Go Out, Young Men

Reviewing Aristillus: Book 2

The Secret Lore Behind Sing the Man

In what may or may not be a stark revelation, there were two reasons I decided to do a substack in 2025, and both relate to the Mr. and Mrs. Psmiths’ Bookshelf substack. Which you should subscribe to if you don’t already. The first was Jane Psmith’s review of Aristillus Book 1 The Powers of the Earth. I had been resisting reading this for some time because I follow Travis Corcoran on twitter, and there’s a very important piece of life advice about meeting your heroes, watching how sausage gets made, and reading the books of your friends. (If I may be so bold as to say.) A book contains a spectral and multi-faceted scan of its authors mind, whether intended or not, and so reading the book of someone you know runs two great risks: first that you might learn something about them you really don’t want to know, and second that you won’t like it. So I was ecstatic to read Jane Psmith’s positive review, and I will tell you the line that sold the book to me was:

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.

And so I got both extent books for Christmas and had them both read before the New Year.

The second reason was because of the end-of-year review from the same substack. In that discussion the authors discussed how their substack book reviews came to be a thing -initially e-mails and then a repository of random thoughts about what they were reading. That description should sound vaguely familiar. But pulled the trigger for me was Jane’s description of her first review as “this is a cool book, you should check it out.” And then, after John’s first review, she said “oh, no. He has an intellectual project.” And I could feel the eye-roll through the internet. I think my monitor may have tilted for picosecond.

And I laughed. And I laughed. And out loud I laughed.

Because, really, there’s so much self-importance in all of our intellectual projects and what we’re really doing is poasting on the Internet. And honestly, if a certain amount of pride, an unwillingness to voice thoughts that haven’t been completely edited and workshopped into anodyne and inert prose, has been the reason I’ve resisted a substack -that was a poor reason. I’m here for me, and if you enjoy it, that is so much the better.

Therefore, in honor of that lore, let us review Aristillus Book 2: Causes of Separation.

This Is a Cool Book, You Should Check It Out.

I contemplated reviewing both books at once, but decided not to. Jane Psmith covered all the major positive things I would say about it, and that would leave me only whingeing. I enjoyed Powers of the Earth, but I got to the end and was vaguely unsatisfied. Yes, I enjoy the character of Mike Martin, and learning the secret of why there is a container transport on the moon was amusing. And yes, I enjoy big guns and moon bases as much as the next boy who grew up reading Heinlein. But I stopped reading Heinlein 20 years ago, and with the exception of Starship Troopers, little of his oeurve has persisted for me. Corcoran has deftly avoided didactic libertarianism a la Ayn Rand, but he is definitely at his best when writing characters in a libertarian mind and frame. There’s a scene where a mob of Mormons attacks a seedier joint in a habitation cave that was largely developed by Mark Soldner for himself and his Mormon followers. Mike Martin, the leader of the CEOs, tries to get Mark to make amends with the restaurant, and Soldner refuses.

And as one of the SoCons that Soldner sort of represents, I read Soldner’s dialogue a bit like “do we really sound like that? That isn’t how anyone I know talks.” And that is, in part, because Soldner is trying speak to Martin -a well known libertarian-esque actor, and he just can’t quite get the dialect. The scene is told from Martin’s perspective, but I would love to see inside Soldner’s more communitarian mind. Soldner clearly has a very strong sense of justice as he sees it, and I would love for him to let our his inner Klingon Ambassador.

But, I wish to praise the scene for this. Even if Soldner is trying to speak in a libertarian key and largely failing, what I appreciate is that Soldner isn’t treated as nuts or wrong -just someone who has a disagreement with Mike. A fundamental disagreement, to be sure. Their deep core beliefs about the very basis of civilization are different, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work together. In a story with a number of betrayals, none of them, that I can tell, are driven by people simply being evil, though they may be evil people. Rather, the actions are driven by people with different beliefs and perhaps the second or third largest problem the Aristillus colony has is actually navigating how people who don’t agree, don’t like each other very much, and are held together primarily by their fear of earth manage to get through every day in a world that is hostile to all mankind.

Nonetheless, I got to the end of the first book in less than a week and wasn’t sure I wanted to read the second. I’m glad I changed my mind, though, because the second book is an order of magnitude better than the first.

This Story Is For the Dogs

The second book starts with the resolution of the cliffhanger that ended the first book. The Aristillus colony manages to defend itself from the first wave of invasions, but the second wave of invasion is immanent and everybody knows it. And because Aristillus is not a Libertarian Colony but rather a colony set up by Libertarians but filled with all kinds of refugees, buccaneers, and adventurers they all have different beliefs and priors, and they all have different ways of trying to defend themselves -and though they trade freely on ideas like militias and designs for weapons, and even though they are able to get at least some basic public finance operations going to fund the war effort -the conflict within Aristillus is nearly as important as the conflict between the Lunar City and earth.

And into this, Corcoran inserts what, in the first book I frankly took as a bit a joke, the most important characters: the uplifted dogs.

I enjoy writing stories, and sometimes I insert little jokes into the text for my own amusement. I once spent a day contemplating scattering the complete lyrics of “Still Alive” throughout a story, but ultimately decided that as amusing as it was to me, I could not find a discreet way of inserting the words “Aperture Science” into a book set in 1300, even if optical lenses and technology are a minor plot point. So that’s what I thought Blue, Max, Duncan, and Rex were. And I continued thinking that even after Rex was killed.

But, much like the Vulcans, the dogs hold up a very different mirror to the story. Their dogness is only sometimes important, but the fact that they were created by humans, uplifted by humans, and then almost exterminated by humans and finally saved by other humans (including Mike Martin) means that they look on the problems of the humans very differently. The younger and angrier dogs have no principled objection to destroying earth entirely until Gamma (an AI saved by Mike and transported to the Moon, too) points out that anything they could fling at earth, earth could fling back, and that breaching the mutually assured destruction detente is really not in their interest. Nonetheless, the dogs largely refuse to cooperate with the humans, considering their own defense the most important thing, but even here there are divides between the different factions of dogs.

Everywhere there are factions, and Max, Blue, Mike, and Mark are never really in full command of anything. Power in Aristillus comes from the ability to persuade and organize at scale. The twists and turns of the story hinge on when an argument fails or when someone makes a decision because they think it is the right thing to do in a society where everyone is always following their own beliefs. This results in two of my favorite scenes, both towards the end of the book.

In the first, the earth forces have captured Mike Martin and are blasting their way back to the lunar surface and ask Mike to get them a safe passage -not that they would release Mike, but just because Mike would prefer the special forces troops not kill everyone on their way back to the airlock. As they near the airlock they are ambushed by a force Mike has never even heard of, and when he tells his own commanders to stand down so that everyone doesn’t die, his general responds back, “what did you expect, Mike? They’re anarchists!” And it is in this way that Mike is freed. Not by top down control, but by a bunch of anarchists doing what they think is right.

My second favorite scene comes during an oxygen scare. It’s science fiction -there’s always a running out of oxygen scene some time. And as everyone is arguing about what to do, the head of their largest agricultural firm agrees to cull his heard. The scene is told from the perspective of Javier, Mike Martin’s considerably more level headed friend, who notes that this is probably the most selfless act anyone of the CEOs has ever done, and it is going almost entirely unrecognized. If we got the story from the mind of the Agricultural CEO, I wonder what he would have been thinking. Was this merely logical? Is he thinking that goodwill benefits him in the long run? Is he thinking that even if it makes him money to see some people succumb to oxygen depravation and carbon dioxide poisoning it’s still the right thing to do to cull his herd? Maybe we’ll find out another time, but this is the really gripping part of the story. What does the world look like when existing communities come together, with wildly different ideas of the good life, but without an Imperial power to compel behavior?

In Aristillus, things worked out. The book makes many explicit references to its similarities to the American Colonies breaking away from England, and how the different cultures and species -human, dog, and AI -are like the original colonies. They have different reasons for the breakaway, and fate has forced them to brave the waves of change and revolution on a skiff of moonrock.

I look forward to seeing how the story continues and concludes.