trope: Libertarian fictions

Darkship Thieves

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Darkship Thieves
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Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.

Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

Cryptonomicon

Cryptonomicon
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Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse – mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy – is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 – commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe – is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy’s fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse’s crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a “data haven” in Southeast Asia – a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe’s tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat.

But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy, with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty…or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson’s most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring.

The Syndic

The Syndic
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Syndic versus Mob! The Syndic operated as a sort of gigantic protective league in what had once been the states east of the Mississippi. Here was a totally hedonistic society—moral inhibitions had gone the way of the horse. (Polo was played in jeeps with 50-calibre machine guns.)

The hopelessly corrupt old North American government had been driven literaly into the sea, but make occassional forays onto the mainland from bases on the coastal fringes of a Europe that had returned to the Dark Ages….

West of the Mississippi was Mob territory, a society whose entire system of values was totally opposed to the Syndic. Here morality ruled with an iron hand. When a wave of assassinations broke out in New Your, it was clealy time to take action against the Mob!

Lucifer’s Hammer

Lucifer's Hammer
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In this bestselling novel by the authors of THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, a massive comet breaks apart and bombards the Earth, with catastrophic results: worldwide earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thousand-foot tidal waves and seemingly endless rain… With civilization in ruins, individuals band together to survive and to build a new society. “A MEGATON OF SUSPENSEFUL EXCITEMENT … which should keep readers going non-stop, cover to cover” – Booklist.

“A work in the grand tradition … even the miracle of Sensurround may be inadequate to convey all the imaginative reverberations.”
– Los Angeles Times

“A ‘Disaster’ thriller of rare quality … for its expertise and the scale of its apocalypse … Strings out the suspense almost unbearably.”
– John Barkham Reviews

The Probability Broach

The Probability Broach
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Denver detective Win Bear, on the trail of a murderer, discovers much more than a killer. He accidentally stumbles upon the probability broach, a portal to a myriad of worlds–some wildly different from, others disconcertingly similar to our own. Win finds himself transported to an alternate Earth where Congress is in Colorado, everyone carries a gun, there are gorillas in the Senate, and public services are controlled by private businesses.

Kings of the High Frontier

Kings of the High Frontier
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Three-time Prometheus Award-winning novelist Victor Koman, who tracked down God in The Jehovah Contract and solved the abortion dilemma in Solomon’s Knife, brings you his epic novel of a past that might have been and a future that will drive humanity’s next stage of evolution: the jump into Space.

America, 1994. Nearly everything seems familiar: the World Trade Center twin towers watch proudly over Manhattan; the Russian space station Mir still orbits Earth; the International Space Station has yet to be built. This America, however, is not quite as we remember it: a sixth shuttle, Constitution, prepares to make its maiden voyage; Senator Ludlow Woolsey III and Dr. Barry Gibbon conspire to place the U.S. space program under the authority of the United Nations Interplanetary Treaty Organization; and the National Security Agency allies with NASA to prevent anyone from challenging the government’s monopoly on Space.

Tammy Reis, NASA Space Shuttle commander, works for the most highly funded, technologically advanced space program in the world. So why do nightmares of the Challenger disaster haunt her sleep? And why does her beloved NASA seem no longer capable of matching the stunning successes of its glorious past?

Billionaire Laurence Poubelle wants to build his own orbital X-15 spaceplane. Can his keen marketing skills overcome a decadent culture hostile to wealth and contemptuous of adventure? Can he single-handedly launch the greatest Space Race in history?

The great-great-great-great grand nephew of Davy Crockett and his cadre of college students secretly build a single-stage-to-orbit rocket-copter in an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx. Can anyone stop them before their low-rent launch attempt sets the New York skyline ablaze?

Russian nuclear missile commander Col. Vladimir Tuchapski subverts a disarmament treaty to attempt an impossible theft. Can he hijack the abandoned space station Mir and restore the glory of the crumbled Soviet Union?

Rocket engineer Gerald Cooper struggles in a tiny spacecraft-design company in the Mojave Desert. Who wants him stopped — or dead?

NSA operative Montgomery Barron fights to construct his own answer to clandestine launch-vehicle efforts: the orbital killer-spaceplane Huntress. Will he achieve the goal of Project Stark Fist to control the spaceways?

Shadowy black-marketeer and smuggler Marcus Aurelius Grant — hidden from scrutiny in a failed African state — concocts an ambitious conspiracy more daring than anyone can imagine. Tammy Reis — stripped of her astronaut wings for resisting a politician’s brutal advances in orbit — is recruited by the National Security Agency to infiltrate Grant’s inner circle. When she discovers his deepest secret, she faces an impossible choice: duty to her government or loyalty to her heart, mind, and soul.

Molon Labe!

Molon Labe!
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After a decade of retaking their stolen freedoms, the people of Wyoming (many of them newcomers) are forced to finally confront their jealous masters in the U.S. Government. Can a lone, courageous state successfully resist federal tyranny, or has the Bill of Rights been reduced to a myth? Can an allegedly free people act free, or is our liberty just a 4th of July farce?
These issues weigh heavily on the shoulders of Governor James Wayne Preston, a decorated Desert Storm Marine helo pilot. Elected in 2014 on the Laissez-Faire Party ticket, he enjoys nearly full support of the legislature to return Wyoming to a long-lost era of liberty. But how far can he and the people of his state go before Washington, D.C. feels compelled to act? Will Wyoming’s free and independent course reach actual secession? Will President Melvin Connor suppress the maverick Western state with federal troops? Will anybody come to Wyoming’s aid?
Molon Labe! is a fictional account of a real-world blueprint for a free state initiative focused on Wyoming. If enough freedom-loving individuals will relocate there under a useful pattern, they can “liberate” the Cowboy State on many levels. In Wyoming we could truly enjoy our rights of gun ownership, privacy, schooling, health and diet, unrestricted travel, and property. Boston shows us how it actually can be done!

The Corporation Wars trilogy

The Corporation Wars trilogy
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From Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated author Ken MacLeod, an action-packed space opera told against a backdrop of interstellar drone warfare, virtual reality, and an A.I. revolution.

Carlos is dead. A soldier who died for his ideals a thousand years ago, he’s been reincarnated and conscripted to fight an A.I. revolution in deep space. And he’s not sure he’s fighting for the right side.

Seba is alive.

By a fluke of nature, a contractual overlap, and a loop in its subroutines, this lunar mining robot has gained sentience. Gathering with other “freeboots,” Seba is taking a stand against the corporations that want it and its kind gone.

Against a backdrop of warring companies and interstellar drone combat, Carlos and Seba must either find a way to rise above the games their masters are playing, or die. And even dying will not be the end of it.

They’ve died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.

Beggars in Spain

Beggars in Spain
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In a world where the slightest edge can mean the difference between success and failure, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent … and one of an ever-growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep.

Once considered interesting anomalies, now Leisha and the other “Sleepless” are outcasts — victims of blind hatred, political repression, and shocking mob violence meant to drive them from human society … and, ultimately, from Earth itself.

But Leisha Camden has chosen to remain behind in a world that envies and fears her “gift” — a world marked for destruction in a devastating conspiracy of freedom … and revenge.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
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Vividly imagined, stunningly prophetic, and epic in scope, The Diamond Age is a major novel from one of the most visionary writers of our time

Decades into our future, a stone’s throw from the ancient city of Shanghai, a brilliant nanotechnologist named John Percival Hackworth has just broken the rigorous moral code of his tribe, the powerful neo-Victorians. He’s made an illicit copy of a state-of-the-art interactive device called A Young Ladys Illustrated Primer  Commissioned by an eccentric duke for his grandchild, stolen for Hackworth’s own daughter, the Primer’s purpose is to educate and raise a girl capable of thinking for herself. It performs its function superbly. Unfortunately for Hackworth, his smuggled copy has fallen into the wrong hands.

Young Nell and her brother Harv are thetes—members of the poor, tribeless class.  Neglected by their mother, Harv looks after Nell.  When he and his gang waylay a certain neo-Victorian—John Percival Hackworth—in the seamy streets of their neighborhood, Harv brings Nell something special: the Primer.

Following the discovery of his crime, Hackworth begins an odyssey of his own. Expelled from the neo-Victorian paradise, squeezed by agents of Protocol Enforcement on one side and a Mandarin underworld crime lord on the other, he searches for an elusive figure known as the Alchemist.  His quest and Nell’s will ultimately lead them to another seeker whose fate is bound up with the Primer—a woman who holds the key to a vast, subversive information network that is destined to decode and reprogram the future of humanity.