Visions of Liberty

Terminal Experiment; he’s also been nominated six times for the Hugo Award. He has twice won Japan’s top SF award, the Seiun, and twice won Spain’s top SF award, the Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficcion. His twelfth novel, Calculating God, hit number one on the bestsellers’ list published by Locus: The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field, and was also a top-ten national mainstream bestseller in Sawyer’s native Canada. His latest novel, Hominids, a June 2002 hardcover, was the third of Sawyer’s novels to be serialized in Analog, the world’s number-one bestselling SF magazine. Visit Rob’s website at sfwriter.com.

Mike Resnick worked anonymously from 1964 through 1976, selling more than 200 novels, 300 short stories and 2,000 articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms. After a more than ten-year hiatus to pursue a career in dog breeding and exhibiting, he returned to fiction writing. His first novel in this “second career” was The Soul Eater. His breakthrough novel was the international bestseller Santiago, published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published eleven more of Mike’s novels and the collection Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun? Mike’s most recent novel is The Return of Santiago for Tor Books. His work has garnered fans around the world, and has been translated into twenty-two languages. Since 1989, Mike has won four Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, a Seiun-sho, a Prix Tour Eiffel (French), two Prix Ozones (French), 10 Homer Awards, an Alexander Award, a Golden Pagoda Award, a Hayakawa SF Award (Japanese), a Locus Award, an Ignotus Award (Spanish), a Futura Award (Croatian), an El Melocoton Mechanico (Spanish), two Sfinks Awards (Polish), and a Fantastyka Award (Polish). In 1993 he was awarded the Skylark Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean born speculative fiction writer who now lives (through many odd twists of fate and strangely enough to him) in Ohio with his wife Emily. He has published in various magazines and anthologies. He is a Clarion graduate, Writers of the Future winner, and Campbell Award for Best New SF Writer Finalist. His work has received Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. His first novel, Crystal Rain, will be out from Tor Books in July of 2005. You can visit http://www.tobiasbuckell.com for more information.

Brad Linaweaver has worked frequently in the alternate history subgenre, producing stories such as “Destination: Indies,” an alternate telling of Christopher Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic, and “Unmerited Favor” which takes a more militant approach to the story of Jesus Christ’s life. He is also the author of the books Moon of Ice, Clownface, The Land Beyond Summer, and Sliders: The Novel; and was a co-editor of Free Space, a collection of original libertarian SF short stories. Winner of the Prometheus Award in 1989, he lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Michael A. Stackpole is the author of eight New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels. He’s the author of thirty-seven novels, including Fortress Draconis, the second novel in the Dragon Crown War Cycle of fantasy novels. “According to Their Need” is the fifth story set in his Purgatory Station universe.

New Zealand has held a special place in Jane Lindskold’s heart since she visited there some years ago. The opportunity to celebrate that lush green land along with its interesting and varied people gave her the setting of this story. Currently, Lindskold resides in New Mexico, a place unlike New Zealand in every way except in its variety. She is the author of a dozen or so novels, including The Firekeeper’s saga, beginning with Through Wolf’s Eyes and The Buried Pyramid, along with fifty- some short stories. She is at work on another novel.

Jack Williamson has been writing science fiction since 1928, with more than fifty novels published. The most recent is Terraforming Earth. One section of it, “The Ultimate Earth,” received the 2000 Hugo Award as the best novella. He lives in New Mexico, where he arrived with his parents and siblings in a covered wagon when he was seven years old. He is still writing, as well as teaching occasional courses at Eastern New Mexico University, his hometown school. His new novel,The Stonehenge Gate, will be published in the spring of 2005.

Mark Tier is an Australian who lives in Hong Kong partly because, as he puts it, “paying taxes is against my religion.” A long-time SF fan and hard-core libertarian, he was a co-founder of the Australian equivalent of the Libertarian Party. He published and edited the investment newsletter World Money Analyst from 1974 to 1991.

James P. Hogan began writing science fiction as a hobby in the mid 1970s, and his works have been well received within the professional scientific community as well as among regular science fiction readers. In 1979 he left DEC to become a full-time writer, and in 1988 moved to the Republic of Ireland. Currently he maintains a residence in Pensacola, Florida, and spends part of each year in the United States. To date, he has published twenty-one novels, including the libertarian classic Voyage From Yesteryear, a nonfiction work on artificial intelligence, and two mixed collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and biographical anecdotes entitled Minds, Machines & Evolution and Rockets, Redheads & Revolution. A new nonfiction work, Kicking the Sacred Cow, will be released by Baen Books in June 2004. He has also published some articles and short fiction. Further details of Hogan and his work are available from his web site at www.jamesphogan.com.

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Mark Tier & Martin H. Greenberg

“Visions of Liberty,” copyright © 2004 by Mark Tier. “The Unnullified World,” copyright © 2004 by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. “The Right’s Tough,” copyright © 2004 by Robert J. Sawyer. “The Shackles of Freedom,” copyright © 2004 by Mike Resnick and Tobias S. Buckell. “A Reception at the Anarchist Embassy,” copyright © 2004 by Brad Linaweaver. “According to Their Need,” copyright © 2004 by Michael Stackpole. “Pakeha,” copyright © 2004 by Jane Lindskold. “Devil’s Star,” copyright © 2004 by Jack Williamson. “Renegade,” copyright © 2004 by Mark Tier. “The Colonizing of Tharle,” copyright © 2004 by James P. Hogan.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-8838-5

Cover art by Carol Heyer

First printing, July 2004

Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH Printed in the United States of America

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NOTES

1

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Plume, New York, 1994), pp. 101–102