Unlike 1984, there was some very excellent and libertarian fiction published in 1985. The first book well worth mentioning is not a novel but a collection of short stories, and thus not allowable as a Prometheus nomination under current rules. However, as was demonstrated last year, fiction that is both very well written and libertarian is rare. Given this scarceness, do we dare pass up a book that fits both categories just because it contains short stories and not a novel? [Note that there is a space to vote on this issue on the nominations ballot in this newsletter.]

Trinity is exceptional, and so is its author, Nancy Kress. If I may quote from Gene Wolfe's introduction,

"Occasionally we may find a writer.... who cares so much for her creation that her creation is all that matters to her, not because she counts herself as nothing but because she does not count herself at all. Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are writers of this kind. So is Nancy Kress. They don't care what we think of them, which is why we think the world of them."

These words, and the fact that Jeff Riggenbach, the libertarian writer and critic, had sent me Kress's book with his recommendation, combined to give me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the kind of feeling that most LFS Advisory members probably get when the book in their hands might actually be intelligently written and (trumpets) liberating.

Kress didn't let me down. Her writing is, at worst, professional —at best she knocks your socks off. Her stories are set all over the time and place. One of the best is "Explanations, Inc.," which she says was "unwittingly" influenced by two other writers: Ayn Rand and Warren Solomon. It is the story of a college professor, obsessed by finding the meaning of existence, who is transformed by his interaction with a business that sells explanations. This story also makes me want to look up the work of Warren Solomon. Kress describes him as a "...SF writer who, like Rand, believes that the universe is rational, that rationality is man's only means to understand the world and himself, and that only rational actions have moral validity."

"Ten Thousand Pictures, One Word," another favorite of mine, is about a fantasy artist whose illustrations of nubile and fantastic women change overnight into pictures of real women of the time, whether past or future. "Borovsky's Hollow Woman" concerns a robotic space suit whose "soul" won't let her do wrong even if she is ordered to do so. "With the Original Cast" has a heroine that Ayn Rand would have loved.

I understand that Kress normally writes fantasy. Since I don't read much fantasy, I have missed her work until now. If she's this good at science fiction, then I'll give fantasy another try.

Speaking of Ayn Rand, Kay Nolte Smith's latest novel, Elegy For a Soprano, is already controversial in some circles because a few people consider it "anti-Rand." Truthfully one of the book's main characters, Vardis Wolf, does resemble Rand in a few ways. Norwegian born, Wolf came to the U.S. as a young woman to become, by unrelenting work and determination (sound familiar?), the worldly greatest operatic soprano. She attracted a too-loyal coterie, and acquired a reputation for imperious mannerisms and a dogmatic perfectionism. Whatever similarities she bad with Rand thus far I will leave to the reader.

Vardis has other qualities, however, that no reader, and certainly not Ms. Smith, would ascribe to Rand. For Vardis, music is everything, and nothing—not friendship, not truth, not even human life are allowed to stand in its way. For Rand, truth and morality were everything. Even when she was wrong, she was trying to uphold one or the other (or both). In other words, Vardis was (and I am using the past tense because she is murdered in the first chapter of Elegy) an artist whose single-minded devotion to her art make her amoral, while Rand, whatever her faults was a supreme moralist.

But Smith'S primary concern in this novel does not seem to be with the nature of the artist. Rather her focus is on the audience. How should we as fans or even followers of genius behave? Does the mere fact of genius negate our own personal devotion to truth and to our own lives and freedom? This is no idle question for Objectivists and former objectivists (since I am one of these), who too often held our own minds in suspension in order to accomodate some almost papal bull from her holiness.

And now for the famous question: But is this book libertarian? Damn right. If we could rid ourselves of government tomorrow we'd find many other tyrannical monsters to fight—some in society and at least one in our minds. The one in our minds is too lazy to think, and tries to convince us how much easier life would be if we'd only let someone else do our thinking for us. It's this monster that Kay Nolte Smith is writing about. Around her theme she wraps a compelling plot and fascinating and completely fleshed-out characters. This is, in my opinion, Smith's best novel yet, and well-deserving of the Prometheus Award.

It was well over a year ago that I first heard of a new book by Gene Wolfe titled Free Live Free. It was, I was told, a story of an old man whose house is going to be torn down because it is in the path of a new highway, and of the friends who try and help save it from destruction. While the plot sounded libertarian enough, it also seemed a little prosaic for Gene Wolfe. I should have known. From such simple beginnings Wolfe's assembled circus of characters—for instance a diminutive detective, a 300 pound prostitute, a gorgeous gypsy, and a nosy neighbor whose name should have been Mrs. Malaprop—survive some outrageous tribulations in order to help Mr. Free, the young/old man whose house is, after all, torn down in the first eighth of the book.

Each reader will have to decide whether Mr. Free's cause is libertarian. After reading Free Live Free twice, I've decided that it is. But it may be that such a deliciously convoluted plot and initially unclear message (if a message exists) is not what we want for a Prometheus Award winner. Nevertheless, I can't resist nominating it, so that as many people as possible can read the book that surrounds the following quotes:

"I used to vote, but it doesn't do any good. It's coffee that makes politicians wise—and that's what the Pope said—only they don't drink enough.

"Mr. Illingworth was just beside himself, if you know what I mean. I mean government repression after all these years…Mr. Illingworth looked ten years younger."

"The trouble with you people is that you won't do what you're ordered to. You can never see that when you do what the leader says, everything works out, and when you don't, it all breaks down."

"You are not American.…There isn't one of you, not a God-damned one, that owns a designer sheet, or a set of matched towels. You don't wear anybody's jeans, and you don't jog.

"You have overcome us, but you have not conquered us. To conquer us you must beat us fairly, and you have not beaten us fairly. To conquer us you must have dignity too, and for that reason you have not conquered us. A man may flee from a wasp and be stung by the wasp, but he has not been conquered by the wasp; it remains an insect and he is still a man. You deck yourselves like fools and chatter and hop like apes, and your princes marry whores. That is why even those you have crushed to dust will not call you master, and none will ever call you master until you meet a nation more foolish than yourselves.

Read Free Live Free and see if you can figure it out.

James Hogan—Whose book Voyage from Yesteryear won the 1983 Prometheus Award, and whose Code of the Lifemaker was worthy of winning the 1984 award—has a new novel out called The Proteus Operation. As excellent as Proteus is, it is disappointingly difficult to make much of a case for it being libertarian. Even though freedom is touted on the dust jacket: the freedom Hogan's characters are fighting for is the freedom we have already, and while that certainly has its advantages, it just isn't radical enough.

In the "proteus" operatives' world, the U.S. remained isolationist throughout World War II, Hitler won the war in Europe and after three agonizing decades the United States is about to fall too. So, the operatives travel in a time machine from 1975 to 1939 to give Roosevelt, Einstein, Edward Teller, and Winston Churchill the military means to win the war—the atomic boob, of course. As always, Hogan gives us enough of a solid scientific and technological background to make everything, including the time machine. plausible.

One of the great attractions of time machine stories is the very human desire to go back in time armed with perfect knowledge and change things. For me the most satisfying aspect of Proteus is the way Hogan's "Men from the future" convince Einstein, et al, that they are actually from 1975, that the threat from Hitler is much worse than imagined. and to embark on a specific course of action that will change the future. Hogan's image of the 1939 Einstein playing like an awed child, with a modern computer will always be one of my favorite moments in fiction. And it is certainly funny to have a very young Issac Asimov dashing in and out of the plot exclaiming about his latest story. (Interestingly. Issac Asimov, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner gave Hogan permission to use them as guest characters.)

However, the theme of the novel is far too interventionist, far too in love with America as-it-is-now, for me to get as excited about it as I'd hoped. All the innovative thought here is scientific, not political. So, although The Proteus Operation is an exciting adventure story, its not the book we'd like it to be for our purposes. But I'd love someone who disagrees with me to change my mind.

L. Neil Smith had a copy of Glen Cook's A Matter of Time sent to me with his recommendation. Like Hogan's Proteus Operation and Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free, this novel involves time travel as a method of changing history.

Matter is a mystery involving three interconnecting story lines which Cook identifies as the X, Y, and Z axes (as in plural of "axis"). The "Z" axis is a Rambo nightmare. The Chinese have been training Vietnam MIA's (yes, Sylvester, that's where they all went) as agents and saboteurs. Unconsciously programmed, they are to be released to the U.S. (and other) governments) to begin the Chinese takeover of the world.

On the "X" axis are the results of that takeover. In 2058 a spat between a few of The State's upper echelon scientists blows up The State's prediction computer (the Tachyon Displacement Data Transfer System), and the four main protagonists are blown back to 1866. There, they travel around Europe, and later, America, three who think it is their duty to survive and save The State—which owes its success to the blownup computer—and one who only wants to find and murder them. Using life extension techniques, they survive until they run into Detective Norman Cash in 1977.

Cash on Cook's "Y" axis is the most initially unaware libertarian hero I've ever read about. Not that his lack of knowledge is his fault. As a detective confronted with a newly-murdered corpse of a man who died 55 years earlier, he does awfully well. As the result of his determination to solve a nearly unexploinable mystery, he becomes the most important freedom fighter in the world. I love stories about ordinary people who save the day, and I think you'll like this one too. Because of Glen Cook's style, this book sometimes requires attentive reading. I misunderstood one paragraph, and had to read most of the book again to figure out what happened.

But even though the reader has to pay close attention to find it, the libertarian message is very much there—i.e.. one person can make a profound difference in the future of the world, and freedom is well worth fighting for even if everyone else thinks you are crazy.