Letters

I just read The Resurrectionist, a great and very libertarian suspense/super-natural thriller by Thomas Monteleone. I want to nominate it for the Prometheus Award. It's a Warners Books hardback, published in 1995.

The novel features lots of anti-government analysis. The central character is a bad politician who has a change of heart after a near-death experience following a plane crash. The government attempts to kidnap and kill him through a secret spy organization.

It's an exposé of double standards in ethics between private individuals and governments, and a very well written, exciting novel.

I have two books to suggest for consideration for the Prometheus Award. First is Melanie Rawn's The Ruins of Ambrai—a surprising work, a fantasy set on another planet where there are two different orders of mages, one believing in individual freedom of choice and the other in central planning by the (magically) wise.

These are clear allusions to the art of comprising as practiced in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and there's some very lucid discussion of the corruption of market economies by statism.

[This novel was published in 1994, and therefore is not eligible for this year's Prometheus Award; however, the book does deserve attention by libertarian fiction fans, and Stoddard's review will appear in the July issue of Prometheus—Editor]

A less clear case, but well worth reading, is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. This has a future where privacy has destroyed the nation state and replaced it with the ethnic kindred, with an international body whose job is to make sure everyone follows common economic protocols, and one of the dominant ethnic kindreds being Anglo Americans who believe in the Victorian ethic. There's even something called the First Distributed Republic which seems like an intelligent though slantwise reading of anarcho-capitalism.

I'm thrilled by [Bill Howell's] review [of Self Control Not Gun Control, Prometheus, Vol. 14, No. 1], which I just read. He's the first reviewer who actually understood that this is not just a gun book like Stopping Power; He MAY be the first reviewer who actually read it.

Thanks for the latest Prometheus. For a moment, seeing Brinke Stevens on the front page, I thought it was Joe Bob Briggs' newsletter.

Thanks for the kind words about Implant. I'm surprised to see it as a Prometheus nominee (I don't consider it SF) but very pleased.