A few LFS advisory members have commented that although they thought Poul Anderson’s new novel was fascinating, they couldn’t say why it would be considered libertarian, or why someone had nominated it for the Prometheus Award. For those doubters I’d like to mention some aspects of the book they might have missed.

The Boat of a Million Years is the story of several “immortals”, humans whose bodies are able to self-regenerate so that they remain, mentally and physically, in their prime for thousands of years. Life extension being a favorite topic for libertarians, the fact of the main characters’ immortality is enough to spark our interest, if not our ideological commitment.

The libertarianism in the book, though not explicit, is demonstrated—in the tradition of Heinlein's Lazarus Long—by the very lives the characters lead. Because they must hide the fact that they do not age, the best of the immortals are encouraged to look after themselves first.

Forced mobility, over centuries, helps the brightest of the immortals — the survivors — to look askance on all governments, all religions, all creeds. Most of them become traders or merchants of some kind. In some cultures, where females are forbidden to own businesses and where wives are little more than chattel, the women often find that only a courtesan can achieve both independence and wealth. (One wonders how the physical systems of both men and women withstand diseases like syphilis, but Anderson is too much of a gentleman to mention it.)

This is done very well, with careful attention to historical accuracy and detail. Anderson’s main concerns here are not with the necessity for freedom, but what happens to humanity when (if) technology solves all our problems. How does the human animal survive without problems to struggle against.

For a longer and very interesting discussion of this novel and the questions Anderson poses, I recommend Greg Costikyan’s review in the July, 1990 Reason. For a group of futurists desirous of eliminating the barriers to a better society, considerations of the results are well worth examining.