House of Refuge

Entertainment & Culture: Literature & Fiction

House of Refuge

Mike Reid September 15, 2014 at 12:05 pm

House of Refuge, is an award-winning libertarian short story by Mike DiBaggio.

As BK Marcus puts it in his foreword, “Mike DiBaggio’s story of adventure and heroism exemplifies the sort of fiction I think the freedom movement needs much, much more of — a tale that demonstrates the evils of force and the virtues of freedom without ever allowing an ideological agenda to distract the reader from the action and drama.”

Members can download it for free from our Library.

Let us know if you enjoy the book as much as we do.

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Mike DiBaggio September 15, 2014 at 12:37 pm

I’d like to thank Liberty.Me for including House of Refuge in their library. I consider it an honor, and I hope the fine members enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. Hopefully it’ll inspire other libertarians to spread their ideals through literature and the arts.

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Bryan HM September 18, 2014 at 7:22 pm

This reminds me of Hagbard Celine, a character from the Illuminatus! series by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. In the books, Celine, a self-described anarchist, took to living in a vast submarine underwater, and frequently traveled around. His reason was that the water was the only place to be truly free – away from the state. I think also that Hagbard Celine’s character was built off of Ayn Rand’s Ragnar Danneskjold. So there seems to be some shared themes here.

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Mike DiBaggio September 19, 2014 at 12:21 am

I’m aware of the Illuminatus! series, but I’ve never read it. Celine sounds a lot like Captain Nemo from the original 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, who was motivated as much by a desire to escape the tyranny and injustice of the surface world as he was by revenge.

Atlas Shrugged, though, I am familiar with, and I certainly think the parallel is interesting. I’m surprised it hadn’t occurred to me before. I can’t say that I was consciously thinking of Danneskjold when I named the protagonist of this story Justin Agnarsson, but there may have been an unconscious resonance.

Incidentally, I’d appreciate it very much if you left a review for House of Refuge on Amazon, GoodReads, your own blog, or wherever else. Even if you didn’t care for it, the feedback helps me improve my craft as a writer and may encourage more people to buy my books, which is always nice.

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  Mike Reid September 22, 2014 at 11:21 am
  
  Mike, I read this story a few days ago and really enjoyed it.
  
  Here’s what I posted to Amazon.com:
  
  Exciting Taste of Big World
  
  House of Refuge thrusts you into an exciting adventure, with tingles of intrigue and blasts of action. It’s only after you’ve finished this fast, satisfying ride that you realize you’ve been introduced to a vast and exciting world of open-source fiction.
  
  With the Ascension Epoch, because DiBaggio’s goal is to create a world that other people can create in, it seems to me that the smartest thing he’s done is to make it a world that’s fairly easy to describe in broad strokes (an alternate modern history with superpowered people and internationalized and decentralized polities) but capable of having all kinds of exceptions and details, nooks and crannies where other authors can carve out their own niches.
  
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    Mike DiBaggio September 22, 2014 at 1:34 pm
    
    Thanks, Mike! Shell just pointed the review out to me just before we left for lunch. We both really appreciate it.
    
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Bryan HM September 19, 2014 at 2:10 pm

Yeah that’s cool. I haven’t read it yet, I just saw this post. If I do I’ll leave a review.

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