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Sarah Hoyt on cloning and State suppression of technology: Her acceptance speech & 2011 Worldcon Prometheus Awards ceremony
LFS member Fred Moulton presented the 2011 Prometheus Awards in mid-August 2011 at Renovation, the Reno, Nevada, Worldcon.
Sarah Hoyt won 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). The Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction went to George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm.
Writer Sarah Hoyt. Creative Commons license)
An excerpt from Hoyt’s acceptance speech:
“I wrote Darkship Thieves because I was furious. Right about the time that cloning started being talked about, I expected and wasn’t disappointed, to see the spate of books coming out, about how cloning was a bad thing… I expected the dystopian view. What I also expected but didn’t like was the fact that the tone of all these novels was, “there ought to be a law,” Hoyt said.
“And the fact that all these corruptions of the technology were envisioned as happening as if society were “free,” and people were able to do this. And that made me furious.”
Legendary sf writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) accepted the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction after the August 2015 Worldcon Prometheus Awards ceremony, which inducted “Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman” into the Hall of Fame.
Ellison’s 1965 short story portrays one man's surrealist rebellion against a repressive future society obsessed with timeliness. The very personal and eloquent video includes a mini-tour of his home and description of many of his favorite awards, some reminiscences about his career, and a few political comments about his sympathy for libertarian ideas.
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.
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
