The Libertarian Futurist Society’s ongoing Appreciation series strives to make clear what libertarian futurists see in each of our past winners and how each fits the Prometheus award’s distinctive focus on Liberty vs. Power. Here’s our Appreciation for Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, the 1987 Best Novel winner.
In 1985, Vinge’s The Peace War lost out to No Award in the Prometheus voting. In 1987, its sequel, Marooned in Realtime, was recognized as Best Novel — the first of several Best Novel and Hall of Fame awards to the author.
The Peace War had shown a market-oriented and anarchistic society in a future central California. But it wasn’t portrayed in detail, and existed within a larger world that was decidedly NOT libertarian, controlled by the repressive Peace Authority. And one of the viewpoint characters was a military officer who considered the libertarian society that Vinge sketched unsustainable.
In contrast, Marooned in Realtime’s characters look back to a past in which libertarian values had triumphed, and the central character is widely admired for his role in bringing down one of the Earth’s last states (a story told in “The Ungoverned,” a novella that won the LFS’s 2004 Hall of Fame Award).
The libertarianism stands out more.
The science fictional premise of both novels is the “bobble,” a perfectly spherical impenetrable force field that traps whatever it encloses.
In The Peace War, it was the basis for a “marvelous invention” story that explored its behavior and its impact on global politics. The great revelation of that story was that bobbles eventually opened, and that the people trapped by them hadn’t died as their air ran out, but went into temporal stasis until their bobbles burst.
Marooned in Realtime takes that same concept and makes it the basis for a novel of cosmic vision, as its characters leap forward over thousands or even millions of years. In a memorable passage, one (apparently) young woman complains of not being allowed to bobble, and feeling trapped in a world where the geography and the plant and animal species never change visibly.
This is akin to the experience of Wells’s Time Traveller entering a remote future Earth; but, for Vinge’s characters, the bobble is a ONE-WAY time machine. As a result of this, his characters, a small collection of human beings from varied backgrounds and eras, find themselves faced with a cosmic mystery: the disappearance of the rest of humanity from an era that they bobbled past, voluntarily or otherwise.
This situation sets up the novel’s OTHER mystery, one that drives the immediate plot: one of the emergent leaders of the remnant human population, Marta Korolev, is murdered by being prevented from bobbling when the rest of the human colony does so, leaving her trapped alone for the rest of her life. Finding the murderer, and preventing them from doing further harm, becomes the task of Wil Brierson, a policeman from an era of private enterprise law enforcement, aided by Della Lu, the former military officer from The Peace War.
In the course of their investigation, Brierson and Lu have to deal with survivals of non-libertarian political systems of the past—both the government of New Mexico, Brierson’s adversaries in “The Ungoverned” (the 2004 Prometheus Hall of Fame winner) and the Peace Authority.
It’s worth noting that Vinge plays fair with his political situation, raising doubts about the nongovernmental monopoly power exercised by the Korolevs through their unique possession of advanced technology as a potential basis for authoritarianism.
Marooned in Realtime isn’t exactly a portrayal of a libertarian society — its future humans aren’t so numerous or so organized as to form a society of a specific type — but their conflicts reflect libertarian and other political ideologies.
With this book, Vinge gained recognition as a central and highly influential figure in libertarian science fiction – and earned wide respect in the broader sf field as well.
Note: A Hugo finalist for Best Novel, Marooned in Real Time is the sequel not only to The Peace War (a 1985 Prometheus Best Novel finalist) but also to the novella “The Ungoverned,” inducted in 2004 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. All three works were collected and republished together as Across Realtime.
In a rave review, Prometheus-winning writer Jo Walton (Ha’Penny, the 2008 Best Novel winner)praised Marooned as a brilliant and tragic story about deep time, evolution, intelligence and how human narratives shape history and perception.
Vince, one of the more imaginative and brilliant sf writers to emerge in the 1980s-1990s and prophetic in his imaginative foreshadowing of the Internet and speculations about an approaching Singularity in human progress, also won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel in 2000 for A Deepness in the Sky and received a Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2014.
In his Prometheus-award acceptance speech (read by Baen Books editor Jim Baen at Cactuscon, the 1987 North American Science Fiction Convention), Vinge wrote:
“Speculative fiction provides a marvelous opportunity to speak of issues in an environment where readers are willing to give new and different ideas a chance. The Prometheus Award is a great encouragement to those who want to write good stories about the ideas of liberty and rights and wrongs.”
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Prometheus winners: For the full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website, which now includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,”an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies (including the recent 2023 ceremony with inspiring and amusing speeches by Prometheus-winning authors Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt),Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to Prometheus Blog posts.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, jointhe Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists believe that culture matters! We understand that the arts and literature can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future – and in some ways can be even more powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, individuality and human dignity.
Through recognizing the literature of liberty and the many different but complementary visions of a free future via the Prometheus Awards, the LFS hopes to help spread better visions of the future that help humanity overcome tyranny, end slavery, reduce the threat of war, repeal or constrain other abuses of coercive power and achieve universal liberty, respect for human rights and a better world (perhaps ultimately, worlds) for all.
