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Free people in the future, hard sf and veneration of competence: Writer Travis Corcoran’s wide-ranging speech at the 2018 San Jose Worldcon Prometheus Awards ceremony
Sample excerpt from Travis Corcoran’s 2018 Prometheus Award acceptance speech for Best Novel for The Powers of the Earth:
“It was an amazing honor to be honored among so many other great writers,” Corcoran said.
Sf novelist Travis Corcoran (Photo courtesy of author)
“Eric Raymond (a freelance writer-reviewer and an LFS board member) said it best:
‘Hard sf is the vital part of the field. The core of hard science fiction is libertarianism, ordering an insistent individualism, veneration of the competent man and instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering,” Raymond wrote.
“I agree,” Corcoran said.
“Science fiction is best when it tells stories of free people using intelligence, skills and hard work to overcome challenges…”
At the London Worldcon in August 2014 in England, emcee Amy Sturgis presented the Best Novel award to Prometheus Award Best Novel co-winners Cory Doctorow (for Homeland) and Ramez Naam (for Nexus). Each author spoke about threats to liberty, from constraints on the information society to the War on drugs and War on terror.
The Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction went to Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Falling Free. Sturges read Bujold's acceptance statement.
LFS member Fred Moulton presented the 2011 Prometheus Awards in Aug. 2011 at Renovation, the Reno, Nevada, Worldcon, to Sarah Hoyt (for Best Novel for Darkship Thieves, a coming-of-age saga depicting a plausible anarchist society among the asteroids and a heroic woman’s fight for her freedom and identity against a tyrannical Earth) and to the late George Orwell (for Best Classic Fiction for his 1945 novel Animal Farm.)
Michael Grossberg, who founded the LFS in 1982 to help sustain the Prometheus Awards, has been an arts critic, speaker and award-winning journalist for five decades.
Michael has won Ohio SPJ awards for Best Critic in Ohio and Best Arts Reporting (seven times).
He's written for Reason, Libertarian Review and Backstage weekly; helped lead the American Theatre Critics Association for two decades; and has contributed to six books, including critical essays for the annual Best Plays Theatre Yearbook and an afterword for J. Neil Schulman's novel The Rainbow Cadenza.
Among books he recommends from a libertarian-futurist perspective: Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist & How Innovation Works, David Boaz's The Libertarian Mind and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.
View all posts by Michael Grossberg
