Prometheus Blog

By Michael Grossberg
Several Prometheus-winning novels rank high in the Great American Read, suggesting that at least some significant aspects of individualist and libertarian/classical-liberal values remain at the core of popular American and worldwide culture.
The nationwide PBS competition invited Americans in communities across the country to rank and vote for their favorite novels – contemporary and classic, in all genres.
To Kill a Mockingbird recently was announced as the No. 1 winner. Although it’s not science fiction or fantasy, and thus ineligible for the Prometheus Award, Harper Lee’s classic courtroom drama (and the Oscar-winning film version starring Gregory Peck, not to mention the upcoming Broadway adaptation of the novel) eloquently uphold basic principles of civility, due process and the presumption of innocence as well as the vital importance of personal integrity, truth and courage that libertarians and classical liberals (but unfortunately fewer and fewer of today’s leftwing progressives) champion and uphold as part of our vital modern foundation for civility and the rule of law against mob rule, racism, false accusations and prejudice.

The posting of the PBS final rankings is the culmination of a lengthy and populist process in which the 100 previously selected popular favorites were whittled down to a set of five finalists (including the Outlander series, the Harry Potter series, Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Rings.)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame a in 2000. The Lord of the Rings, ranked No. 5 on the Great American Read list, offers a cautionary fable about the unbridled pursuit of power, how power corrupts and absolute power (symbolized by the Ring) can corrupt absolutely, leading to vast evil and tyranny threatening civilization itself. (If the great British classical liberal and Catholic historian Lord Acton, who famously wrote that “Power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,” had written a fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings might well have been it, because it perfectly embodies his cautionary themes.)

George Orwell’s novel 1984, an early Prometheus Hall of Fame inductee (coincidentally, in 1984) for its perceptive dramatization and dissection of horrific socialist/communist/fascist tyranny and how dictatorships undermine and deny facts and truth and reality itself through indoctrinating and intimidating people in a group-think mob hysteria, ended up ranked at No. 18 on the Great American Read.

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, one of the first two Prometheus Hall of Fame winners in 1983, also ranked high at No. 20. Rand’s magnum opus is a suspense-mystery philosophical thriller about the crucial role of the free mind in human civilization. (Note: Under the rules of the Great American Read series, only the top-ranked novel by each author could be eligible for inclusion in the top-100 list – or else Rand’s The Fountainhead likely would have ranked high, too.)
Ready Player One (ranked No. 76), by Ernest Cline, won the 2012 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Among the other science fiction or fantasy classics that also ranked on the top-100 list include The Chronicles of Narnia (No. 9), the children’s fantasy series by the great Christian libertarian C.S. Lewis; Stephen King’s The Stand (No. 24); Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (No. 34), Frank Herbert’s Dune (No. 35), Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (No. 39), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (No. 43), Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (series) (No. 49), Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (No. 52); The Martian (No. 61), by Andy Weir (whose Artemis was a recent Prometheus finalist for Best Book); and The Sirens of Titan (ranked No. 87), by Kurt Vonnegut (whose short story “Harrison Bergeron,” nominated in the past two years for the Prometheus Hall of Fame, offers an implicitly libertarian satirical critique of coercive egalitarianism carried to extremes.)

Of course, many if not most of the 100 novels on the list are well worth reading and quite a few offer great stories and great wisdom about the human experience. So the list (despite the occasional inclusion of recent favorite bestsellers destined to fade over time) can be used as a welcome guide to further reading – or re-reading.
For the full ranked list of the 100 most popular novels in the PBS competition, visit http://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/results/

A bust of J.R.R. Tolkien in the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford. (Creative Commons photo). 

By William H. Stoddard

The Prometheus Award has been given annually since 1982, and the Hall of Fame Award since 1983. All through the twenty-first century, lists of four to six finalists have been announced for each award. And for much of that time, online comments on the nominations and awards have often questioned their rationale.  There have been comments suggesting that the awards could go to virtually any book, or to winners that have no libertarian content, or indeed are actively opposed to libertarianism.

“Virtually any book” is an exaggeration. There are any number of compelling books whose themes aren’t political: The Island of Dr. Moreau, At the Mountains of Madness, and Ringworld are all examples. Even past winners of the Prometheus Award have written such books, such as Michael Flynn’s brilliantly tragic The Wreck of The River of Stars. There are also books written from viewpoints opposed to libertarianism, such as Star Maker or the Foundation series. I think it’s safe to say that none of these could have been a Best Novel nominee, or can be expected to be a Hall of Fame nominee.

On the other hand, it’s long established that our awards go to the book, not the author. There’s no list of official libertarian authors, or of unacceptable antilibertarian authors. A work can be considered if it attempts to envision a free society, or to show a path that might lead to increased freedom, or if it shows the dangers of authoritarianism as such, or deconstructs an earlier work based on antilibertarian assumptions. Prometheus Awards have gone to authors such as Ken MacLeod (several times!), Terry Pratchett, Charles Stross, Harry Turtledove, and Jo Walton because our members agreed that they had something important to say to us about these topics.

But on the gripping hand, exactly what it is that marks a work as of libertarian interest, or disqualifies it from being considered that way, isn’t always clear to nonlibertarians. (For that matter, libertarians may disagree about this; our juries have some lively private discussions each year!) So I’d like to discuss one of our recent honorees, a work whose admission to the Hall of Fame evoked an unusually large volume of questions: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

On one hand, I’ve seen a number of comments to the effect that there’s nothing in The Lord of the Rings that’s relevant to libertarianism, or to political philosophy of any sort. That seems a surprising statement! This is, after all, a novel about a magical device that grants the user power over others, and particularly the ability to take over and control other magical devices; that is an invaluable tool of conquest and domination; and that also is dangerously addictive to the user. In fact, the One Ring is a modernized version of Plato’s parable of the Ring of Gyges, an ancient legend about the corruption of power. It’s hard to imagine a premise for fantasy better adapted to make a libertarian point. Despite Tolkien’s disclaimer of “allegory” and overt messages, the applicability is there.

It’s also worth noting that the Shire, the home of the novel’s hero and his friends, is a much freer society than is common in fantasy. It has a mixed government, part aristocracy and part commercial republic, but its only important functions seem to be police (and concerned more with strayed beasts than strayed hobbits) and the mails; it’s really quite a good fit to the old idea of the “minimal state.” Tolkien’s description of it seems to owe something to independent Iceland, in which several libertarian writers have found inspiration.

Later in the story, the Shire gets taken over by outside intruders, who propose to modernize it, and who set up a system of “gatherers and sharers” who, as one resident of the Shire says, do a lot more gathering than sharing. Tolkien doesn’t push the reader’s face into it, but this episode looks a lot like a socialist takeover, and like many such takeovers, it leaves the Shirefolk both poorer and less free.

On the other hand, some commenters have thought that The Lord of the Rings had elements that were clearly and obviously opposed to libertarianism. More than one commenter, in particular, has pointed to the accession of Aragorn (or “Strider”) to the throne of the reunited kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, taking it that monarchy is obviously at odds with libertarian ideas.

Many libertarians are anarchists, and rule by a king is obviously opposed to anarchism. (Tolkien, incidentally, expressed sympathy for anarchism in one of his letters.) But so is rule by a voting majority, or any other sovereign entity. How bad a given monarchy is depends on what sort of rule the monarch engages in; a good monarch can be a lesser evil than a bad popular government.

On the other hand, many libertarians are not anarchists, but supporters of constitutional government that respects people’s rights. And in a libertarian view, the important rights are “life, liberty, and property”—freedom to think for oneself, to express one’s thoughts, to form relationships, to trade and produce, and by doing so to sustain one’s life and happiness. The right to vote is a less important issue, and would be even less important if government were barred from violating the primary rights. What’s important is that rights and law are prior to government, and that rulers should be restrained by them. A democratic majority unrestrained by law, and doing anything it pleases, is unlibertarian; a king ruling under law—as was assumed in much of the medieval writing that Tolkien studied—need not be. And Tolkien showed Aragorn acting as such a king, and moreover, not asserting the right to rule through superior power, but asking the people of Minas Tirith to consent to his rule. It’s especially notable that Aragorn makes a point of preserving the rights of the Shire, that happy near-anarchy, to maintain its own laws and customs, to the point of not himself crossing its borders.

In other words, the element in The Lord of the Rings that seems incompatible with libertarianism for many readers is less so than it appears. It’s arguably incompatible with democracy, but democracy isn’t a primary value to libertarians; democratic majorities have too often voted to take away rights that libertarians want to preserve. It seems that some readers, not very familiar with libertarian ideas, may have assumed that libertarians must agree with them, instead of finding out what libertarians think. And one of the goals of the Prometheus Award and the Hall of Fame is to provide a list of works that will help people find that out—among which The Lord of the Rings is a good example, offering many ideas congenial to libertarian thought, but not by any means the only one.

Johanna Sinisalo holds her Prometheus Award. (Photo by Ryan Lackey). 

The Paris Review has a new article up, “How Finland Rebranded Itself as a Literary Country,” which purports to tell the story of how Finnish writers have acquired an international reputation.

But the article’s author, Kalle Oskari Mattila, seems to be determined to make sure that neither the science fiction community nor the Prometheus Award will receive any credit for the growing attention to Finnish writing.

The article includes a photograph Johanna Sinisalo and a brief description of her novel, The Core of the Sun. But it doesn’t mention that she received the Prometheus Award in 2017 for the book — likely the first time the award has gone to someone who isn’t an Anglo-American author.

Similarly, the article leaves out the fact that Sinisalo was one of the guests of honor for the first-ever Finnish worldcon in 2017, which drew 7,119 people. Sinisalo was given her Prometheus Award at the convention, and the award helped demonstrate that she was a guest of honor on her merits, and not just because she happens to be Finnish. The worldcon was one of the biggest ever in terms of attendance and certainly helped shine a spotlight on Finnish writers.

I thought this sort of literary snobbery had gone away but the “Paris”
Review (actually published in New York) apparently wants to take it into the 21st Century.

— Tom Jackson