David D. Friedman added excitement and intellectual stimulation as the guest presenter at the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony.
A leading libertarian theorist (The Machinery of Freedom), economist (Price Theory: An Intermediate Text) and law-and-economics professor (Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters), David is also a Prometheus-nominated sf/fantasy novelist (Harald, Salamander, Brothers).
Friedman presented the Prometheus Hall of Fame category for Best Classic Fiction during the Aug. 30 ceremony. Here is the text of his speech, which followed an introduction by LFS President William (Bill) Stoddard.
By David D. Friedman
Bill mentioned my friend Vernor Vinge, who is in part responsible for my writing my second novel.
I described to him my idea for that and for the alternative, a sequel to my first novel (Harald, a 2007 Prometheus Best Novel nominee). He thought Salamander would more interesting, so I wrote it. He was right.
I thought I’d start by saying a little about what I’ve learned relevant to libertarianism from science fiction.
As some of you may know, Vernor’s story “The Ungoverned” (inducted in 1994 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame) is about a stateless society, modeled on my ideas, being invaded by an adjacent state.
Seeing that society through the eyes of a novelist rather than an economist showed me things about it that would not have occurred to me….
… What it might feel like to live in it, how the way its inhabitants would look at the world and differ, would not have occurred to me without that.
OATH OF FEALTY
Another story I learned from was Oath of Fealty coauthored by another friend Jerry Pournelle, along with Larry Niven.
A central lesson of that story is that when a private organization replaces the core functions of government, its customers will relate to it as citizens relate to their government.
Hence the title: Oath of Fealty.
If that is true, and it well might be, it is important for anyone trying to construct a stateless society or figure out what such a society would be like.
Editor’s note: Pournelle, Niven and Michael Flynn co-wrote Fallen Angels, winner of the 1992 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
As Bill mentioned, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Editor’s note: one of the first two works inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 1983) was a major influence on my views.
Before I read it, my view was that the free market, voluntary exchange, was the right way to produce things, but that it required a legal framework produced and enforced outside the market – a government.
That view was in tension with my moral intuitions, which found no basis for taxes, government authority, no obligation to obey the law merely because it was the law.
Right and wrong are not made by act of Congress.
Heinlein’s book was set in a society where the legal order was endogenous – produced from within the society. So far as I could tell, it was an internally consistent picture.
If the society he described existed, there was no reason why it could not have functioned as he described.
If that society could function as described, it could not be true, as I had believed and thought I could prove, that all societies required a legal framework produced by government.
A theorem is refuted by a single counter example – in this case, a fictional counterexample, but one that appeared to me to be internally consistent.
If a stateless legal order was not impossible, it was worth trying to imagine what such a thing could be like in something closer to the real world.
That was the origin of the model of anarcho-capitalism, a stateless legal order in my first book (The Machinery of Freedom.)
Enough about me.
I am here to award a prize.
The finalists are:
One song, “The Trees” by Rush
One story, “As Easy as A.B.C.,” by Rudyard Kipling, which I might mention has been qualified for this award for about a century now. Unfortunately, the (Libertarian Futurist) Society did not exist that early.
I have to suppress the urge to recite all of McDonough’s song from that story, my favorite anarchist poem. I like to tell people that it’s an anarchist poem by Kipling, and give people bizarre ideas about Kipling.
And two novels: Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, and Orion Shall Rise, by Poul Anderson.
And the winner is Orion Shall Rise.
A FRIEDMAN FAVORITE: POUL ANDERSON
Anderson has been a favorite of mine for a very long time.
My SCA (Society of Creative Anachronism) persona was inspired by a character I first encountered in one of his books, and later in the medieval chanson de geste the book is based on.
One of the things I appreciate about Anderson’s writing is that he plays fair.
Almost none of his characters, none that I can think of, are true villains – the cartoon version of evil, wanting bad things to happen to people – and few are stupid.
He writes antagonists, not villains.
There are four very different societies in Orion, sometimes at war with each other. Each of them is presented in a way that shows why people love it.
In the story “No Truce With Kings” (inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2010), he plays so fair between two societies in conflict that, well into the story, the reader is likely to think the good guys are the bad guys and vice versa.
A second thing I like is that he thinks like an economist.
My standard example is “Margin of Profit,” one of the Nicholas van Rijn stories. Central to the plot of that story is the insight that to stop someone from doing something you don’t want him to do, you don’t have to make it impossible, just unprofitable, that you can leverage his rationality.
In Van Rijn’s words: “Revenge and destruction are un-Christian thoughts. Also, they will not pay very well, since it is hard to sell anything to a corpse. The problem is to find some means within our resources to make it unprofitable for Borthu to raid us. Not being stupid heads, they will then stop raiding and we can maybe later do business.”
Anderson not only teaches that lesson, he teaches it three times in the one story — with three different examples.
Van Rijn and his allies could win a war with Borthu, the empire that is blocking their trade routes, attacking their ships, brainwashing the crews into Borthu’s navy.
But the war would cost more than the trade route is worth, so they won’t.
They could arm their ships to defeat attacks on them.
But a warship cannot carry enough cargo to pay for itself. So they won’t.
The solution Van Rijn comes up with, arming one ship in four, costs less than the value of the trade route.
So It’s worth doing, and it raises the cost of attacks to Borthu enough to make raiding unprofitable to them, so they will stop.
The enemy are not “stupid heads.”
Or, as an economist would put it, are rational.
In the real world, Estonia’s defense strategy is based on that insight.
They can’t defeat a Russian invasion but they might be able to make invading expensive enough so the Russians won’t think it worth the cost.
That is why their national hobby is “Military Sport,” training the civilian population in guerrilla warfare.
Something I expect Poul, in the SCA known as Sir Bela of Eastmarch, would have approved of.
And now Astrid Anderson Bear, Poul Anderson’s daughter, will accept the award for Orion Shall Rise.
WATCH THE 45TH PROMETHEUS AWARDS CEREMONY
* Watch the full 45-minute video of the 45th Prometheus Awards ceremony, which was recorded Aug. 30, 2025 with six eloquent, thought-provoking, occasionally poignant or amusing speeches by David D. Friedman, Astrid Anderson Bear, Kevin Flynn, LFS President William H. Stoddard and LFS co-founder Michael Grossberg. The ceremony is posted on YouTube and available to see here.
* For more about David Friedman, read these Prometheus Blog articles about his interests and achievements and why he should be better known as an sf/fantasy novelist.
ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS AND THE LFS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and 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, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in 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. This page 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.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* 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.
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