Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discovery.Get your FREE copy of Under the Ice by Marie-Hélène Lebeault!Beneath the frozen silence, a world awaits discoveryIn a future where the Earth's surface is uninhabitable, humanity survives under the ocean, within a protective Dome. Ryn, a unique individual unable to adapt to aquatic life like the others, faces a dire situation when the Dome's stability is compromised. As their only hope for survival lies beyond the icy barrier above, Ryn embarks on a perilous journey to the unknown.Science fiction and libertarian political philosophy have a long history together, perhaps “growing out of the 1930s and 1940s when the science-fiction pulp magazines were reaching their peak at the same time as fascism and communism…” resulting in “…speculations about societies (or sub-groups)…in direct opposition to ‘totalitarianism.’”Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.In 1979, this close association inspired sf author L. Neil Smith to create the Prometheus Award “to honor libertarian science fiction.”Dave Freer dedicates his 2023 Prometheus Award winning novel, Cloud-Castles, “[t]o the memory of the men and women of the Eureka Rebellion,” a reference I had to look up. The Eureka Rebellion started in 1851 as a series of protests by gold miners in Australia’s Colony of Victoria against its British administrators. Matters escalated over the next three years, ending with the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, in which twenty-seven people (mostly miners) died.Freer borrows a number of elements from Australia in general and the Eureka Rebellion in particular, transposing them to the gas-dwarf (mini-Neptune) world of Sybil III.The planet itself is mostly sky, punctuated by the eponymous cloud-castles (Freer never explains the hyphen) islands of “floating vegetation,” and the “trading-plate.”Freer’s describes the world he’s created in fascinating detail:Sybil III just had no land. None. Or none that any human could survive on. It was a gas dwarf world, and its solid core lay somewhere many, many miles down below at enormous temperatures and pressures. The lifezone, such as it was, was up in the outer atmosphere. It was a vast lifezone, just resource poor, and short of solid landing platforms.Two extraterrestrial, extrasybillian, and formerly imperialistic species inhabit the cloud-castles, which have been around longer than humans have been in space. Unfortunately, the Thrymi and the Zell hate each other. Their respective interstellar empires seem to have destroyed one another long ago, leaving the sybillian populations the only known (to humans, at least) examples of the two species.Thanks for reading The Cosmic Codex! This post is public so feel free to share it.Trade represented the one area of common interest between the two alien societies. Before their empires vanished, they built an “anti-gravity trading plate” in the skies of Sybil III to serve as neutral ground, a tradition the local aliens maintained even after their two species annihilated each other elsewhere.Humans first arrived on Sybil III aboard the failing FTL ship Botany Bay, which managed to crash on the trading plate. The survivors threw together a ramshackle settlement they named the “Big Syd”, made of scrap taken from the wrecked ship and whatever suitable native vegetation they could gather.By the time of the story, the Big Syd is a dangerous frontier town in which life reflects a Hobbesian state of nature—“poor, nasty, brutish” and often unnaturally short.Other human planets maintain embassies on the Big Syd. This is mainly due to competition over the hoped-for attentions of the Thrymi and Zell, who never-the-less tend to snub everyone equally.Enter Augustus StJohn Thistlewood III, youngest son of the wealthy Thistlewood industrial family on the planet Azure. Augustus is an idealistic university graduate. When he found working in his family’s factories as a boy had already taught him more engineering than his professors knew, he added sociology courses to his workload. As a result, he’s come to Sybil III to help “uplift” the local residents of the Big Syd out of poverty and ignorance.Augustus follows in the literary tradition of the “lucky fool.” While a brilliant, naturally gifted engineer, he has no “street smarts” at all. Time after time, this places him in perilous situations. Yet somehow everything seems to work out. He often remains blissfully ignorant of the chaos going on around him, which he himself has caused.Much of Augustus’ good luck is just that—luck. But some of it is manufactured by his local “guide,” Briz, who recognizes his wealth and naivety early and latches on to him as an easy meal ticket:“She didn’t care what he’d done to be made a remittance man here. It wasn’t something that she needed to know. There were a quite a few men and women that ...
