REVIEW: The Powers of the Earth, by Travis J. I. Corcoran

The Powers of the Earth, Travis J. I. Corcoran (self-published, 2017).

A compelling story needs a convincing villain. The bad guy’s motivations and reasoning must seem completely reasonable once you’re inside their head, or else your reader will be torn from the page and the story will fall flat. You can sort of skirt this requirement with some kinds of genre literature — an evil wizard so warped by exposure to fell magics that he’s lost his humanity, a truly alien cosmic horror — but traditional “hard” science fiction¹ isn’t one of them: you really do need a modicum of realism to make the whole thing work, including plausible behavior from your human antagonists. And alas, this has become increasingly difficult to find in mainstream sci-fi, where the authorship is shifting ever farther towards a particularly online brand of politically polarized nerd — and the bad guys increasingly resemble their political opponents.

The most dramatically bad example I’ve read recently² was a novel that suddenly gave POV chapters to its minor antagonist, a cut-rate Baron Harkonnen, who had heretofore appeared only to cause trouble for our heroes and be racist against aliens. All of which was fine, and none of what he did “on screen” was out of character for a humans-first aristocrat who valued loyalty and hierarchy — but it all fell apart as soon as we were inside his head. His entire internal monologue was so defensive, so full of references to how obviously everyone else would think his behavior was reprehensible, that it was immediately clear the author really couldn’t understand how anyone could think this way. A sympathetic portrayal of alien psychology is one thing, but the outgroup—! Well, they’re obviously just bad people, and they must know (deep down) that they’re bad, because we all know they’re bad…

And yet Travis Corcoran, who is an anarcho-capitalist New Hampshire state legislator and prolific Twitter poaster — and therefore definitionally a particularly online brand of politically polarized nerd (though not the kind who gets a Tor contract) — has nevertheless produced a book full of “bad guys” who actually sound like, well, like they sound in real life. Maybe this isn’t a complete shock, since the Right is usually better at understanding the Left than vice versa, but it’s all the more notable because the setting for his Aristillus series is basically the right-wing version of those pants-wetting near-future dystopias that come out every few years. You know the ones I mean: the Christian Nationalists have taken over and banned contraception and Islam and dancing…

The Powers of the Earth is set forty years from now, when the Global Fair Deal’s command economy has mired Earth in a long-term depression, profitable businesses have been shut down and their CEOs put on trial, military fitness standards have been relaxed to accommodate “alternatively abled soldiers,” the Bureau of Sustainable Research bans technological innovation because it destroys jobs, and on and on.

So obviously a bunch of libertarians have moved to the Moon.

You’ll have to Photoshop in your own Gadsden flag.

If “libertarian moon colony” sounds vaguely familiar, it should: this is a pastiche of Robert Heinlein’s classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, complete with pitched battles in the lunar tunnels and phone calls with the super-intelligent moon computer. (Robin Hanson objected to the latter, but come on, you can’t do The Moon is a Harsh Mistress without the super-intelligent moon computer.)³ But while the basic premise is very similar — libertarian moon colony battles oppressive Earth regime for their freedom — the setup is subtly different. Heinlein’s characters are on the Moon because they’re the descendants of prisoners trapped in their lunar Australia by low-g physiological changes, and they’re revolting against an oppressive Earth government that’s stripping them of their natural resources and will shortly doom them to starvation. Corcoran’s, on the other hand, are there on purpose. They’ve encountered an unsustainable situation on Earth and chosen exit; their new home in the Aristillus crater is something like what Galt’s Gulch might have been if Ayn Rand had given a hoot about realistic worldbuilding.

This, by the way, is the thing people don’t get about space. Every time humanity takes some tiny step along the path to becoming a multiplanetary species (by which I mean “every time SpaceX does something cool”), someone comes along and complains that it seems kind of pointless. The Moon is very far away, Mars is even farther, and we have this whole big planet right here that’s already full of “uninhabitable” regions like the Sahara or the Antarctic or, uh, the entire American West. Starting there seems easier, since they already have things important elements such as “air” and “water” and “a biosphere.” Play your cards right and you won’t even need a passport, let alone a spaceship. A friend of mine even coined the slogan: “Terraform Terra first.”

But this misses the point. Yes, space colonization appeals because it’s part of the wizardly dream of innovation, of building new and exciting things, and thus has an aesthetic draw that goes beyond practical arguments. Yes, long-term we probably shouldn’t put all our civilizational eggs at the bottom of one gravity well. And yes, many humans have a Promethean (Faustian? Icarusian?) drive to expand, to explore, to see what’s beyond the horizon. All of which is a pull to space.

Now pause for a moment and think about what would actually happen if you decided to set up your terran terraforming in, say, the Owyhee Desert of southwestern Idaho. There’s a river in parts of it. It rains occasionally, and snows in the winter. Whatever techniques you were planning to generate power and conserve water on Mars would certainly work in Idaho — more efficiently, for solar, since we’re closer to the source, and with more margin of error if you can add water to the system. Plus the desert is full of exciting minerals you can mine to sell or even to extract water from! And the second you tried, the Bureau of Land Management (which owns most of the Owyhee, and indeed most of the American West) and the Environmental Protection Agency (which has opinions about mining) and the ranchers (who would also like to use that water, thank you) will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

That’s the push to space.

The dream of space colonization is partly about all the ways it would be cool to live on Mars or the Moon. But it’s also, implicitly or explicitly, a claim that it’s easier to solve enormous technical challenges (air! water! food! solar radiation!) than it is to solve societal challenges on Earth. Terraforming is hard; eunomiforming is harder.⁴

The Aristillus crater.

Of course, these aren’t entirely separate issues, because even in your anarcho-capitalist moon colony there are still people, which means there’s still a society and there’s still politics. And perhaps unexpectedly, this is one place The Powers of the Earth shines. After all, if you’re doing essentially utopian worldbuilding to demonstrate the practicality — nay, the superiority!— of your personal philosophy, it would be tempting to focus only on the good parts, right? You’re writing the darn thing to show people how cool neo-Jacobitism/the LaRouche movement/meritocratic neoliberal managerialism really is, so why would you draw attention to the bad? Well, because we live in a fallen world and even a “better” system will have its flaws and weaknesses, so it’s nice to see those weaknesses show up honestly in the story.

The Aristillus colony really does operate quite effectively along the lines laid out by various anarcho-capitalist theorists (there’s a scene where the hero grits his teeth and pays through the nose to drive faster on the road), but it’s also full of examples of the weaknesses inherent to that system. Some of these are obvious — not having a state, it turns out, is extremely inconvenient when you’re trying to run a war — but the opening conflict of the book turns on a much more prosaic issue with private land registries. It’s exactly the kind of problem that would pop up in the absence of a government to enforce property rights, and it’s much more interesting than a system that would be running perfectly if it weren’t for those meddling Earthlings.

Just as Corcoran creates plot out of an honest reckoning with the weaknesses of his system, he does something similar with his hero. There are a number of viewpoint characters, but the main protagonist is Aristillus colony founder and tunnel-building magnate Mike Martin — and since I’ve already told you that this is a libertarian political manifesto thinly disguised as a novel about space colonization, you probably have an immediate mental picture of him, right? Broad-shouldered and jut-jawed! Determined! Charismatic! (Or at least the author keeps saying so; in practice these guys aren’t even sturdy enough to be considered “wooden” and instead display all the personality of a cardboard cutout.) And his great weakness, if he has one at all, is the tragic backstory that provides his motivation.

Well, that’s how it goes in most novels about ideas, because they’re more about idea than story, but this isn’t one of those. Mike Martin is short-tempered and hard-headed, politically tone-deaf, with vanishingly little patience for anyone who disagrees with him but endless attention for infrastructure and engineering projects…and all of these things cause major problems for him, repeatedly. These are not the kinds of flaws you list in your job interview to make yourself look good (“I just care too much”), these are realistic and convincing limitations — drawn, as far as one can tell from Twitter persona, more or less directly from the author himself. It’s frankly an impressive display of both self-knowledge and self-confidence; the idea of writing a story where things go pear-shaped because of my own personal character flaws makes me want to hide under the table.

I suppose I should say at this point that I am not now and have never been a libertarian, except in the most lame and boring State Capacity Libertarian-y kind of way, but some of my best friends I am libertarian-adjacent: they’re more or less my people, even if I think they’re wrong about some big stuff.⁵ But I’m close enough to get the jokes (a favorite: a character looking for a new spot for lunch consults the Cowen Wiki), and the book may be less fun if you don’t. Then again, though, once-niche libertarian ideas like prediction markets are now mainstream in plenty of circles, and even a reader who’s never giggled at Murray Rothbard’s play about Ayn Rand⁶ will have plenty to recognize and enjoy.

I’ll confess, though: I almost didn’t read this book. Actually, for several years I didn’t. I was vaguely aware of its existence, but I’d pretty much stopped reading new speculative fiction because I finally admitted to myself that it was pure masochism that kept me beating my head against the wall of newly-published extruded genre product when I had sixty-plus years of Hugo and Nebula nominees to choose from. Sure, every novel will reflect something of its age’s concerns (there’s a lot of nuclear war in those old Hugo winners!), but it’s gotten much worse in the last ten or fifteen years: every book that gets any buzz is so deeply inflected with questions of personal liberation from oppressive structures, so little nuanced and so obsessed with identity and representation, that I find it borderline unreadable. A few books like that, done well — fine, that’s part of life, that’s certainly a kind of story you can tell. But when it’s everything, when it becomes a precondition for publication, you’re left with a tragically denuded sample of the human experience. It’s not that I don’t want to read a book where I disagree with the underlying politics, it’s that an unsubtle obsession with the “correct” politics makes a book boring and cringe. One-dimensionally “right-wing” fiction written in reaction to the contemporary mainstream is just as bad — worse, perhaps, because if done well it’s the sort of thing I would really enjoy.⁷

But it turns out this one is, and I did.

1. “What makes something science fiction” is an interestingly loaded question, because we tend to use the term in two different ways: sci-fi is both a kind of story in which the author posits a moderately-plausible technological change and shows us how the world changes with it, but it is also a kind of window-dressing involving spaceships, robots, laser-guns, etc.

Structurally, Star Wars is fantasy (down to the evil wizard warped by exposure to fell magics), but it’s also obviously sci-fi. It’s much more difficult to go the other way and create a story that’s structurally traditional sci-fi but dressed up like a typical fantasy novel, because admitting magic is such a far-reaching and fundamental change to the fictional universe, but Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founder’s Trilogy and the RPG Spire both pull off fairly convincing cyberpunk with fantasy trappings.

2. I won’t name it because I enjoyed the author’s other work.

3. I’ll grant, however, that Corcoran’s uplifted dog subplot is new.

4. Though to his credit Corcoran has a diverse portfolio: in addition to the space colonization dreams, he’s tackling the “terraform Terra” angle with an active homestead (he’s written some guides) and the “improve society somewhat” approach through more direct political engagement than I’ve ever done.

5. Lunar politics produces strange bedfellows, and one recurring argument is with the leader of the Mormon émigrés who thinks there absolutely should be a laws, and a state, they should just be good ones. I’m with that guy.

6. "Keith, would you like a cigarette? Here, this is a particularly rational brand."

7. There’s nothing worse than poor execution of an incredible idea, because it means no one else will come along and do the incredible idea right. Austin Grossman’s Crooked, for instance, is Richard Nixon vs. Cosmic Horrors, which is a brilliant premise (yes, the Interstate Highway System is definitely an eldritch sigil designed to protect America, I will not accept any argument) but falls apart on the totally ahistorical version of our 37th President designed to justify making him the “good guy.” The real Nixon is such a fascinating and compelling figure — why not keep him as weird and twitchy and striving as he actually was and have him be the good guy anyway?

Or, say, the Napoleon movie.