The Libertarian Futurist Society’s ongoing Appreciation series strives to make clear what libertarian futurists see in each of our past winners and how each fit the Prometheus award’s distinctive focus on freedom. Here’s our Appreciation for Fallen Angels, co-written by Michael Flynn, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:
Fallen Angels, the 1992 Prometheus Best Novel winner, 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 novel’s co-authors Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn offer some genuine hope by focusing on a group of individualistic, science-loving and freedom-loving misfits.
The title refers to two astronauts from NASA’s stranded and closed-down space station who fall to earth while on one of their desperate flights to beef up the station’s diminishing gas supplies by scooping up nitrogen gases from the Earth’s outer atmosphere.
Such missions have sparked the ire of the Greens, who view the astronauts’ actions as simply more theft of Earth’s resources and as “inappropriate science” – the new no-no in a reactionary and regressive society that puritanically condemns any consumption of energy as polluting and wasteful.
The two “fallen angels” struggle to evade capture and try to return to their space station, which has made progress toward self-sufficiency. In a subplot that seems consciously aimed at science-fiction fans, the astronauts fall to Earth the day before the annual science-fiction convention, prompting a group of sf fans to decide to rescue them.
Yet, the authors also find much humor in the contrast of cultures between the practical, reality-oriented astronauts and the romantic, idealistic fans, whose optimism somehow carries them through obstacles to help solve the crisis.
Note: Michael Flynn also won the 1991 Prometheus Award for Best Novel for In the Country of the Blind.
Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017) edited The Survival of Freedom, a 1981 anthology of short stories and essays (co-edited with John F. Carr) that was inducted in 2001 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Larry Niven, meanwhile, is best known for his award-winning novel Ringworld and its sequels, all part of his interlinked stories and novels set within the same interstellar future within his Tales of Known Space.
* Check out the previous Appreciation for Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind.
* Read the Appreciation of The Survival of Freedom, an anthology edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr and inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2000.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
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