“History, Aristotle says, represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be.”
— Albert J. Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Free Riders

\”Free Riders\” is our affectionate term for nonpaying members of the Libertarian Fiction Authors Association.

Basic membership in the association is free, with supporting membership conferring extra benefits.

Other political philosophies have a free rider problem, but, rather than fight free riders out of fear, libertarians and smart entrepreneurs embrace them.

Craig L. Seymour

Craig is a family man, author, capitalist, and libertarian. He has been a Libertarian Party candidate for the House of Representatives and the publisher of an independent newsletter, Capital & Liberty. He is the author of Time Skip, a twist on the traditional time travel story. He is currently working on a sequel, as well as a middle grade series revolving around three friends, a magic amulet, and classic monsters.

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Sarah A. Hoyt

Sarah Hoyt was born in Portugal and lives in Colorado. In between, she’s worked at jobs ranging from dishwasher in a hotel in Germany to multilingual scientific translator for a company in South Carolina. She denies that she has a writing problem and insists she can give it up as soon as she wants to, but the longest she ever managed to go without writing was two weeks, and then a novel attacked her.

Sarah has published around 23 novels (she hasn’t counted lately) and 100 short stories with publishers like Berkley, Bantam, and Baen, and magazines such as Asimov’s and Analog, as well as a variety of anthologies. Lately, she’s decided to work only for Baen, the publisher that doesn’t drive her nuts, and as the other works revert, she’s republishing them herself.

She’s also independently publishing novels that aren’t appropriate for Baen. Her novel Darkship Thieves won the 2011 Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Novel. The first book of her Musketeer’s Mysteries series was an alternate book club selection. Her first indie fantasy novel, Witchfinder, just came out.

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Jeff Patterson

By some fortuitous circumstance Jeff was born on September 1, 1962, the day the United Nations announced that the world population had exceeded three billion people, so he figures that was him.

He has been writing holiday-themed science fiction and fantasy short stories for some 17 years, which can now be found collected in Solstice Chronicles.

Jeff is a writer, illustrator, blogger, mastermind of Bad Day Studio, contributor to the Hugo Award–winning website SF Signal, frequent panelist on the SF Signal Podcast, and the least-educated (but better-looking) third of the podcast team known as The Three Hoarsemen.

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Ken Hagdal

Ken Hagdal

Ken Hagdal was trained as a control engineer, worked as a programmer, and moved on to artsy endeavors and non-academic psychology research, with a focus on coercive persuasion and its manifestations in every area of life. He’s very familiar with victims of abuse in all its forms (sexual, emotional, physical), his experience gained from running a support group on late MSN groups, real-life involvement and observation, forum moderation, and long-term immersion in fringe groups.

Ken’s first novel is X-Novo, a hard-hitting dystopian satire on gender issues. Free copies are available for reviewers.

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Aaron Ross Powell

Aaron is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and the editor of Libertarianism.org. He is a mystery and horror writer, the author of the apocalyptic novel The Hole, published by Permuted Press, as well as the short story collection Animus: Six Tales of Crime and Terror.

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Jeffrey Schlaman

Jeffrey Schlaman

Jeff Schlaman is a California CPA and holds an advanced degree from the University of Florida. He has worked as a corporate executive in the United States and Europe. Jeffrey holds strong libertarian beliefs and writes both to entertain and to warn those who otherwise might not listen of the perils of the current course of our government. He is the author of political-financial thrillers Fiat and Subprime Factor.

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Harold Carper

Harold Carper is a USAF veteran, husband, father, and systems administrator. He is not a people person.

The son of ministers, he was brought up in the Assemblies of God. Once on his own, however, he asked too many questions to which there were no satisfactory answers in mainstream Christianity. After years of study and debate with armchair, Internet theologians from around the world, Harold’s searching led him to a new spiritual home among Messianic Jews and Hebraic Christians. He found the Messianic perspective more scripturally founded, more intellectually rigorous, and richer in tradition than any other, and has been a Torah-keeping Christian ever since.

Politically, Harold is a libertarian-leaning conservative or a conservative-leaning libertarian, though neither group would be overly happy to claim him. Having never known one person to be identical to another in any observable way, he does not believe in equality. Men should have short hair and beards. Women should have long hair and no beards. Men should vote and fight wars. Women should teach their children and care for their husbands. He does not believe that men are better people than women or that one race of men is more or less human than any other. They are different, and there’s nothing wrong with being different.

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Matthew Maynard

Matthew Maynard was born and raised in Arizona. In 2000, he graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering and a loathing for his arch-nemesis, the Fourier Transform.

After marrying his high school girlfriend in 2004, they moved to Virginia, where he continued his career as a programmer and developed his skills as a writer in his spare time. His first novel, The Dragonslayers, Vol. 1: The Righteous and the Lawless, was born in the mayhem-filled month of November 2010 during National Novel Writing Month. Four years, several revisions, and one child later, he finished the manuscript. It was published through Amazon in March 2014.

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Tracy Lawson

Tracy Lawson

Tracy Lawson is eagerly awaiting the release of her coming-of-age thriller, Counteract. It’s the story of a girl (Careen), a guy (Tommy), the terrorist attack that brings them together, and their race to expose a conspiracy that could destroy their country.

In Counteract, Careen survived a terrorist’s bomb when she was a kid, and now the threat of a chemical weapons attack is literally hanging over her head. She takes the antidote offered by the government, but is unprepared for the side effects, which cause her to hallucinate, affect her memory, and derail her from her university studies. Her erratic behavior attracts the attention of a young law enforcement officer, who mistakenly pegs her as a dissident and pursues her, hoping she’ll make contact with a known resistance group. Careen doesn’t realize the antidote is causing her confusion… until she runs out on the day of the anticipated attack.

Tommy, recuperating from injuries sustained in a recent auto accident, is unaware that there’s a link between that accident, which killed his parents, and the chemical weapons attack that threatens him now. The antidote plagues him with hallucinations of tragedy and loss, and sends him spiraling into despair. When he discovers that working out before he takes his dose helps him feel more like himself, he defies the rules to regain his strength and his sanity. On the day of the attack, he meets Careen, who just might be the girl of his dreams, and tries to save her by sharing his last dose with her, even though doing so could potentially hasten his own death.

What Careen and Tommy learn about the true nature of the terrorist threat spurs them to take action, and their decisions lead them to run afoul of local law enforcement, team up with that underground resistance group, and ultimately take their quest for the truth to the highest reaches of the United States government.

Resist, the second volume in the trilogy, is nearing completion, and Tracy is now commencing work on the as-yet-unnamed final installment in Tommy and Careen’s saga.

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Alyssa Altadonna

By day, Alyssa Altadonna appears to be a mild-mannered school teacher; but, in the shadows of the evening, she becomes SUPER-LIBERTARIAN-SCIFI-TEEN-AUTHOR-WOMAN! Fueled by an irrepressible love of outer space and the rage that accompanies reading the daily headline news, she writes stories that somehow manage to instill the hope of freedom in the face of totalitarian oppression.

Alyssa is the author of several short stories and is currently working on her first novel, a young-adult scifi adventure set on Mars.

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