Comments on the finalists

PROMETHEUS AWARD

Circuit Breaker is the second of Melinda Snodgrass’s trilogy. It’s fun, but not as good as Circuit (the first) and neither is it as good as Final Circuit (the third, which has already been nominated for the 1987 Prometheus). Two reviews pro and con, have been published here, so enough said.

A fascinating and more than competently written book about a man with few scruples and a future where the national debt is repudiated, the military becomes privatized, and the power of the federal government is broken. Two groups of people should read this novel: those who believe that without a strong military the U.S. would be overthrown by invaders, and those who think a libertarian revolution could be merely an economic reform without principles. The old lesson, power corrupts, is underscored, but the moral point might be too vaguely drawn for some readers.

A flawless libertarian allegory with a great setting. There is no place in this book where I wanted Koman to have done it differently. The point the novel makes–-that even if God exists, he’s such an ass that he doesn’t deserve respect, attention, obedience, or even existence–-is a great one proclaiming as it does liberation from the biggest Big Brother of them all. I’d be very pleased if this book won the Prometheus Award.

A delightful novel, with a good plot, a clear vision, and many finely crafted alien races (plus two perfectly realized not-so-alien races--"uplifted" chimps and gorillas). Clearly, Brin read everything by Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, because his intelligent chimps and growing-in-intelligence gorillas seem exactly as they should, with the influence of human mentors noted and species differences given their due.

There are fine little libertarian touches, like the free-market plant colony that the hero and heroine discover, and the fact that humans can’t control their charges, especially the dolphins. But the author has his own agenda and some personal points to make–-for instance–-that humans are not by nature evil, just ignorant, and that as we increase our knowledge we will learn how to avoid such stupidities as pollution.

A book with a good side and a bad side. Aliens enslave the human race, rather like a dairy farmer milking his cows, confiscating their production and otherwise controlling their lives. For their own good. The Aslaag are so powerful humans so helpless, that it takes years for a resistance movement to form and coalesce around one man called the Pilgrim.

But after the hero has given his near-Galtian speech to the head Aslaag, explaining why the spirit of humankind will no longer tolerate enslavement, then Dickson destroys the uplifted mood with a cute, deflated ending. Why? Has he been influenced by creative writing dogma? i.e., a happy ending can’t be art? Someone should ask him.

Editor’s Note: I just received a late review of Pilgrim from Gerry Uba. He loved the ending, saying: “One of the most pleasurable and satisfying experiences I have as a reader is to find a story whose ending changes my interpretation of everything that happened since the first page. But, Uba adds, “The story itself is not intrinsically original or exciting.”

HALL OF FAME

This is J. Neil Schulman’s first novel, and as good and as solidly written as it is, it just doesn’t have the complexity, the power, or the maturity of his Prometheus Award winner, The Rainbow Cadenza. In 1979 Michael Grossberg caused a furor when he called it an excellent juvenile in a Libertarian Review article, but he did not mean that comment to be an insult. It is a novel written about a very young man and should appeal to young people; many great authors, Heinlein among them, have written juveniles, and adult readers often love them; and the book eschews morbid violence and explicit sex in the style of an author writing for the young.

After all the discussion of this novel in these pages, there is probably nothing left to say about it that might convince the members that hate it not to, but I have to do something because it consistently gets high vote totals, and might win someday.

I would like those who hate The Dispossessed to consider two things:

1. It is possible that they are misreading Le Guin’s novel.

2. If it wins some year, perhaps they should stay in LFS anyway. After all, if a non-libertarian sees Rand and Le Guin represented in our Hall of Fame, it might just get them thinking.

Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination is number 10 (out of 45) on the Locus All-Time Best SF novel list, and is also on J. Neil Smith’s list of libertarian SF (see page 3 of this issue). Stars has everything--complexity, a breath-taking pace, some exciting, realistic, and highly technological setting, and a message.

The story of a man who transforms himself from space-rat to Renaissance man and then something else, this is the novel that most deserves to be made into a movie, and one that probably should be a Hall of Fame winner.

Since no one can sell Bester better than Bester, here’s the novel’s second paragraph:

“All the habitable worlds of the solar system were occupied. Three planets and eleven million people swarmed in one of the most exciting ages ever known, yet minds yearned for other times, as always. The solar system seethed with activity. …fighting, feeding, and breeding, learning the new technologies that sprouted forth almost before the old had been mastered, girding itself for the first exploration of the far stars in deep space, but—”

And then some dialogue from the book’s conclusions:

“’For God’s sake, Yeo, keep that crowd back. Don’t let them hear this.’"

"’No,’ Foyle roared. ‘Let them near this. Let them hear everything.’

"‘You're insane, man. You’ve handed a loaded gun to children.’

"‘Stop treating them like children, and they’ll stop behaving like children…. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open.’ Foyle laughed savagely. ‘I’ve ended the last star-chamber conference in the world. I’ve blown the last secret wide open…. No more telling the children what’s best for them to know…. Let them grow up. It’s about time…who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we’re compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life or death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?’

"‘We’re not saddled,’ Yang-Yeovil said quietly. ‘We’re driven. We’re forced to seize the responsibility that the average man shirks.’

"‘Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it. Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?’

"‘Damn you! Dagenham raged. ‘Don’t you realize that you can’t trust people? They don’t know enough for their own good.’

"‘Then let them learn or die.’”

It’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, and I hope it wins.

Ira Levin wrote Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, and No Time for Sergeants. This Perfect Day could have easily been written in the thirties, but was published in 1970. Its style more nearly resembles some early dystopian novels, and like some of them, its characters are nearly as uniform as the society they live in. I can’t find any evidence that Levin wrote this novel to make a moral point. In this and his other works, he seems to be exploiting the fads of the day in order to make a buck. Well, most of us need money.

For all of this, the book is libertarian, as is any novel where characters fight against a totalitarian society and for the liberty to think and live for themselves, and it has a fast-moving plot. But I don’t find any new ideas here, and I hope that anyone who sees the book differently will write a review for this publication.

This beautifully written novel is one of the first major examples of modern dystopian fiction, and its author is one of the foremost post-revolutionary Russian writers. After an unauthorized portion of We was published in a Russian emigré journal, Zamyatin was silenced in his country, and went into voluntary exile in France. It is amazing that he was given that much, because the novel’s tightly controlled future civilization, where people are always visible in glass-walled buildings, and sex is regulated with ration coupons, made a powerful statement and was considered to be an unconcealed attack on the regimentation of communism.

Where other authors of the day were warning of the dangers of technology and mechanical domination, Zamyatin saw man, not machines, as the tyrant. He was one of the first post-revolutionary Russian writers to glorify individual freedom. In English literature especially We elevated the heretic to the status of hero. This book deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

—The editor