The Fractal Man

by J. Neil Schulman

The Fractal Man has been nominated for the 2019 Prometheus Award for Best Novel! J. Neil Schulman's fourth novel, The Fractal Man, could only be penned by a writer who wrote scripts for The Twilight Zone. It’s a fictional autobiography of lives he never lived. The story begins when David Albaugh is awakened by a phone call from his best friend, who’s been dead for nine years, telling him they’re late for a science-fiction convention panel. David’s alternate realities only start there. If only his abstract photography recommended to New York’s Museum of Modern Art by a photographer for Mad Magazine had been exhibited; if only General Electric had taken up his idea for a practical jet belt when he was 11; if only he’d had the money to execute his own business plan and corner the market on eBooks a decade before Jeff Bezos. David’s journey to parallel timelines takes him to a world where people and cats can fly but dogs can't; commissions him as a battlefield general in a war between totalitarians and anarchists; as the bringer of music to a world that’s never heard it; as the head of a movie studio making the Superman/Spider-Man movie; as the explorer of a dead world and the real-estate developer of a new one. What if there was a war where a loved one can be dead in one world and alive in another? What if different systems of social order were dominant in different universes resulting in extreme conflicts when they met? What if parallel lives could be fused into a melding of personalities and talents? What if some of your favorite celebrities have entirely different lives in parallel worlds? The Fractal Man asks and offers speculative answers to these questions. A stand-up narrative establishes a central flow-through yet many vignettes can be read as stand-alone short stories. Redefining theoretical physics into possible cosmologies, Schulman employs intrigue and suspense to rewrite everything we think we know about the rules of existence. This is what science fiction was made for. Early Praise for The Fractal “J. Neil Schulman’s The Fractal Man takes MetaFiction to a new level. It’s a wildly entertaining collision of the 20th and 21st Centuries. There is something new under the sun.” — Brad Linaweaver, Author, Editor, Publisher, Filmmaker, Teacher "Assuming you know what 'space opera' is, this is “timeline opera” done with the exuberance of a Doc Smith novel." --Eric S. Raymond, "Armed and Dangerous"

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 24, 2018

Reviews

[Andrew J. · Rating 1 out of 5]

With Fractal Man, J. Neil Schulman strives to produce a knock-off of Robert Heinlein from the latter's late period and fails to meet even this modest level of achievement.
In his old age, Heinlein forgot how to write good novels, substituting meandering self-indulgent messes, which should not be emulated, but rather forgotten. Schulman chooses to model his book the nearly plotless and seemingly endless Number of the Beast, while at the same time promoting his anarchist/libertarian views. The burden the latter would by itself would have been more a much better piece of fiction than this could bear, by making the already confusing and uncompelling story even less believable.
The story is more or less about concerns some universe-hopping anarchists and their evil "statist" enemies, who, after destroying freedom in their own universe with their "statist" ideology, go around invading other universes to oppress them, because...well, suffice to say the author does not attribute any recognizable human motive to these baddies...I guess that's just what statists like to do (if you are wondering, a "statist" is anarcho-libertarian-speak for someone who believes in government of any kind. It is not a compliment.) Anyway, the statists try to do something terrible to the hero, and he decides to take them to court. But since the hero does not believe in government courts with their evil compulsory process , he has to bring his case in the voluntary arbitration system of which he is a member. Fortunately, for no discernible reason, the bad guys decide to also join the same arbitration system. Surprisingly enough, the good guy wins his case , and J. Neil Schulman proves that a private voluntary court system is way better than a nasty old government one.
(Interestingly enough, when I asked the author how his private system would handle a case where one of the parties did not agree to the jurisdiction of the private, non-compulsory court, and after dancing around the question for a while, referred me to an anarchist legal theorist. Shulman himself has written and spoken extensively in favor of replacing statist courts with private ones, even though he could not answer this rather basic question.)
The book is replete with similar examples of the author's libertarian philosophy, which, as I have said, does nothing to help the already formless story along, and in fact, intermittently succeeds in bringing it to a complete halt.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alternate realities have become something of a vogue in science fiction, especially on television with Fringe and Counterpart. I've even tried my hand at it in a few short stories such as The Other Car. But J. Neil Schulman has outdone all of this with his novel The Fractal Man, which for most of its 160 some odd pages - meant literally as well as a figure of speech here - is not only a masterpiece of alternate reality, but one of the best science fiction novels I've ever read, literally.

Read the rest of this review here.

[Rand Allan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fractally humorous

This book wasn’t the best of Neil’s works. However, the book felt like Neil was taking a light-hearted romp through his imagination, exploring a concept, then taking an abrupt right turn when another thought invaded his space. It held my attention for the duration.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book could have been great. I was reading it primarily to review for Prometheus 2019, and mentally tracked my rating...3 early on, when it was just word salad of references to other books and libertarian concepts...then shooting up to 5 for about 25% of the way through to 50%, and then back down to 3-4/5 once time travel and general stupidity came into the picture. It could have been a pretty clear 4.5-5/5 if he'd just stopped at the end of the book, vs. all the crap added for the second half to fill it out, and removed a lot of the fan service/pandering.

I think it's probably a reasonable rule that any novel which includes the novel's authors other works in-book as books, as well as multiple split personalities/wish fulfillment fantasy versions of the same author, is probably going to be a lot more enjoyable for the author to write than for a reader to read.

Still, there were enough good elements of the story to make it 4/5 vs. 3/5, even if I didn't like the overall book to that degree.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did, as I've really enjoyed Schulman's previous books. And it's a great premise. Unfortunately, it sort of turned into a self-congratulatory literary masturbation session as he pimped for his own works, both real and imagined, over and over, to the point of fatigue. The story kind of got lost, or at the least, drowned in self-promotion.

[Frederick Hammill · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would recommend the author return to 6th grade and take some time to revisit the basic plot diagram.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun times and a tribute to a number of other threads

Wow! So many things happen that it is difficult to single out things. Tribute to a number of authors and the sorts of alternate universe alternate timeline that others have attempted but with definite originality in the execution. Some great ideas presented leaving you to think about your own misspent reading time in your earlier years. Some great contrasts that I felt worked to humorous effect. Some moments when I wished I had spent some more time with certain authors (e.g., Clive Staples).

[Rick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wowowow! A masturbatory, name dropping piece of shizz. Read Escape from Heaven and enjoyed quite a bit, but fonking hockey I almost put Fractal man down before finishing. What a sad ending for what was a semi bright star.