To make clear why past winners deserved recognition as pro-freedom sf/fantasy and how they fit our award, we’ve published Appreciations of all past Prometheus Award-winners. Here’s the appreciation for F. Paul Wilson’s Sims, the 2004 Prometheus Best Novel winner:
BY MICHAEL GROSSBERG
Paul Wilson’s 2003 novel Sims, set in a plausible near-future, explores the struggle of the sims, a genetically engineered cross between humans and chimpanzees, for freedom and respect.
After impressive advances in genetics research that have made possible the elimination of many genetically transmitted diseases, the SimGen Corporation has created the transgenic species of sims or Humanzees (human-chimp hybrids).
Bred for docility and a small amount of intelligence in order to be rented out for domestic and manual labor, the sims are gradually freeing up humanity from the drudgery and danger of physical labor.
But the company, which owns the patent on the sims and claims them as its property, has sinister secrets that it will go to great lengths to preserve. When a lawyer agrees to take on the challenge of getting legal recognition for a labor union for the sims, he stumbles over some secrets that prove dangerous. The lawyer also joins forces with an activist and a mysterious man called Zero to stop the corporation and end the creation of sims.
In Wilson’s signature style, there is plenty of action and suspense, and a serious exploration of what characteristics divide those for whom we would fight from mere creatures.
Should such genetically enhanced creatures be viewed as animals, to be owned, or as human, with basic rights?
Wilson explores such basic libertarian issues with gripping drama in this scientific thriller.
ABOUT F. PAUL WILSON
Note: Wilson also won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for Wheels Within Wheels, while winning the Hall of Fame award twice, for related novels (Healer, in 1990, and An Enemy of the State,in 1991) in his LaNague Federation series.
Wilson, a previous guest of honor at the first two LFScons at Columbus’ Marcon in 2001 and 2015, will be the Prometheus Awards Guest of Honor at the Columbus 2020 North American Science Fiction Convention, which will include the mini-con LFScon III. For more information, see the recent Prometheus blog news update about the LFScon and NASFiC plans.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE
* See related introductory essay about the LFS’ 40thanniversary retrospective series of Appreciations of past Prometheus Awards winners, with an overview of the awards’ four-decade history.
* Other Prometheus winners: For a full list of winners – for the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the recently updated and enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website.
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards, join the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), a non-profit volunteer association of libertarian sf/fantasy fans and freedom-lovers.
Libertarian futurists believe cultural change is as vital as political change (and often more fun!) in achieving universal individual rights and a better world (perhaps eventually, worlds) for all.
