Freehold and Net Assets
I've recently read Freehold by Michael Z. Williamson. I got it on one of the packages at Webscription .
These packages are a great deal all around - the books are very reasonably priced for the reader, and since so many are series every time I buy a package I end getting another to cover the rest of another series. That part is great for the publisher, of course...
Freehold was very nice. The Freehold of the title is a planet that has an anarchy based society, in which everything goes great - crime is non-existent (even if everyone is heavily armed), taxes are minimal to none, etc.
(I can almost believe that could work - the citizens would need a completely different upbringing than any I've heard of, though)
The UN-unified Earth, very incompetent, of course, enters war because they can't tolerate how well they are doing without a heavy-handed government. Now that I can sure believe in...
One thing I thought was interesting were the paralels with Net Assets .
Net Assets is a (now free) e-book by Carl Bussjaeger with has strong anarcho-capitalistic leaning, in which a tiny, private company makes space launches possible by using a ground-effect based launcher and a small shuttle, and using simple off the shelf components whenever possible. Making NASA and the government look bad, at which point there is a war that ends in a very similar way to Freehold.
I have no idea if that launcher concept is really viable, but I do know that some of the "outside the box" techs mentioned are being developed (I even sold some of my software to a company that worked on inflatable space habitats - not as cool as my other sale to JPL but nice none the less).
If you read it and enjoy it, please donate something. I did.
The lack of sequels because of piracy is sad. However, I'd guess it is more because of being available only as an e-book in a single site (vs a large e-book site such as Fictionwise) than P2P users...
These packages are a great deal all around - the books are very reasonably priced for the reader, and since so many are series every time I buy a package I end getting another to cover the rest of another series. That part is great for the publisher, of course...
Freehold was very nice. The Freehold of the title is a planet that has an anarchy based society, in which everything goes great - crime is non-existent (even if everyone is heavily armed), taxes are minimal to none, etc.
(I can almost believe that could work - the citizens would need a completely different upbringing than any I've heard of, though)
The UN-unified Earth, very incompetent, of course, enters war because they can't tolerate how well they are doing without a heavy-handed government. Now that I can sure believe in...
One thing I thought was interesting were the paralels with Net Assets .
Net Assets is a (now free) e-book by Carl Bussjaeger with has strong anarcho-capitalistic leaning, in which a tiny, private company makes space launches possible by using a ground-effect based launcher and a small shuttle, and using simple off the shelf components whenever possible. Making NASA and the government look bad, at which point there is a war that ends in a very similar way to Freehold.
I have no idea if that launcher concept is really viable, but I do know that some of the "outside the box" techs mentioned are being developed (I even sold some of my software to a company that worked on inflatable space habitats - not as cool as my other sale to JPL but nice none the less).
If you read it and enjoy it, please donate something. I did.
The lack of sequels because of piracy is sad. However, I'd guess it is more because of being available only as an e-book in a single site (vs a large e-book site such as Fictionwise) than P2P users...
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