The latest novel by Sarah Hoyt has the same setting as her earlier Darkship Thieves (Prometheus Award for Best Novel, 2011) and Darkship Renegades (Best Novel nominee, 2013). The cover calls it a “sequel” but it isn't exactly that; it seems to take place in parallel to the other two novels, especially Darkship Renegades, with which its plot crosses over in the later chapters. Where those two novels focus mainly on a small anarchistic colony in space, with Earth as a place the characters visit, A Few Good Men takes place almost entirely on Earth, and shows what's going on there. Given the difference in scale, the effect is somewhat like the alternation between Frodo and Sam's perilous journey into Mordor and the massive battles in Rohan and Gondor in The Lord of the Rings.

Hoyt's future Earth is a grim place, in which all the perilous trends of the twenty-first century have gone to completion, leaving a badly damaged world. Most of the industrialized land areas have been destroyed, whether by straightforward nuclear attack or biological weapons. Advanced civilization mainly exists in a number of "seacities.” And contrary to the speculations of libertarians such as Patri Friedman about "seasteading," these are not havens for the liberty-minded, but dictatorships. Not out-and-out totalitarian states—it doesn't look as if Hoyt's world had societies with enough people for totalitarian mass murder to be sustainable—but old-fashioned systems of elite privilege backed up by repression. The people at the top, called Good Men (making the title an ironic one), have their separate domains, but join together in suppressing any uprising, like Roman patricians setting aside rivalry to deal with a slave revolt. Readers of Nietzsche may recall his discussion of “master morality” as defining “good” as “masterful" and "bad" as "servile."

But the other side of the irony is a reference to the kind of "good men" who fight for their own and others' rights. And the novel's hero, Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, is such a good man rather to his own surprise, as he is the son and heir of the Good Man of Olympus Seacity. Or he was the heir, formerly, for the novel opens very much in medias res (rather like some of Heinlein's novels), with Lucius in a maximum security prison, his escape from which sets the story in motion. He returns to Olympus to find his mother, his father, and his younger brother all dead, and himself the inheritor; to learn startling and science fictionist things about his own past; and to become the center of a political struggle that sets off a widespread uprising.

His involvement in the uprising comes about through his encounters with a secretive religious tradition, the Usaians. This is, I think, Hoyt's most distinctive idea in this series, the one that sets it apart from various action/adventure/romance stories in more or less fantastic futures. Hoyt envisions an American diaspora, like the diaspora of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple, turning them from a nation into a religion looking back to old traditions. “Religion” may be a somewhat misleading word, as it suggests heavenly or otherworldly hopes; the idea here is more like “next year in Jerusalem!" or like the prophet who asked, “What does the Lord God require of you, but to do justice, and love mercy?" The Usaians have no set theology that all of them agree on: they believe in natural human rights, which may or may not be God-given, they revere the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and they name their children "Benjamin” and "Nathaniel” and “George” and “Abigail” and “Martha" and the like, in commemmoration of traditional heroes. The spirit is like that of Psalm 137, which says, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy." And the implied subtext is that the Usaians look forward to the refounding of their lost "land of liberty" as the Jews looked forward for centuries to returning to Israel. It's rather a poetic conception, and I think the implied analogy between America and Israel makes a lot of sense, as between two societies founded on (rather different!) laws, and two societies that thought they were not meant to be "like all the nations."

The evocation of Biblical themes is another rather Heinleinian point about this book, and in fact in many ways it can be read as a kind of love letter to Robert Heinlein. This comes out especially strongly in a brief idyllic interlude midway through the book, where Keeva and his new friend Nathaniel Remy spend time in a small farming community on the American mainland, in the home of a family named "Long." (The dramatic structure of the episode, though, is closer to that of Dagny Taggart's stay in Galt's Gulch, or perhaps of the Fellowship's visit to Lothlorien.) Hoyt's style is rather different from Heinlein's, but she's picked up both some of his tropes and some of his storytelling tricks.

All in all, I enjoyed A Few Good Men most of Hoyt's three novels (so far) set in this universe; I hope she plans a sequel showing the further progress of the uprising, and how Keeva and his allies struggle with the difficulties of establishing liberty on the ruins of statism. (It isn't an easily solved problem, as Hoyt reminds us with her evocation of the French Revolution!) If it has any defect, it's the inclusion of a love story—one that feels, to me, a bit tacked on, a bit too neat of a solution, like something a fanfic writer might have done with two good friends in someone else's story. I think it would have been just as satisfactory to leave it at the theme of Kipling's "Ballad of East and West,” with its friendship of "two strong men" and to leave it open for both of them to fall in love with other men in a possible sequel, or even for the reader to imagine that they might become more than friends, if the reader is inclined that way. I'm reminded of Mallarmé's complaint about the Parnassians: “they deprive the mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates.” But even with that criticism, I think this novel well worth reading, and I find its primary historical myth moving—and deeply libertarian in spirit.