Prometheus Award Ceremony, 2002

Fred C. Moulton (presenter): The Prometheus Award, established by the Libertarian Futurist Society, was founded in 1979, making it one of the oldest awards after the Nebula and Hugo, and one of the oldest fan-based awards currently presented in science fiction. It honors the novel that best explores the possibility of a free future, champions individual rights, including personal liberty, and examines the conflict between individuals and coercive governments and the tragic consequences of the abuse of power. Prometheus Award nominees for the best novel published in 2001 are Falling Stars, by Michael Flynn; Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury, Enemy Glory, by Karen Michalson; The American Zone, by L. Neil Smith; and Hosts, by F. Paul Wilson. And the winner is Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury.

Donald Kingsbury: That's very nice. First gold I've ever had.

It was sort of a thing I've been thinking about writing for a long, long time. I started reading Asimov's psychohistorical crisis stories, the Foundation series, when I was about l6. And what intrigued me about these stories was you had these constraints that you had to live with. We all know we have to live with constraints. You can't walk on the surface of the sun. But you have freedom within those constraints, and that came out in the series. It wasn't a deterministic thing where everybody was being a puppet carrying out their little part. It was more like hydrodynamics where you don't follow the individual atoms—they can go anywhere they want—but they have certain constraints.

Now one of the things that bothered me as a teenager and it bothered me all the time and it became the seed of Psychohistorical Crisis, and it was very simplistic, is that in order to predict the future you had to keep it secret. If you didn't keep it secret then somebody would just go out and falsify your prediction. But what that does is it sets up an elite government. And then this came through in Asimov's story. You have the Second Foundation, and they're not telling anybody what the prediction is or what the future is or anything like that—they're keeping it secret. At the same time there's no single future that you predict. Just like ourselves, we walk out into the street and we predict that a bus is coming along and we decide we're going to walk slowly and get run over or we're going to wait for the bus to go by and then we have all these decisions. I predict that if I run U can get across the street ahead of the bus. I predict that if I don't run I'll get run over by the bus and I predict that if I stand still I'll survive and so I have these choices that prediction gives you.

Well, the Second Foundation has choices too. Hari Seldon looked at the decline of the Galaxy and predicted that if you set up certain people in a certain place they would be able to revive civilization in a shorter period of time than if that wasn't done. But still you have the Second Foundation making these decisions. And what happens with an elite is that they start to make decisions toward their own benefit. We have a hard time predicting, so this option, which is kind of fuzzy and is difficult to examine, well, we'll make sure that that one doesn't happen because it doesn't fit the math too well. And we'll take this one which may be the easy course. And no one can contest this because they don't know what is going on. So you have this powerful government which is kind of treating people as atoms rather than as thinking people.

It occurred to me that this would cause some terrible crisis in the future; people could begin to decide things that the Second Foundation didn't want. It occurred to me that people would be very upset if they weren't allowed to study the machinery of prediction. They would develop a feeling of exclusion, a feeling of being manipulated. Even though the manipulators are claiming to be doing it all for your own good.

It's similar to the Catholic position when they didn't allow anybody to read the Bible. Only the well-trained priests and clergy would be capable of understanding it. So you weren't even allowed to read it. So I figured that there would be groups that would be trying to reduplicate psychohistory and there would be people who would feel disenfranchised. So I wanted to deal with that.

No matter what the constraints are you have choices, your own free choices to make. And the individual does make a difference. He handles these constraints and works within them; he can do a lot of things. So I have my central character Eron Osa, who sort of finds out these things while he studies psychohistory, and he develops his own way of proceeding and notices that there's this crisis coming up.

I'm a mathematician so I know how you can obscure things when you want an answer that the mathematics isn't really giving you. Like you like smooth functions which don't have discontinuities. So you ignore the discontinuities, and you only study smooth functions, only apply smooth functions to the model, and you get these nice smooth answers which may have nothing to do with reality because reality may not be very happy with the smooth functions. Something like mathematics is only a model of what's really there, and there's no way you can have a perfect picture of the future; you have to be very careful about your assumptions.

I especially wanted to look at Asimov's assumption that you had to be secret if you were going to predict the future. I don't think you have to be. I think you get a very interesting future if we have this predictive knowledge. In our society we do have a lot of powerful predictive tools. You can go to the university and study them, or you can buy a book and study them, and people have access to them. They may not want to do it, but a lot of people on the stock market now are very interested in doing that kind of thing.

You predict something that you'd like and then you find out that everybody else is predicting something else. You want to develop all this land and you want to cut it down and they want to live there and you're predicting that you have the power to go in there and they're predicting that you don't and you get this big conflict going. If everybody has enough power to predict then there's some compromise that you can do and you get a mutually acceptable future. So when more and more people can predict then you get these back and forth feedback exchanges in which people zero in on a future that they all can accept. Rather than something like Second Foundation where they can predict a future where it doesn't matter if you like it or not—it's going to happen; you're not in a position to oppose it. You don't really have the power to oppose it because you don't know where it's going and you're putting your efforts in the wrong place.

Anyway, I thought there was a lot of very interesting discussion that could be done and that Asimov didn't do in his later fiction. It bothered me that he had a robot that had been around 20,000 years manipulating human history and we were all just sitting there and he was taking care of us because he had these laws of robotics and he had to take care of everybody. It's nice to have a mother and father when you're four years old—it keeps you out of a lot of trouble—but by the time you get to be fifty you want to be independent of your mother and father and you want them to give you advice but you don't want them running your life.

Thanks for the award.

Fred C. Moulton (presenter): Our next award is the Hall of Fame Award, which focuses on older classic fiction including novels, novellas, short stories, poems, plays, movies, and television. The finalists for this year's award were A Clockwork Orange, a novel by Anthony Burgess; "Requiem," a short story by Robert A. Heinlein; It Can't Happen Here, a novel by Sinclair Lewis, "The Prisoner," a television series by Patrick McGoohan; and The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy of novels by J. R. R. Tolkien. The winner is "The Prisoner."

Mr. McGoohan could not be present, but he sent an acceptance speech, which will be read by Fran van Cleave, a science fiction writer and LFS member.

Fran van Cleave (reader): It means quite a bit to me to receive this award, because I am philosophically in the same ballpark with individualists and libertarians. I am very touched.

There's no point in talking about [the show]; everything that's in there is in there.

I would say that I am amazed after nearly 40 years since "The Prisoner" first got out, to receive this prestigious award. l'm glad you expanded the spectrum of your award from novels and novellas to include film and television, because every now and then in film and television something good will come out.

Thank you all very much.