Book Review: The Powers of the Earth

A novel too good to be any author's first foray into long fiction

Imagine a mashup of the best elements of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Atlas Shrugged, with a little Neal Stephenson and David Brin thrown in for good measure. That's The Powers of the Earth, a novel too good to be any author's first foray into long fiction. It's certainly no surprise that this book and its sequel, Causes of Separation, won back-to-back Prometheus Awards. They're just damn good books.

The story

The title comes from the U.S. Declaration of Independence ("When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth..."), so as you might expect, TPoTE tells the story of a revolution. And since it's sci-fi, that revolution naturally takes place on the Moon.

Corcoran clearly modeled his novel on TMiaHM, but TPotE is no mere pastiche. Corcoran riffs on and remixes the elements of Heinlein's masterpiece and adds much that is uniquely his. Warning: TPotE is a loooonnngggg book (Amazon says the Kindle version is 663 pages), and it's only the first book in the series. The second is out now, and Corcoran is rumored to be working on a third (and final?) book.

The characters

As befits a tale with the scope of TPotE, there's a sizeable cast of characters, including an AI reminiscent of the supercomputer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the U.S. President (an insufferable former talk show host), and a group of uplifted dogs. If there's a main character, it's driven, principled and somewhat antisocial Mike Martin, the founder of the Aristillus moon colony. An ex-soldier named John, who fled to the Moon with the aforementioned sentient canines to save them from being murdered by the government on Earth, also gets a lot of screen time. As with most novels dealing with the Fate of Humanity, the characters clearly exist solely to propel the story, but Corcoran does a fine job of making each character feel distinct (although I did have some trouble remembering which dog was which).

The world 

Corcoran's dystopic vision of Earth's future is vividly portrayed and seems to be inching closer to prophecy with every passing day. He gives us a world so constrained by red tape, regulation, taxes and political correctness that fleeing to the Moon makes perfect sense. The first time I read TPotE, about three years ago, I thought the inclusion of the "alternately abled soldiers" was a bit of a misstep, pulling the narrative a little too close to satire, given the cold realism of the bulk of the story, but as I watch people argue in dead seriousness that pregnant women (sorry, pregnant persons!) should be allowed to be fighter pilots, I'm starting to think the world we live in is a much sillier place than Corcoran's future.

The politics

TPotE is unapologetically libertarian (or perhaps anarcho-capitalist) in its outlook. The heroic characters are rugged individualists, and the villains are scheming tyrants, benighted pawns, or something in between. That said, Corcoran take a much more subtle approach than, to pick a name completely at random, Ayn Rand. There are no eighty-page monologues on the value of the individual or the evils of collectivism. If you're of a more left-leaning persuasion, though, this book will probably piss you off. 

Content warning

There's a fair amount of profanity (f-bombs and other cursing), as well as a moderate amount of violence, as one might expect in a book about a war.

Who is it for?

Anyone who enjoys Robert Heinlein, particularly The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and fans of Neal Stephenson and Ayn Rand.

Why read it?

Who doesn't love a story about plucky underdogs (heh) standing up to tyrannical overlords? Judging by the sales of YA fiction, pretty much everybody. But instead of a cartoonish future drawn in broad strokes, a la The Hunger Games, Corcoran gives us a world that feels almost too real. This is hard sci-fi done right.