Prometheus Finalists

Below follow brief reviews of the finalists for the 1994 Prometheus Award. The voting deadline is August 15.

Rainbow Man, M. J. Engh

This is a funny and ultimately a 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 gradually 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 guaranteed safeguards for individual liberty, and it makes that argument clearly and dramatically.

Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress

This is a stunning, highly crafted work of libertarian fiction. The questions raised in this novel draw from the ideas, thoughts, and dilemmas of human relationships raised in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed while forging an attempted synthesis of both.

What is the moral relationship between talented individuals and those who benefit from their talents? This is the question that genetically altered nonsleepers ask themselves and deal with in different manners.

Benefitting from increased intelligence, more time and energy, and tremendous longevity, the non-sleepers grow and develop into a realization of their own differences. Set in the near future and an America in collapse from envy and a collectivist economy, the non-sleepers take alternate views on the relations of "normal" humans.

The development of the characters and the value system presented by Kress make this a fascinating libertarian achievement. If as rumored her next novel is even more libertarian it will truly be a delight.

The Silicon Man, Charles Platt

A highly advanced and sharply extrapolated work of near-future science fiction, this novel details an FBI agent's attempt to trace a hightech underground experiment. Built around dreams of electronic immortality, the minds behind this experiment will do anything to protect and finish their work.

The novel is graced by an authentic feel for place describing Los Angeles in vivid detail. The questions raised about means and ends are controversial and thought-provoking, and the technical details of storing the mind and its memories electronically are handled in an adept, original manner.

Pallas, L. Neil Smith

In one of Smith's most ambitious works to date, two very different groups of colonists settle a large asteroid and strive in their separate ways to influence the course of both societies.

Yet much more than this, Pallas is a well constructed libertarian novel with memorable characters, a highly-driven plot and sudden surprises. The protagonist, Emerson Ngu, is a quintessential libertarian without being preachy; his philosophy expresses itself in his actions, core beliefs, and creative entrepreneurship.

Virtual Girl, Amy Thomson

I always thought Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were very anti-libertarian in nature. By limiting robots' rights to use force, these laws robbed them of the right of self-defense.

Such laws and other insidious antitech views are propelled by fear that the superior technology of robots threaten humanity. Finally along comes a novel that declares independence for robots and all thinking individual beings.

This brilliant first novel spins a powerful tale of a robot in female form whose growing self-awareness derives from a stronger law, that each thinking creature is her own master, a lesson she takes beyond her own person.