Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I was excited when I heard that J. Neil Schulman was releasing his first novel since Escape from Heaven, which he had published in 2001. In his new book, The Fractal Man he actually inserts himself and his late friend Samuel Edward Konkin III, into the story. Though they are actually fractals, which are alternative versions of themselves that exist in different universes. I have always found the idea of alternate universes intriguing because I think we have all wondered what our own lives would look like if we had taken a different path, at least once in our lifetimes.

The story begins when our main protagonist Dave Albaugh, a fractal version of J. Neil Schulman, gets a call from his friend Simon Konrad III, the fractal version of Samuel Edward Konkin III that they are about to be late to a science fiction panel. This wouldn’t seem all that unusual for Dave, if it weren’t for the little inconvenient fact that his friend Simon had died nine years earlier. What’s even more bizarre is that Dave still has the footage of his friend’s funeral recorded on his cell phone. Both Simon and Dave come to the realization that they are both in a different dimension when they discover that both humans and cats can fly in this strange world that they happened to find themselves in. Our protagonists also discover that while this alternate universe seems freer than the world that they came from, it has one little quirk. Music doesn’t exist in this universe, which our two heroes decide to remedy. The story becomes even more intriguing when both Simon and Dave are recruited by an Agorist militia to fight against a totalitarian group, which ironically refers to itself as the Free Street Project. The Free Street Project seems somewhat reminiscent of The Hamiltonian antagonists in The Probability Broach, who want absolute power over the populace.

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