{"id":8009,"date":"2018-05-23T01:17:18","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T05:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8009"},"modified":"2018-05-23T18:25:27","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T22:25:27","slug":"review-the-fractal-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8009","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Fractal Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><cite>The Fractal Man<\/cite> (written by J.Neil Schulman, soon to be available on Amazon) is a very, very funny book &#8211; if you share enough subcultural history with the author to get the in-jokes.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t &#8211; and in particular if you never met Samuel Edward Konkin &#8211; the man known as known as &#8220;SEKIII&#8221; to a generation of libertarians and SF fans before his tragically early death in 2004 &#8211; it will still be a whirligig of a cross-timeline edisonade, but some bits might leave you wondering how the author invented such improbabilities. But I knew SEKIII, and if there was ever a man who could make light of having a 50MT nuclear warhead stashed for safekeeping in his apartment, it was him.<\/p>\n<p>David Albaugh is a pretty good violinist, a science-fiction fan, and an anarchist with a bunch of odd and interesting associates.  None of this prepares him to receive a matter-of-fact phone call from Simon Albert Konrad III, a close friend who he remembers as having been dead for the previous nine years.<\/p>\n<p>His day only gets weirder from there, as SAKIII and he (stout SF fans that they are) deduce that David has somehow been asported to a timeline not his own.  But what became of the &#8220;local&#8221; Albaugh?  Before the two have time to ruminate on that, they are both timeshifted to a history in which human beings (including them) can casually levitate, but there is no music.<\/p>\n<p>Before they can quite recover from <em>that,<\/em> they&#8217;ve been recruited into a war between two cross-time conspiracies during which they meet multiples of their own fractals &#8211; alternate versions of themselves, so named because there are hints that the cosmos itself has undergone a kind of shattering that may have been recent in what passes for time (an accident at the Large Hadron Collider might have been involved).  One of Albaugh&#8217;s fractals is J. Neil Schulman.<\/p>\n<p>It speeds up to a dizzying pace; scenes of war, espionage, time manipulations, and a kiss-me\/kill-me romance between Albaugh and an enemy agent (who also happens to be Ayn Rand&#8217;s granddaughter), all wired into several just-when-you-thought-it-couldn&#8217;t-go-further-over-the-top plot inversions.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know that the natural audience for this book is large, exactly, but if you&#8217;re in it, you will enjoy it a lot. Schulman plays fair; even the weirdest puzzles have explanations and all the balls are kept deftly in the air until the conclusion.<\/p>\n<p>Assuming you know what &#8220;space opera&#8221; is, this is &#8220;timeline opera&#8221; done with the exuberance of a Doc Smith novel.  Don&#8217;t be too surprised if some of it sails over your head; I&#8217;m not sure <em>I<\/em> caught all the references. Lots of stuff blows up satisfactorily &#8211; though, not, as it happens, that living-room nuke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Fractal Man (written by J.Neil Schulman, soon to be available on Amazon) is a very, very funny book &#8211; if you share enough subcultural history with the author to get the in-jokes. If you don&#8217;t &#8211; and in particular if you never met Samuel Edward Konkin &#8211; the man known as known as &#8220;SEKIII&#8221;&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=8009\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Review: The Fractal Man<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8009"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8015,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8009\/revisions\/8015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}