Fiction Forum

Interesting that Michael Grossberg is accused of trying to keep J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night from the Prometheus Hall of Fame because he doesn’t think it good enough. I recollect from the misty past of a couple of years ago an editor of Prometheus deciding that none of that year’s nominees was ideologically pure enough to win the award, and abusing her position to talk the membership into voting no on the award. Heck, I can understand the temptation; I did something not entirely dissimilar when I was editing a clubzine.

The Rainbow Cadenza is a brilliant book, perhaps the best book ever to win the Prometheus. Alongside Night is merely a respectable first novel. Even the author admits he was aiming low (“Alongside Night was written to be…a fast-moving adventure story that would act as a hook for libertarian philosophy…the novel is Spartan, a left out anything that I thought might get in the way of expressing the possibility of achieving liberty through human action.”)

It is, thus, not on the basis of its quality that the author wishes A.N. to win; rather: “the Prometheus Award was designed to promote the ideas of liberty, and of my two novels, Alongside Night does this more directly.”

Then we should vote for A.N. because it is good propaganda? I don’t think it is good propaganda any more. Its depiction of an America wracked by hyperinflation was both topical and immediately plausible toward the end of the Carter interregnum; but today’s teenagers don’t know what inflation is.

If the Prometheus is intended to get non-libertarians to read libertarian SF (as opposed to helping libertarians find stuff in tune with their ideology) then it cannot afford to become known as an ideological purity label. I remember once discussing The Rainbow Cadenza with a dealer in a convention huckster’s room; when I mentioned I admired it for having given the best argument for the existence of God I had ever encountered, a woman standing next to me almost tore it out of my hands. By contrast, on another occasion, I was praising Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime to the skies, when I let the L-word slip, I could see mental shutters closing the moment my listener realized the book was “libertarian”.

If seconds-rate works are given the Prometheus as a reward for ideological purity or propaganda value, then we will shortly see those same mental shutters closing when a book is labeled “Prometheus Award Winner”; and the award's only function will be to assure that we ever more precisely preach only to the converted.