40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Fallen Angels, the 1992 Prometheus Best Novel winner by Flynn, Niven and Pournelle

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we launched in September, 2019, a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our Best Novel category.

Here’s the latest Appreciation for Fallen Angels, co-written by Michael Flynn, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:

Fallen Angels imagines a heroic struggle set against a dark future in which the United States and other countries are fighting a losing battle amidst the “global cooling” of a new Ice Age.

With the government turned anti-science and anti-technology in a coalition among Greens, feminists and religious fundamentalists, and federal officials focusing on persecuting science-fiction fans as subversives while ignoring the welfare of much of the population in some of the most affected parts of the weather-besieged country, this provocative 1992 novel might have been just a depressing cautionary tale.
But the three co-authors offer some hope by focusing on a group of individualistic, science-loving and freedom-loving misfits. Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Fallen Angels, the 1992 Prometheus Best Novel winner by Flynn, Niven and Pournelle

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, the 1991 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the 11th appreciation/review, following recent appreciations for award-winning novels by (among others) F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith, Vernor Vinge, Victor Koman and Brad Linaweaver:

By William H. Stoddard

Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind came out in 1990, the same year as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. While the word “steampunk” was somewhat older (coined in 1987 by K.W. Jeter for Victorian fantasies generally), these two novels gave the genre one of its central themes: the use of Victorian technology and social transformation as an analog of (then-) recent computer technology, making steampunk parallel to cyberpunk.

For both novels, a central technology was Charles Babbage’s “analytical engine,” a proposed machine that would have been fully programmable in the manner of an electronic computer.

Gibson and Sterling made the analytical engine the basis for an alternate history – a literal “difference engine.” Flynn did something subtler: He made the analytical engine the basis for an only minimally fictionalized version of real-world history.

Most of his novel was set in the present or the near future; the actual Victorian past appeared only in short prologues to its three sections -though strikingly evocative prologues. Rather than an “alternate history,” Flynn presented a “secret history”: a tale of striking events hidden unsuspected within the known past (a genre later put to epic use in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle).

Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, the 1991 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Koman’s Solomon’s Knife, the 1990 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the next Appreciation for Victor Koman’s Solomon’s Knife, following recent appreciations for novels by J. Neil Schulman, F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith, James P. Hogan, Vernor Vinge and Brad Linaweaver:

Victor Koman’s Solomon’s Knife imaginatively extends the typically partisan and predictable debate over abortion into new territory.

His provocative 1989 novel imagines a plausible future in which a controversial new surgical procedure is devised that could help women with unwanted pregnancies and women who want children but can’t become pregnant.

At the heroic center of the libertarian-themed medical thriller, which takes its title from the biblical story of King Solomon that tests two women over a baby, is a surgeon who risks her career to do the clandestine new type of surgery to help a beautiful woman seeking a routine abortion.

The new “transoption” procedure to transplant a fetus from one woman’s body to a willing new female host sparks media coverage, public outrage and a courtroom trial over an unprecedented custody battle. Koman uses his clever futuristic plot to explore issues within a moral drama that also has legal, political and scientific dimensions.
Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Koman’s Solomon’s Knife, the 1990 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice, the 1989 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Following recent appreciations for novels by F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith, James P. Hogan, J. Neil Schulman, No Winner (the 1985 choice), Victor Milan, Vernor Vinge and Victor Koman, here is the ninth Appreciation for Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice, the 1989 winner:

Brad Linaweaver conceived and wrote a richly detailed, provocative, and acclaimed alternate-history saga in Moon of Ice.

The meticulously researched 1988 novel – expanded from a 1981 novella published in Amazing Stories and nominated in 1982 for the Nebula Award – imagines an increasingly libertarian United States that provides a refuge for those fighting the evils of statism and collectivism.

Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice, the 1989 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Koman’s The Jehovah Contract, the 1988 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we’re posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the eighth Appreciation, following appreciations for novels by F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith, J. Neil Schulman, James P. Hogan, Victor Milan and Vernor Vinge:

Victor Koman’s audacious 1987 thriller-noir-fantasy The Jehovah Contract centers on dying atheistic assassin Del Ammo – masquerading as a private detective, and living in the ruins of a terrorist-bombed skyscraper – who’s given a contract to kill God. Yes, God!

Clever philosophical speculations by Koman, a veteran libertarian, accent his suspenseful and prescient story, set in a near-future Los Angeles, as the assassin finds a way to excise the concept of God from the minds of humanity and enable a more laissez-faire “Creatrix” to return to power.
Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Koman’s The Jehovah Contract, the 1988 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, the 1987 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the seventh Appreciation, following recent appreciations for novels by J. Neil Schulman, F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith and James P. Hogan, No Award (the 1985 choice) and Victor Milan:

By William H. Stoddard

In 1985, Vinge’s The Peace War lost out to No Award in the Prometheus voting. In 1987, its sequel, Marooned in Realtime, was recognized as Best Novel — the first of several Best Novel and Hall of Fame awards to the author.

The Peace War had shown a market-oriented and anarchistic society in a future central California. But it wasn’t portrayed in detail, and existed within a larger world that was decidedly NOT libertarian, controlled by the repressive Peace Authority. And one of the viewpoint characters was a military officer who considered the libertarian society that Vinge sketched unsustainable.

In contrast, Marooned in Realtime’s characters look back to a past in which libertarian values had triumphed, and the central character is widely admired for his role in bringing down one of the Earth’s last states (a story told in “The Ungoverned,” a novella that won the LFS’s 2004 Hall of Fame Award).

The libertarianism stands out more.
Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, the 1987 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Milan’s The Cybernetic Samurai, the 1986 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Following recent appreciations for F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels, L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, James Hogan’s Voyage to Yesteryear and Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza, here’s our next Appreciation for Victor Milan’s The Cybernetic Samurai:

The 1985 novel, one of the forgotten works of the early cyberpunk scene, explores the tensions between duty and free will, duty and love and duty and justice in a harsh future where some people struggle to be free within a largely totalitarian Earth.

Imagining a 21stcentury between the third and fourth world wars in a story whose hero is the world’s first sentient computer, Milan portrays a bloody and terrible future in which much of the world is destroyed but Japan becomes the last refuge of a dying free society and free market.
Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of Victor Milan’s The Cybernetic Samurai, the 1986 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of No Award, the 1985 Prometheus Best Novel choice

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the fifth Appreciation, for No Award (1985), following recent appreciations for novels by F. Paul Wilson, L. Neil Smith, James Hogan and J. Neil Schulman:

By William H. Stoddard

When the Libertarian Futurist Society started giving regular awards for Best Novel, ballots mailed to members offered the option of voting for None of the Above.

In 1985, None of the Above won, for the first and – up to now – the only time.

Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of No Award, the 1985 Prometheus Best Novel choice

40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of J. Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza, the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.

Here’s the fourth Appreciation for J. Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza, following recent appreciations for F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels, L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach and James P. Hogan’s Voyage to Yesteryear:

Schulman’s romantic and passionate sf drama explores the power of art, the thirst for creativity and the threat to such individuality and self-expression in a future Brave New World dominated by a single world government.

Schulman was prescient and years ahead of his time in envisioning a positive future where gay marriage is normal and legal.
Yet, his complex story portrays a very mixed and disconcerting dystopian future where teenage women are drafted into government prostitution service for three years, clones are treated as inferior and a new underclass called Touchables are hunted for sport.

Continue reading 40th Anniversary Celebration: An Appreciation of J. Neil Schulman’s The Rainbow Cadenza, the 1984 Prometheus Best Novel winner

40th Anniversary Prometheus Celebration: An Appreciation of James P. Hogan’s Voyage From Yesteryear, the 1983 Best Novel winner

Introduction: To highlight the four-decade history of the Prometheus Awards, which the Libertarian Futurist Society is celebrating in 2019, we are posting a series of weekly Appreciations of past Prometheus Award-winners, starting with our earliest Best Novel awards.
Here’s our third Appreciation, for James P. Hogan’s Voyage to Yesteryear, following recent Appreciations for F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels and L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach:

Two human civilizations, long separated across light years, confront significant philosophical and political differences when they make renewed contact decades after a World War III devastated the Earth and led to the rise of widespread authoritarian governments there.

When the Earth’s three superpower governments engage in a space race to renew contact with the lost colony on Chiron in the Alpha Centauri system colony’s descendants, the Americans arrive first with an authoritarian goal of invasion and domination.
Meanwhile, the Chiron colonists – sent from Earth generations before in a ship with babies raised by robots in order to start fresh and avoid the bad habits and prejudices of Earth – have developed a radically free libertarian society founded on the belief that each individual has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Continue reading 40th Anniversary Prometheus Celebration: An Appreciation of James P. Hogan’s Voyage From Yesteryear, the 1983 Best Novel winner