February 02, 2009

Finding Sanctuary
A Novel of Alternate History
By Jeremy McIlroy

Fiction is a difficult medium for most freedom oriented writers. There are exceptions such as L. Neil Smith, but even he is often accused of preaching more than telling a story. It depends a lot on what you consider "preaching," of course, and how much the rest of the story resonates with you.

Jeremy has managed to minimize the preaching, using the freedom concepts he wishes to convey quite believably in the dialog between his excellent characters. He states the concepts rationally and briefly, avoiding the pages long rants of otherwise wonderful stories such as "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

I suspect that Jeremy took at least some of his inspiration for this work from L. Neil's "Probability Broach" because he uses the same rationale for the time travel which is such a large part of the story. The idea is that each decision in life creates a divergent time line, so that time travel could never be linear - going into one's own past and undoing what had already happened - but sideways into millions of alternate realities.

The world described in this story is not nearly as frightening as the one I find myself in today for a lot of reasons, but the implications are clear that only individual responsibility and freedom make life worth living. Each character must make difficult and sometimes painful decisions, take action without the comfort of knowing 100% that they are either right or wise sometimes, and face the risk of failure each day. But hard decisions and dedication to life and liberty eventually lead them to take the chance and risk it all to build a new world and society in an alternate universe.

The sequel, "Freedom's Sanctuary" should be just as good, if not better as Jeremy hits his stride and improves in his craft. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Check out Jeremy's website: www.findingsanctuarybook.com

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