This is a funny and ultimately terrifying story about a woman spacer who decides to settle on what is supposed to be a planet without government. Only after her ship departs does she learn that this planet without laws does have customs, and the punishment for breaking those customs is unbelievably nasty. A good book for libertarians who can’t remember that oppression doesn’t always have a government label. The book argues for guarantee safeguards for individual liberty, and it makes that argument clearly and dramatically.

A “Repairman Jack” story in which good and evil, the rational and the irrational battle it out. A devil-like entity decides to destroy the earth by slowly taking away light. Every day sunrise comes a little later, sunrise a little earlier. Scientists are baffled and unnerved. Wilson does a great job of making the growing terror believable, even while the events themselves (this being a horror novel) are beyond belief. The message of the book’s ending—fear will destroy you and refusing to fear makes great things possible—is always a strengthening one. I especially enjoyed his little libertarian touches that occur here and there in all of Wilson’s work.

A beautifully written science fiction thriller from the mystery queen. It is 2021, and all human males have become infertile. The last baby was born in 1995, and civil rights have gone out the window as governments across the world have forcibly tested every man for viable sperm. Then a woman in England becomes pregnant, and instead of turning it over to authorities, in the process of fighting for the right to bear and keep her child brings the government down. It is also the story of a man who transforms from a joyless academic with nothing to live for into a man who passionately cares about this woman enough to fight for her.

Goldstein’s first fantasy novel, set in Elizabethan London, is also a very entertaining mystery with historical figures like Christopher Marlowe acting as detectives. A fantastic battle between opposing forces from an alternate world begins to involve the “real” world—from Queen Elizabeth’s court to the common bookbinders’ stalls in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Are these forces real or a mass hallucination? Do the opposing sides represent God and the Devil, or something else? A beautiful and individualist tale which delivers a memorable heroine.

This book is, to date, Nancy Kress’ best developed, and most Libertarian novel. A near-future story of genetic manipulation, it examines and argues over several ideas, the most important of which include: (1) what, if anything, do the sleeplessly gifted owe the masses of people who are not so gifted, and (2) why is it that “normal” people should not only tolerate, but welcome, the existence of people whose minds are more capable than their own. Kress explores these ideas through the reflections and actions of several fairly complex characters, some bad, some good, some badly mixed up.

Two new classes of humanity are generated by scientists in this novel. First to be created are the Sleepless, super-intelligent and very motivated humans who can spend those otherwise wasted night hours working and learning. Because the new humans are so driven to learn, they become supremely productive and successful. The envy of those who must sleep nearly destroys civilization. It becomes fashionable among “normals” to do shoddy work, or no work at all. “We sleep” is the motto of a factory producing almost unusable products. The products sell because of their limitations. Then the Sleepless themselves create a new kind of human.

Throughout the story other philosophical wars rage: the lead character’s father is a man driven by the ideas of a Japanese scientist/philosopher who advocates the idea of contracts between individuals as the cement of civilization and progress. The value of the individual is held in highest esteem, both by heroes and some rather unsympathetic characters. One of the most capable and influential Sleepless believes that only the collective is of value: her motivation for that belief is shown in stark detail. As a result, the reader is convinced by the cumulative strength of an idea itself, rather than by sympathy or antipathy for any one of its advocates.

[This review was written before I began taking Nancy Kress’ writing class. I am not trying to suck up to her with this, and the class is not graded. She did ask me to explain why I considered the book libertarian and then Kress stated that her next book is much more libertarian than this one.]

I don’t know what to do with The Silicon Man in terms of the Prometheus Award. It was published in 1991 by Bantam as a special edition. After selling out in less than two months, Bantam admitted that it should have reprinted it, but declined to do a reprint. An LFS member brought it to my attention at that time, but I was unable to get a copy. Fortunately, Charles Platt decided to have a small publisher bring it out so that it could be more available. I’m very glad he did, and recommend that LFS make an exception for this novel, and use its second printing date for the award.

The Silicon Man is a story of a young FBI agent who finds evidence of a very strange anti-government conspiracy and tries to stop it, losing his life, but not his memories or his consciousness in the process. It is also the story of several very obsessed scientists whose desire for scientific advance and personal immortality leads them to believe that their ends justify any means.

Several aspects of this novel are skillfully handled. The ideas of placing the memories and the consciousness of a human into a computer is nearly as old as science fiction, but Platt is most convincing in his attempts to figure out how the process might be accomplished. He also explores satisfactorily the existence of that mind once stored, and some of the questions that the immediately created by the concept of immortality—electronic or corporal.

The transition to an anarchist society is handled with grace, humor, and a convincing sense of inevitability which should be admired by most of the general reading public. Platt says that he wrote The Silicon Man while he was living in Los Angeles for a year. The authentic feel for that area, almost as mesmerizing as that demonstrated in Victor Koman’s The Jehovah Contract, shows that he didn’t waste his time while there.