Pallas wins Prometheus Award

The Libertarian Futurist Society awarded the 1994 Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction novel to L. Neil Smith's Pallas.

Bill Ritch presented the award for LFS at the 1994 Worldcon, ConAdian, the 52nd World Science Fiction convention, held September 1-5 in Winnipeg, Canada. A representative of Smith accepted the award on Smith's behalf. Pallas is Smith's second Prometheus Award, along with his debut novel The Probability Broach, which won the award in 1982.

Pallas combines a blend of dystopia and utopia in its sketches of two different ways of social life on an asteroid outside Mars orbit. Writer J. Neil Schulman calls Pallas an answer to Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and a work on par with Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Tor published the hardcover edition of Pallas in November of 1993, and has scheduled the paperback edition for May of 1995.

Yevgeni Zamiatin won LFS's other annual award, the Hall of Fame award, for best classic work of fiction dealing with liberty, for his dystopian novel, We, first published in the United States in 1924.

Zamiatin (1884-1937) began writing in Russia in 1908. After the 1917 October Revolution he became a prominent figure in important literary groups. Censored and vilified by the dominant literary faction, especially after an émigré journal published We (My) in 1927. Zamiatin left for Paris. There he died shunned by Soviet officialdom and other anti-Soviet émigrés.

A source of inspiration for other dystopian novels such as Brave New World and 1984, Zamiatin's disturbing picture of the logical conclusions of creeping totalitarianism remains a valid and timeless warning. The most apparent example of living totalitarianism—the Soviet Union—may have fallen, but the lessons of how it got there must never be forgotten.