A guide to Best Novel nominees, Part 5: Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, Steve Wire’s Black Hats, Fenton Wood’s Hacking Galileo and Alan Zimm’s Misperceived Threats

By Michael Grossberg

Here is the fifth and final part of the Prometheus Blog guide to the 2024 Prometheus nominees for Best Novel.

These capsule descriptions – alphabetized by author, and concluding with Daniel Suarez’s Critical Mass, Steve Wire’s Black Hats, Fenton Wood’s Hacking Galileo and Alan Zimm’s Misperceived Threats – aim to make clear why LFS members nominated them for the next Prometheus Award and how they fit the distinctive dual focus of our award, at once literary and thematic.

While the 12-member Prometheus Best Novel finalist-judging committee won’t vote to select a slate of finalists from the 17 nominees until April, other Libertarian Futurist Society members are invited to begin reading the nominees that spark their interest.

Perhaps also, this may allow LFS awards voters to get a head start on reading some nominees that may end up as finalists – even before the usual final reading and ranking stage of the Prometheus awards process between April and July 4, the traditional voting deadline to choose the annual Prometheus winners.

• Critical Mass, by Daniel Suarez (Dutton, 464 pages) – Set after the events of Delta-V, this near-future sf novel champions private efforts to expand human progress through the solar system via technology.

After a portion of the team make it back to Earth from struggles with mining an asteroid, remnants of the organization that launched the original mission regroup to rescue crew-members still at the asteroid and save the Earth from environmental catastrophe.

Unusually realistic in its depiction of the perils of traveling, living and working in outer space, much of the story focuses on the immense high-risk challenges of engineering, space industrialization, asteroid mining, uranium enrichment, nuclear-powered spaceships and building and operating a space station at L2 on the far side of the moon.

In the process, the central characters find it necessary to resist government control, wrestle with the rule of law, and launch a decentralized financial structure allowing anyone to become a stakeholder. They courageously persist despite significant government opposition, restrictions and even sabotage and military action.

Consistently showing government as the problem and profitable cooperation through free enterprise as at least part of the solution, the twisty novel is of special libertarian interest because of its plausible depiction of the creation of a functional private currency beyond the reach of Earth.

• Black Hats, by Steve Wire (Plaintext Publishing, 298 pages) – This fast-moving sf space thriller, Book 3 of Wire’s Space Hackers series (following the 2022 Best Novel nominees Man in the Middle and White Hat) focuses on the nature of government versus private enterprise and explores why governments shouldn’t try to restrict the development of even risky technology – relevant to today’s hype, panic and potential stock-market bubble over emerging AI.

Set on the sparsely populated asteroid-belt frontier, when Earth, Mars and Luna are dominated by rather authoritarian governments, Black Hats follows a crew of independent, ungoverned people who’ve built an anti-matter-powered spaceship.

This and many other advancements are possible within the dispersed frontier society with support for independent scientific research and development funded by voluntary contributions from individuals located all over the solar system. All of that is considered a threat to the powers that be.

With an explicit nod to the late libertarian thinker Samuel Edward Konkin III and his concept of the “agora” as a socially harmonious anarcho-capitalist enclave of peaceful trade and prosperity, Black Hats also explores the downsides to an uncontrolled society.

Among the challenges: stopping a psychopath with a world-ending bioweapon and visiting a hollow asteroid with a nano-plague converting everything it touches to goo – and then stopping a psychopath intending to use this world-ending bioweapon.

Laced with sly nods to the history of technology and other sf works, Black Hats shows how governments tend to be reactionary and lack creativity but also are too powerful to attack directly at their strong point – institutionalized and legalized violence – and how free people and free societies can deal with those who use technology destructively.

 

• Hacking Galileo, by Fenton Wood (Amazon, 257 pages) – This tech-oriented novel, recommended for ages 8 and up, follows the against-the-odds efforts of a brilliant teenage hacker who gets into NASA computers and, with the help of his high-school friends, hijacks an interplanetary probe to stop a rogue asteroid on collision course with Earth.

A paean to 1980s hacking and phreaking culture and somewhat reminiscent of the 1980s movie War Games in its nerd appeal and young whizzes outsmarting adult authorities, Wood’s story of youthful underdogs saving the world highlights the dangers of bureaucracy, national-security-state surveillance and the shortsighted attitudes of governments seemingly more concerned with maintaining control and secrecy than facing real-world threats.

With its teen-aged protagonists, the novel has some Young-Adult appeal, as recognized by its nominator, two-time Prometheus winner Travis Corcoran.

Yet, Hacking Galileo also should appeal to adults old enough to remember the 1980s and thus appreciate the protagonists’ inventive use and references to TRS-80, 300 baud and rotary phones.

The novel’s ethos of individualism, technical mastery, anti-authoritarianism and independent thinking, and personal responsibility evokes the can-do but rebellious spirit of a Heinlein-juvenile novel.

 

• Misplaced Threats, by Alan Zimm (BookMarketeers, 330 pages) – Billed as Book 1 of the Misplaced Humanity Chronicles, this interstellar sf novel explores the tensions between different categories of existential threats to humanity: invasive aliens, domestic tyrants and pirates.