clinic experiences a sudden and inexplicable surge in popularity. He sends Trent Rowe undercover to earn Arianna’s trust so he can find out what she is up to and if she is “murdering” embryos. What Trent discovers will challenge his beliefs, and he must make a choice between what he was raised to believe, and what Arianna has taught him.

Peikoff’s prose is decent, although she occasionally misuses words, which sound like notes of a melody played flat. On page 58, for instance, she uses “pretext” when she means “pretense.” On page 55 she uses “oblivion” when she cannot possibly have meant it.

She also has an affinity for metaphors, some of which go off well and help elucidate an idea. For instance, on page 261 she writes, “But recently the cells had been tantalizingly close to the goal, developing as astrocytes or microglia instead of oligodendrocytes, like Cokes instead of Diet Cokes.” However, there are just as many times when no metaphor is needed, or the one she chooses takes the reader out of the story. A good example is on page 163, where a character is said to be “trapped in an ethical straitjacket, laced tight with emotional strings.” It is not that the metaphor cannot convey the idea, but the particular one used seems a little silly and distracting, like a knowledgeable professor whose belly spills over the waistline of the pants he bought when he was 40 pounds lighter.

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