Karl Gallagher's “Swim Among the People” Published

Books and Media
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On 2022-05-11 I mentioned Karl Gallagher’s “Fall of the Censor” series in this comment. This is a rip-roaring space opera which includes an artificial intelligence apocalypse, a society that practices “security through obscurity” and tyrannical suppression of technology to prevent a recurrence, a fragile alliance of the tyranny and independent worlds against the AI threat, and the risk posed to a static society by its subjects even having access to their own history.

The books in the Fall of the Censor series so far are:

  1. Storm Between the Stars
  2. Between Home and Ruin
  3. Seize What’s Held Dear
  4. Captain, Trader, Helmsman, Spy

The Kindle editions of all of these books are free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Now, on 2023-03-19, the fifth novel in the series, Swim Among the People, was published. This picks up the story with the Censorate assembling their forces, magnitude unknown (“security through obscurity”) to retake the worlds lost in the rebellion against the tyranny. How can newly-free people, just learning their history and experiencing liberty for the first time, defend themselves against the ultimate cancel culture? The Kindle edition of this book is also free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

This is a grand-scale epic which, although you can enjoy any of the books in isolation, is best read from the start, as the characters discover the strange environment they inhabit and develop with the challenges that face them.

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I just finished this book today. It is an excellent yarn combining the principles of how to organise an insurgency among an occupied population whose oppressors have little restraint in responding with brutal reprisals against opposition and where a majority of the occupied are either collaborators or just want to be left alone, plus how a people with millennia of experience being deemed “the other” and preserving their identity in the face of oppression balance self-preservation against throwing in with those bent on throwing out the tyrant.

The tale does not end in a cliffhanger, but there is more to come in the saga.

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