James P. Hogan is long established as a libertarian science fiction writer. Any novel that he publishes has a good chance of being nominated for the Prometheus Award, as The Legend That Was Earth has been. And the nomination seems all the more fitting when a central concern of the novel is social and political change. Despite this, I'm not sure that this novel qualifies for the award.

In the first place, despite its advocacy of "freedom," it doesn't seem to understand freedom the same way libertarians do. A major goal of the novel's villains is keeping trade open between humanity and the alien culture the novel portrays, the Hyadeans. By implication, the right side seems to be the people who want to prevent trade between Earth and the Hyadeans—represented here by the Chinese and the Muslim nations. The "freedom" of this novel seems to be the freedom of majorities to prevent voluntary trade between individuals in their nation and individuals in another nation, and, more generally, the democratic notion of "freedom" as collective control of the economy. This is nearly the exact opposite of libertarian views of freedom, for which free trade is vital.

In the second place, despite Hogan's engineering background and interest in technology, its claims to be hard science fiction are equally questionable. Hogan is not working within the framework of 20th century scientific theory; his version of science is a grab bag of alternative ideas, including Velikowskian cosmology (not explicitly so called) and cold fusion. He rejects Darwinian evolution in favor of biological change programmed by DNA from outer space; he rejects special relativity, while retaining quantum mechanics, whose predictions attain unprecedented numerical accuracy only by relying on special relativity. It's also disturbing that he describes special relativity as based on importing the Galilean transformation from classical mechanics into electromagnetic theory; in fact, it was the reverse—Lorentzian transformation was imported from electromagnetic theory into mechanics, which is why special relativity seems bizarre to physics students trained in classical mechanics.

In fact, what The Legend That Was Earth really is is a competently written thriller. It starts out as a novel of business and political intrigue; it ends as a war story. Despite the involvement of its characters in major social changes, they seem almost devoid of ideas; they are pragmatic businessmen, politicians, conspirators, and military officers. The underlying idea of a race of alien conformists fascinated by the wild diversity of human civilizations has libertarian implications, but they don't seem fully developed. Hogan has given libertarian readers an entertainment that occasionally touches on sympathetic political themes; but libertarian readers won't find any new insights here, and nonlibertarians won't see a clear enough statement of libertarian values to win them over. Hogan may be one of our core authors, but The Legend That Was Earth isn't one of our core books.